Relational regions 'in the making': institutionalising new regional geographies of higher education

This paper advances current debates on relational regions and higher education through a unique focus on the rise of transregional university alliances. We examine the formation of university research and training consortia to make a series of wider arguments about the new spatialities of higher education praxis, the construction of new regional identities, and processes of institutionalising relational regions. Our research shows new partnership working between universities to be conducive to the weakening of fixed regional territories. It then illustrates how and why some relational imaginaries are beginning to crystallise into harder institutional forms, before revealing significant political-economic and societal implications arising from new institutional geographies of higher education. Furthermore, our research reveals the concerted theoretical and empirical attention required to develop vocabulary and frameworks better able to comprehend emergent regional worlds. For our part, we distinguish between territorial, archipelagic, de facto and constellatory regionalism to exact more precise interpretations of unfolding configurations of relational regions a new conceptual perspective on the increasingly complex spatialities characterising and shaping our globalizing world.