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Global higher education, including that of Asia, has been facing many challenges, notably declining government funding and simultaneously increased influences of neoliberalism on its outlook, aspirations, policies and practices. This reality has put the role and purpose of higher education (HE) under testament, particularly in unprecedented crisis-induced situations such as natural catastrophes and pandemics. This article, while focussing on an Asian context, is situated in the larger picture of HE's responses to crises and what transformations that may be enabled in the process. In unprecedented crisis-induced challenges, how does HE serve the interests of the public and society? Likewise, in this context, how can HE maintain equity and social justice as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda? These very questions are critical for many societies and invite serious scholarly examination. Engaged with the literature on HE as a public/private good, HE and neoliberalism, and HE in times of crisis, this article discusses the case of the University of Dhaka -- the leading university in Bangladesh -- in its responses to the COVID-19 crisis (2020-2022). We show how HE as a public good is utmost important as governments everywhere are finding ways to incorporate the SDGs into every aspect of their HE systems. We also posit that the COVID-induced transformations of higher education in the case of the University of Dhaka have proved HE as a public good to be a robust and resilient pillar for fulfilling various stakeholders' needs and aspirations. Such transformations have affirmed the values of humanity, access and equity in HE, and these values are here to stay.

This article is concerned with the internationalisation of higher education and student mobility for society and community engagement purposes. Drawing on the specific case study of Universiti Brunei Darussalam's Community Outreach Programme overseas, it examines the programme's operation in Vietnam as well as investigates Bruneian students' experiences during their programme activities in this Asian country. The article also explores the impacts of such experiences on the students' growth and transformations. The reported growth and transformations, on the one hand, demonstrate the importance of social engagement beyond campus and correspond to the internationalisation in higher education for society agenda recently advocated by international education scholars and practitioners. They also offer rich insights into (inter-Asian) student mobility for non-academic purposes, which remain largely under-researched. On the other hand, underlying the students' transformative experiences are many issues associated with student safety and wellbeing that require ethical responses and appropriate adaptive pedagogies.

Informed by an ethnographic qualitative research study conducted with expatriate teachers of English in Saudi Arabia, we examine emotion(al) labor in the context of transnational mobilities with regards to cultural and institutional tensions. Engaged with wide-ranging interdisciplinary literature on emotion and affect, we discuss the place of transnational emotion(al) labor in four inter-related manifestations: (a) struggles and efforts to interact and communicate with students; (b) internalization and resentment of privilege and deficiency underlying discourses of native speakers; (c) responses to challenges from social, religious, and cultural difference; and (d) prolonged endurance, frustration, helplessness, and resistance to prescribed curriculum, testing, and top-down policy and practice. We also incorporate our reflections and emotion(al) labor as transnationally trained academics as we engage with the participants' accounts. We show how our study could inspire dialogues with the self and conversations among researchers for support and solidarity beyond constructed boundaries of race, language, religion, ethnicity, and nationality.

This article, through autoethnographic narrative and reflection, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions, explores how the transnational academic mobility experiences of a Muslim scholar of Islam based in Brunei may influence his identity, research, and teaching. It pinpoints how transnational academic mobilities could (re)produce, sustain and endorse East/West, local/global, and religious/secular dichotomies and binary thinking. Likewise, it shows that transnational academic mobilities often generate ambiguous and divided spaces concerning knowledge production, pedagogy, and identity formation. The article also maintains that contextualizing and engaging (with) the specificity and particularity of place and academic discipline are pivotal in studying transnational academic mobilities. Methodologically, it highlights the role of autoethnographic reflection in bringing out complex experiences and accounts that academics undergo but rarely acknowledge and conceptualize in scholarly work. Such accounts and experiences serve as reminders of the importance of humility, trust, ethics, and reflexivity in academia. Transnational academic mobilities, after all, must not be privileged.