Universities & Crisis (U&C) team members were among the 2,000 participants at this year’s General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). Held at Charles University in Prague, the event brought together academics from across Europe and beyond for more than 500 panels on political science, international relations and sociology research. In…
In this chapter, I explore the role of coloniality in the making of youth activist lives in the context of apartheid in South Africa. The primary questions posed are as follows: how does one learn urban youth activism driven by eugenics logics while simultaneously navigating the epistemic margins of knowledge-making, particularly when such marginal experiences…
This article focuses on the question of how universities respond to authoritarian attacks on their autonomy through a close reading of faculty protests over rector appointments at Boğaziçi University (BU) in Turkey. I draw on digital and social media accounts of the protests and expert opinion interviews with displaced Turkish academics to refine the arguments…
This paper examines the ways in which administrators, academics and students living under conditions of authoritarianism come to imagine the university’s political possibilities and horizons. To this aim, we first consider how alternative imaginaries are constructed and contained at Boğaziçi University, where the parameters of political possibility are pre-figured both by the current ruling regime…
Drawing on empirical data this paper explores how a new articulation of meritocracy has emerged over time in UK Higher Education. To this end, we analyze the five major HE reports produced in the UK between 1997–2010. The proposed analytical design combines semantic mapping, natural language processing (NLP), and critical discourse analysis to identify the…
What does it mean to take ‘the cultural turn’ seriously, and in our case, to engage it in research on globalisation and higher education? In this book chapter, we argue that this involves adding a cultural lens to engage with, rather than depart from, an analysis of the global political economy of higher education. This…
This paper examines the production of multiple trajectories of privatisations in UK higher education over the past two decades. Using corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis as methodologies, we show how six key higher education reports since 1997 discursively set into motion those structural selectivities (Jessop, 2005) which are strategically selective of different modalities of privatisation and their social relations (Martini & Robertson, 2021).
In this Special Issue, we seek to develop a more nuanced understandings of current political and cultural shifts by taking a different approach to the study of populism, i.e., analysing it as having a more fully ideological relationship with the economic model and social ontology of globalised neoliberalism (Steger 2019).
This paper explores how, in what ways, and with what outcomes, deep structural transformations have reconstituted higher education in England, and are deeply implicated in the rise of authoritarian populism. We focus particularly on the ways in which our understandings and lived experiences of class, social mobility, meritocracy, social inequality, and social justice have been transformed.
Higher Education (HE) constitutes a space that calls urgently for new understandings in the contemporary political moment. One way of establishing such an understanding is to consider more fully the work of political theorists in relation to questions of power in the modern nation-state, particularly as these impinge upon the key problem of the rise of populism in the twenty-first century. This paper argues that a productive conceptual approach is to be found in the recurring idea of political paradox in the political philosophy literature, an idea which is utilized to explore the role of conflicted national politics, moralising state practices, and scientific rationalities in reconfiguring the governing rationales of HE.