‘Dominant or dominating? Imaginaries of higher education in Turkey and Northern Syria’. By Jee Rubin and Lakshmi Bose

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 … Continue reading ‘Dominant or dominating? Imaginaries of higher education in Turkey and Northern Syria’. By Jee Rubin and Lakshmi Bose

‘UK higher education, neoliberal meritocracy, and the culture of the new capitalism: A computational linguistics analysis’. By Michele Martini & Susan L. Robertson

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 … Continue reading ‘UK higher education, neoliberal meritocracy, and the culture of the new capitalism: A computational linguistics analysis’. By Michele Martini & Susan L. Robertson

‘Globalisation, Culture and Higher Education’. Book chapter by Susan L Robertson, Mariano Rosenzvaig & Elizabeth Maber

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 … Continue reading ‘Globalisation, Culture and Higher Education’. Book chapter by Susan L Robertson, Mariano Rosenzvaig & Elizabeth Maber

‘Crises and the Production of Multiple Privatisations in UK Higher Education’ By Susan L. Robertson and Michele Martini

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).

‘Education cleavages, or market society and the rise of authoritarian populism?’. By Susan L. Robertson & Matias Nestore

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, violent modernities and the ‘global present’: the paradox of politics and new populist imaginaries in HE’. By Jo-Anne Dillabough

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.

‘Cultural trauma and the politics of access to higher education in Syria’. By Zeina Al Azmeh, Joanne Dillabough, Olena Fimyar, Colleen McLaughlin, Shaher Abdullateef, Wissam Aldien Aloklah, Adnan Rashid Mamo, Abdul Hafiz Abdulhafiz, Samir Al Abdullah, Yasser Al Husien, Ammar Al Mohamad Al Ibrahim, Ziad Al Ibrahim, Taiseer Barmu, Abdulnasser Farzat & Bakry Kadan

This paper examines the relationship between the politics of Higher Education access pertaining to longstanding practices of patrimonial authoritarian politics and the narration of collective trauma. Building on an empirical study of Syrian HE during war, we suggest that a narrative disjuncture within HEIs has a damaging impact not only upon the educational process, HE reconstruction and reform, but also upon the possibility of social reconciliation.