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).
‘Introduction to special issue: education and populisms’. By Matias Nestore & Susan Robertson
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).
‘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.
Publication: Provincializing the OECD-PISA global competences project
In 2018 the OECD added a set of global competence measures to its PISA programme, and reported on the outcomes in November 2020. In this paper I explore the provenance of the idea of global competence underpinning the OECD-PISA Global Competence framework and measure. The official account by the OECD references the OECD PISA Governing Board, Expert Panels, National Teams and Consortia engaged in the creation and delivery of this assessment tool. However, in this paper I problematise this narrative and sketch out an alternate genealogy that seems to operate in the shadowlands of the official account.