Academic Life and Labour in the New University

Academic Life and Labour in the New University
Author: Ruth Barcan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2016-03-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317185943

What does it mean to be an academic today? What kinds of experiences do students have, and how are they affected by what they learn? Why do so many students and their teachers feel like frauds? Can we learn to teach and research in ways that foster hope and deflate pretension? Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices addresses these big questions, discussing the challenges of teaching and researching in the contemporary university, the purpose of research and its fundamental value, and the role of the academy against the background of major changes to nature of the university itself. Drawing on a range of international media sources, political discourse and many years’ professional experience, this volume explores approaches to teaching and research, with special emphasis on the importance of collegiality, intellectual honesty and courage. With attention to the intersection of large-scale institutional changes and intellectual shifts such as the rise of transdisciplinarity and the development of a pluralist curriculum, this book proposes the pursuit of more ethical, compassionate and critical forms of teaching and research. As such, it will be of interest not only to scholars of cultural studies and education, but to all those who care about the fate of the university as an institution, including young scholars seeking to join the academy.

Academic Life and Labour in the New University

Academic Life and Labour in the New University
Author: Dr Ruth Barcan
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2014-01-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1472405773

What does it mean to be an academic today? What kinds of experiences do students have, and how are they affected by what they learn? Why do so many students and their teachers feel like frauds? Can we learn to teach and research in ways that foster hope and deflate pretension? Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices addresses these big questions, discussing the challenges of teaching and researching in the contemporary university, the purpose of research and its fundamental value, and the role of the academy against the background of major changes to nature of the university itself. Drawing on a range of international media sources, political discourse and many years’ professional experience, this volume explores approaches to teaching and research, with special emphasis on the importance of collegiality, intellectual honesty and courage. With attention to the intersection of large-scale institutional changes and intellectual shifts such as the rise of transdisciplinarity and the development of a pluralist curriculum, this book proposes the pursuit of more ethical, compassionate and critical forms of teaching and research. As such, it will be of interest not only to scholars of cultural studies and education, but to all those who care about the fate of the university as an institution, including young scholars seeking to join the academy.

Reimagining the Academy

Reimagining the Academy
Author: Alison L Black
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2021-11-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3030758591

This book explores the capacities and desires of academic women to reimagine and transform academic cultures. Embracing and championing feminist scholarship, the research presented by the authors in this collection holds space for a different way of being in academia and shifts the conversation toward a future that is hopeful, kind and inclusive. Through exploring lived experiences, building caring communities and enacting an ethics of care, the authors are reimagining the academy’s focus and purpose. The autoethnographic and arts-based research approaches employed throughout the book provide evocative conceptual content, which responds to the symbolic nature of transformation in the academy. This innovative volume will be of interest and value to feminist scholars, as well as those interested in disrupting and rejecting patriarchal academic structures.

Academic Life in the Measured University

Academic Life in the Measured University
Author: Tai Peseta
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2020-05-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0429767455

While a life in academia is still one bestowed with enormous privilege and opportunity, on the inside, its cracks and fragility have been on display for some time. We see evidence of this in researchers bemoaning time spent applying for grants rather than doing research; teachers frustrated at the ways student feedback data are deployed to feed judgements about them; and doctoral students realising that they have little chance of securing full-time academic work. Yet in the public policy domain, the opposite appears true: academics left to their own devices in their elite ivory towers, rarely ever do enough. This collection addresses the fact that academic life deserves to be rigorously researched. Its emphasis on the measured university traces how academic life had ceded itself to the logics of perverse measures, and raises questions about whether the contemporary university may well have become too measured to adequately counter the political times now upon us. The contributors explore the ways in which measurement inhabits paradoxical positions in these spaces. It sketches the contours and consequences of mismeasurement, including the personal costs to academic staff. It examines our desires and fumbled efforts at institutional transformation, and it puts on display our own ethical conduct. The collection concludes with a call to chart a course for a revitalized moral economy of academic labour. This book was originally published as a special issue of Higher Education Research & Development.

Reshaping the University

Reshaping the University
Author: David Palfreyman
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2014-06-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0191635723

The global economic crisis has required governments across the globe to reconsider their spending priorities. It is within this demanding economic context that higher education systems have been steadily restructured with in many ways the English model in the vanguard of change. This book focuses in particular upon the policy of removing almost entirely public support for the payment of student fees. This has emerged from a steady process of change, which has broad political support and is underwritten by the idea that higher education is now seen more as a private than a public, good. As this shift has occurred (not a new innovation but rather a return to what once prevailed as more of a market in English higher education) so the relationship between government and the higher education has evolved with the latter now attempting to steer the development of the system through a state-regulated market. The book has a strong comparative dimension that draws upon US higher education to illustrate both the possible advantages and potential hazards to the marketization strategy. It concludes that any such strategy needs to be accompanied by state regulation if it is to function effectively, particularly to stimulate price competition, encourage innovation from new entrants, and provide consumer protection for students paying high fees.

Universities in Crisis

Universities in Crisis
Author: Eric Lybeck
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2023-01-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1350250007

This book goes beyond now-familiar analyses of 'neoliberal governmentality' which tend to characterise academics as passive subjects or as 'strategic actors', drawing on and cynically exploiting metrics as a form of capital exchangeable across different fields. Instead, Universities in Crisis draws on newer paradigms by drawing on processual, post-critical and phenomenological approaches that leave room for new spaces of negotiation – discursive and practical – for understanding and advancing academic professionalism in this rapidly changing context. Contributors reflect various manifestations of the changing political and public climate, as well as the unease that surrounds contemporary debates which position the academy in troubling ways. Unifying concepts such as academic work, jurisdiction and transdisciplinarity are deployed to transcend functional divisions within and between academics, administrators, managers and students. Drawing on these theoretical and conceptual resources, contributors engage in critical consideration of whether the potential for 'push back' lies both in re-emphasising the specialness of academic professionalism and in defining the commonalities with other professional groups of knowledge workers. The book offers an unflinching analysis on the conditions which frame the darker side of professionalism and which are associated with increased precarity and reduced autonomy. The contributors explore the dilemmas, challenges and possibilities of professionalism for both early career academics and senior academic leaders.

Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education

Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education
Author: Joss Winn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017-08-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1474267602

Higher education in the UK is in crisis. The idea of the public university is under assault, and both the future of the sector and its relationship to society are being gambled. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable, its historic institutions are becoming untenable, and their purpose is resolutely instrumental. What and who have led us to this crisis? What are the alternatives? To whom do we look for leadership in revealing those alternatives? This book critically analyses intellectual leadership in the university, exploring ongoing efforts from around the world to create alternative models for organizing higher education and the production of knowledge. Its authors offer their experience and views from inside and beyond the structures of mainstream higher education, in order to reflect on efforts to create alternatives. In the process the volume asks: is it possible to reimagine the university democratically and cooperatively? If so, what are the implications for leadership not just within the university but also in terms of higher education's relationship to society? The authors argue that mass higher education is at the point where it no longer reflects the needs, capacities and longterm interests of global society. An alternative role and purpose is required, based upon 'mass intellectuality' or the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge.

'Making It' as a Contract Researcher

'Making It' as a Contract Researcher
Author: Nerida Spina
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 111
Release: 2020-04-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0429777647

‘Making It’ as a Contract Researcher examines the contemporary experience of research employment in universities from the perspective of a significant yet often invisible group: temporary or contract researchers, who make up a substantial, and ever-growing, proportion of the academic research workforce. A critical, pragmatic and international account of the contemporary research career, this book explores the question of what it means to ‘make it’ as a contract researcher in academia, and how individuals and organisations in higher education might seek to do things differently. Providing the reader with practical and realistic strategies for improving the experience of being a contract researcher and achieving and sustaining an academic research career, this book guides the reader on a range of topics, including: Charging fairly for your work Building a publication track record Finding the next contract Sustaining your network Feeling like you belong Moving beyond contract research. Using a combination of current research, interviews and reflective writing, the book is written specifically for and by contract researchers in academia, offering unique and extremely valuable advice for all new and current contract researchers, including PhD students, early career researchers, and any party interested in pursuing a research career in academia. The ‘Insider Guides to Success in Academia’ offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia. These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game – the things you need to know but usually aren’t told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors – and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia.

Implementing Communities of Practice in Higher Education

Implementing Communities of Practice in Higher Education
Author: Jacquie McDonald
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2016-11-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9811028664

In this edited collection, the authors pick up the communities of practice (CoP) approach of sharing practice in their reflection on the experience of taking their CoP vision from a dream to reality. Their stories articulate the vision, the passion and the challenge of working within and/or changing existing institutional culture and practice. The book discusses strategies that worked and considers the lessons learnt to inspire future dreamers and schemers. The multiple perspectives provided in the case studies will assist higher education leaders, as well as academic and professional staff, in establishing or assessing CoPs. The book offers insights into implementation strategies, practical guidelines and ideas on how CoP theoretical underpinnings can be tailored to the higher education context.