Call for papers: Soundings 84 & the crisis in Higher Education

Posted on 15/03/2023

The Soundings collective is planning a special issue on the crisis in Higher Education and would love to hear from potential contributors. 

Higher Education has become a key site of contestation and struggle. In the UK the sustained strike action by the Universities and College Union (UCU) has represented a challenge to the marketisation of universities, and has helped build new alliances between students and academics, including the many staff on casualised contracts (many of whom live their working lives as ‘second class citizens’ and are left vulnerable to exploitative practices and harassment (Mason and Megoran 2020)). There have also been struggles to decolonise the university (see, e.g., Bhambra et al 2018; Laing 2021). The university has now become a frontier in the ‘Culture Wars’: the right have mobilised attacks on ‘wokeness’ to close down articulations of the university as a progressive space, and these have had significant consequences, as attacks on the arts and humanities and critical social sciences have led to significant redundancies and the loss of funding.

Influential authors such as Stefan Collini, though writing perceptive accounts of the shifting dynamics of UK universities (2012, 2018), have been wary of directly linking these changing dynamics to processes of marketisation and political contexts: their accounts have thus tended to be rather de-politicised and at times backward-looking. This special issue, by contrast, seeks to participate in emerging debates that take a more avowedly critical stance.

We are particularly interested in hearing from people in universities where there have been recent battles over the curriculum or department closures.

We are also interested in hearing stories about places where alternative places for learning are flourishing, both inside and outside the university – as for example the Race and Resistance group at Oxford; the learning that has taken place between staff and students in the UCU disputes since 2018; the Anti University project; supplementary schools.

Our starting point is the understanding that the university is increasingly run as a business, as a specific form of corporate capitalism. It is also increasingly subject to government intervention over what is taught. Our main themes are: what is education for; elitism and class; corporatisation/managerialism; culture wars; access; the hostile environment.

Topics might include (these are indicative areas; other proposals are also welcome):

• Accounts of battles from different universities or FE institutions, including the battles of non-academic staff and students; dispatches from UCU picket lines; accounts of disputes over subject areas and the curriculum (all these can be anonymised; and they could be in the form of short reports or personal stories)
• What is a Starmer government likely to do around universities? What should it do? – interventions in discussion re future action
• Accounts of alternatives and positive experiences of learning
• Universities and real estate
• Questions of funding and governance – who runs our universities?
• Underfunding of EDIs and other ‘lip-service’ shopfronts of university branding
• Culture wars – ideas about indoctrination, ‘wokeness’, free speech, attacks on the arts and humanities
• The ineffectiveness of marketisation – its inability to deliver even in its own terms
• International perspectives, struggles in universities internationally
• Questions of access and participation, attempts by government to shut down what little exists
• Engagement with debate around decolonising the university
• The status of international students and attempts by the government to block them from entering the country; the hostile environment in HE
• Relationship between the university sector and climate change
• Assessments of ‘Slow academia’
• Initiatives to challenge neoliberalism in HE
• Psychic damage resulting from of the degree of cognitive dissonance that academics operate with
• How HE articulates with the devolved national landscape
• The issues facing para-academics

As well as more traditional articles, we are open to suggestions for non-academic-format pieces, such as poems, non-fiction accounts of university battles to allow for anonymity, dialogues, etc.

 

References

Bhambra, G.K., Gebrial, D. and Nişancuğlu, N. (2018) Decolonising the University, Pluto Press

Collini, S. (2012) What are Universities For?, Penguin; (2018) Speaking of Universities, Verso

Laing, A. (2021) ‘Decolonising pedagogies in undergraduate geography: student perspectives on a Decolonial Movements module’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education 45: 1, 1-19.

Mason, O. and Megoran, N. (2021) ‘Precarity and De-humanisation in Higher Education’, Learning and Teaching, 14: 1, 35-59.

Please send abstracts (250-300 words) and a biographical note to sally@lwbooks.co.uk

The deadline for abstracts is 8 April 2023 but earlier submissions are also welcome. Invitations to write will be sent out in late April 2023.

Final submission deadline: 4 August 2023

Publication of the volume is planned for September 2023

For information about Soundings see https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/soundings/page/submissions-guidelines/