Universities in the Anglophone world of 2020, where teaching posts are ever fewer and contracts are ‘fixed term’ to use the preferred HR euphemism—meaning precarious, temporary and renewed if at all only at the whim of institutions—armies of management and… Read More ›
neoliberal university
The Making of Bullshit Leadership and Toxic Management in the Neoliberal University, John Smyth
My over-arching argument in this article is that both academics and students in universities have been afflicted by a set of relations that Lauren Berlant refers to as ‘cruel optimism’ (2011). Cruel optimism according to Berlant, constitutes the holding out… Read More ›
Towards a Schizoanalysis of the Contemporary University, Andy Broadey and Richard Hudson-Miles
The history of the university has been read as a cycle of foundational paradigm shifts, wherein emergent socio-cultural forces destroy dominant-hegemonic university problematics and rebuild the institution in their own image. Most famously, Bill Readings (1999, 54) identifies a sequence… Read More ›
Epistemic Institutions: The Case for Constitutionally-Protected Academic Independence, Oliver Milne
By these means the American Founding Fathers endeavoured to defend the independence of their judiciary, and because of these defences the present partisan state of that country’s Supreme Court is a result, not of pressure exerted on the judges by… Read More ›
The Uncomfortable Transformation of Discomfort in the Neoliberal Higher Education Context, Emma Craddock
The neoliberalisation of Higher Education has led to the creation of a landscape where students are increasingly perceived by both university administration and themselves as consumers of a product, while metrics are sought to quantify teaching quality in the form… Read More ›
The Neoliberal University and the Common Good, Raphael Sassower
The intense “audit culture” and digitally enhanced monitoring of faculty’s production resembles the “pre-neoliberal” or “feudal university” as much as the neoliberal university (Cruickshank 2019). Is higher education no different from other institutions plagued by the neoliberal regime of economizing… Read More ›
Geographies of the Knowledge Economy on the Semi-Periphery: The Contradictions of Neoliberalisation and Precarity in Portugal, Adam Standring and Simone Tulumello
The recent special issue of Social Epistemology (33.4, 2019) and the ongoing debates in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) point to many of the challenges faced by universities as sites of knowledge production and dissemination situated both… Read More ›
The Accident of Accessibility: How the Data of the TEF Creates Neoliberal Subjects, Liz Morrish
The stress occasioned by constant demands for academics to submit to evaluation has been well documented (Loveday 2018, https://bit.ly/316NfXU; Morrish 2019, https://bit.ly/2XQD8Jr), nevertheless the bureaucratic appetite for surveillance is fed by the ease of accessing quantifiable data. This post looks… Read More ›
Exploring the Concepts of Science in 166 Pages, Mirko Farina
Author Information: Mirko Farina, King’s College London, mirko.farina@kcl.ac.uk. Farina, Mirko. “Exploring the Concepts of Science in 166 Pages: Reviewing Nigel Sanitt.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 4 (2019): 28-33. The pdf of the article gives specific page… Read More ›
Teorías Implícitas del Investigador: Un Campo por Explorar Desde la Psicología de la Ciencia, Nuria Anaya-Reig
Author Information: Nuria Anaya-Reig, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, nuria.anaya@urjc.es. Anaya-Reig, Nuria. “Teorías Implícitas del Investigador: Un Campo por Explorar Desde la Psicología de la Ciencia.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 11 (2018): 36-41. The pdf of the article gives… Read More ›