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 ›
It is often remarked that solutions must be social, not technological. Yet this surely must mean that the problems should also be deemed social, and not technological. In their article, ‘Challenges to Public Universities: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity’ (2019), Holmwood… Read More ›
I read Jana Bacevic’s article, ‘Knowing Neoliberalism’, shortly after completing a series of challenging interviews with Turkish academics, recently fired or under investigation for signing the Academics for Peace petition … [please read below the rest of the article]. Article… Read More ›
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 ›
Robert Antonio’s association of authoritarian ethno-racial nationalism with neoliberal adventure capitalism, and the broader matter of how neoliberal democratization opens the way to rightwing populism and illiberal capitalism (Antonio 2019, 280), seem particularly pertinent. The recourse to Hayek’s political theory… Read More ›
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 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 ›
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 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 ›
The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective invites a dialogue on issues in higher education involving the audit culture, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and technocracy. These issues are addressed in a special issue of Social Epistemology (33 (4): 2019), “Neoliberalism, Technocracy and… Read More ›