Goldsmiths Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy invites you to put down your marking and come and discuss:
Universities, neo-liberalisation and (in)equality
Friday 28th April 10am – 5.30pm Professor Stuart Hall Building, LG01,
Universities in the UK, alongside other public services, are treated by policy-makers as enclaves of privilege to be democratised through the introduction of quasi-markets in teaching and research, while at the same time what academics do is increasingly constrained by ‘performance indicators’, league table rankings and the like. At the same time, and despite fees, the numbers of students who are bene tting from university education remains high: in 2014/15, 48% of 17-30 year olds went to university.
As the recent government bill on Higher Education makes clear, universities have been transformed almost beyond recognition from institutions that offered social rights to free higher education for a small number of people – when degrees were undoubtedly routes to individual social mobility - in the 1960s and 70s, to sites of ongoing marketization and bureaucratisation in the context of policy-makers’ emphasis on public spending cuts, suspicion of professionals, and ‘widening participation’.
At this conference we invite speakers both to analyse the marketisation and bureaucratisation of universities today, and also to discuss what can be done. We aim to think about resistance and the possibilities of more fundamental transformation of universities.
What, if anything, should we aim to preserve of the value of education as it was established
in universities in the 1960s? Is there resistance already going on in the interstices of the ‘audit culture’, and what form does it take? Does the rhetoric of ‘widening participation’ offer any possibilities to challenge some of the ongoing inequalities in universities – around issues of diversity, for example? What ideas do we have for a radical transformation of universities, and what we want universities to become?
Programme
10.00 – 10.30 / Jo Littler (Sociology, City University)
Universities beyond neoliberal meritocracy
10.30 - 11 / Robbie Shilliam (Politics and International Relations, QMUL)
Neoliberalism, public culture and the myth of black deficit
11.30 - 12 / Discussion
Chair: Vik Loveday (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
11.30 – 12 Break
12 – 1 / Audit and working life/ Daniel Neyland (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
The politics and (in)equalities of a market device: Studying the decision-making practices of REF panellists
Vik Loveday (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
The neurotic academic: casualisation and governance in the neoliberalising university
Chair: Miranda Iossi dis (Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy, Goldsmiths)
1 – 2 / Lunch
2 – 3 / Bureaucratisation Chair: Natalie Fenton (Media and Communications, Goldsmiths)
David Graeber (Anthropology, LSE)
Reflections on an age of total bureaucratisation
Kate Nash (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
Is bureaucracy all bad for equality? Comparing socializing and marketising bureaucracy
3 – 3.30 / Coffee 3.30 – 5.30 / Change! Chair: Kate Nash (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
Des Freedman (Media and Communication, Goldsmiths)
Affiliation and commitment as strategies of resistance
Mao Mollona and George Briley (Anthropology, Goldsmiths)
Beyond markets: the co-operative university
Mollie Neath (Students’ Union, Goldsmiths) and Brett St Louis (Sociology, Goldsmiths) in conversation on ‘Liberate my degree’
The ResSisters (Feminist collective)
Research, collaboration and sisterhood: Collective resistance in the neoliberal academy
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
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