Our education list focuses on education policy and politics and the inequalities that are both built into education systems and perpetuated by them. It speaks to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education.
Our titles, including Stephen Ball’s The Education Debate, now in its fourth edition, address the challenges in education, including those around technology and the digital divide. The list offers students and researchers internationally sourced evidence-based solutions that challenge traditional neoliberal approaches to learning.
Education
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This book offers an analysis and critical interrogation of the contemporary crisis of higher education. On the one hand, this crisis manifests itself in the partial unmaking of the institutional form of the university that emerged from European medieval centres of scholarship, their globalisation through Western imperialism, and the temporary success of the Humboldtian notion of the university as a discrete institutional space dedicated to knowledge and differentiated from the economic sphere. On the other hand, crisis manifests itself as transformation, engendering new institutional models. It is driven by the marketisation and commodification of education systems, both at the national level and on a transnational scale, the advent of new information technologies, the concomitant transformation of forms and practices of knowledge, and the consequent remaking of labour practices within academic spaces.
Here, we analyse these issues from the perspective of academic capitalism, that is, the insertion of universities into the capitalist marketplace and resulting market-like behaviours on the part of universities, academics, students and academic administrators. Drawing on theories of affective capitalism, we ask, first, how the transformation of universities’ structures and labour practices under academic capitalism is implicated in transformations of modes of subjectivation, interaction and embodied forms of affective experience on the part of scholars, students and administrators. Second, we consider how the critical interrogation of the affective dynamics of academic capitalism might be bound up with the emergence of new forms of critical pedagogy and alternative modes of contestation of the neoliberal status quo in higher education.
Chinese students who aspire to study abroad are not only worried about their grades. Like many people in China, they often imagine that Westerners are more creative and more confident than themselves, and many businesses and educators profit from these anxieties. Drawing on ethnographic research on educational consulting companies and educational reformers in Beijing, Chapter 11 demonstrates that teaching students to present themselves as passionate and confident is not only a major industry, but also a form of social and cultural activism. Critical scholars have depicted the project of developing psychological capital as a form of investment in the self, while recent studies of social entrepreneurship have critiqued the way it collapses moral issues into market rationalities. I argue that young Chinese entrepreneurs are teaching others how to adapt to international educational markets, and that they are doing so as a social intervention integrating capitalist and nationalist logics. Educational reformers are teaching Chinese students how to become modern subjects by conforming to the affective style of American academia, offering their own careers as models of self-management and self-expression.
This book offers an analysis and critical interrogation of the contemporary crisis of higher education. On the one hand, this crisis manifests itself in the partial unmaking of the institutional form of the university that emerged from European medieval centres of scholarship, their globalisation through Western imperialism, and the temporary success of the Humboldtian notion of the university as a discrete institutional space dedicated to knowledge and differentiated from the economic sphere. On the other hand, crisis manifests itself as transformation, engendering new institutional models. It is driven by the marketisation and commodification of education systems, both at the national level and on a transnational scale, the advent of new information technologies, the concomitant transformation of forms and practices of knowledge, and the consequent remaking of labour practices within academic spaces.
Here, we analyse these issues from the perspective of academic capitalism, that is, the insertion of universities into the capitalist marketplace and resulting market-like behaviours on the part of universities, academics, students and academic administrators. Drawing on theories of affective capitalism, we ask, first, how the transformation of universities’ structures and labour practices under academic capitalism is implicated in transformations of modes of subjectivation, interaction and embodied forms of affective experience on the part of scholars, students and administrators. Second, we consider how the critical interrogation of the affective dynamics of academic capitalism might be bound up with the emergence of new forms of critical pedagogy and alternative modes of contestation of the neoliberal status quo in higher education.
The tensions between academic capitalism and ethical subjectivation in universities are discussed in Chapter 5 through the contrast of two different types of stories about the university. The first is the university as a ‘moral concentration camp’, where research and education are part of biopolitical neoliberalism and its valuations of worthy/unworthy, beneficial/non-beneficial etc. The second is the university as ‘a public library’ where knowledge is shared and passed on for free to future generations. These stories express very different ideas of the ‘university’. The first uses what we call storyselling. It expresses the corporatisation of the self in the neoliberal academy and works through affective subjectivation. The second uses storytelling as an element in ethical self-formation. We argue that these two contradictory forces are simultaneously present in the work of the self on the self by which academics manage and organise their professional work lives. Resistance to academic capitalism is associated with storytelling. The problem as we see it is that storytelling resistance increasingly relies on the work of the self on the self while effective resistance requires the creation of more collective spaces where people can come together.
This book offers an analysis and critical interrogation of the contemporary crisis of higher education. On the one hand, this crisis manifests itself in the partial unmaking of the institutional form of the university that emerged from European medieval centres of scholarship, their globalisation through Western imperialism, and the temporary success of the Humboldtian notion of the university as a discrete institutional space dedicated to knowledge and differentiated from the economic sphere. On the other hand, crisis manifests itself as transformation, engendering new institutional models. It is driven by the marketisation and commodification of education systems, both at the national level and on a transnational scale, the advent of new information technologies, the concomitant transformation of forms and practices of knowledge, and the consequent remaking of labour practices within academic spaces.
Here, we analyse these issues from the perspective of academic capitalism, that is, the insertion of universities into the capitalist marketplace and resulting market-like behaviours on the part of universities, academics, students and academic administrators. Drawing on theories of affective capitalism, we ask, first, how the transformation of universities’ structures and labour practices under academic capitalism is implicated in transformations of modes of subjectivation, interaction and embodied forms of affective experience on the part of scholars, students and administrators. Second, we consider how the critical interrogation of the affective dynamics of academic capitalism might be bound up with the emergence of new forms of critical pedagogy and alternative modes of contestation of the neoliberal status quo in higher education.
In recent years, higher education has undergone significant shifts, heralded by the rise of organisational reforms and regulated disciplinarity. Becoming subject to the particularities of academic labour in the ‘new’ university has been an unsettling and uncanny experience. Drawing together the threads of personal and professional experience, Chapter 8 looks at the effects of having to renegotiate questions to do with identity, power and social wellbeing. The extent to which the author’s recent re-experience of self has been/is embedded within the wider sociological relations of power is explored and as a researcher interested in narrative and life history approaches I frequently focus on the telling moments in life stories and how these moments are often connected to life transitions and transformations. This chapter re-tells a reflexive and biographically positioned ‘truth’ to speak about and re/story a narrative of psychological, physical and emotional dis/ease.
In Chapter 12, we return to the question of how this book contributes to conversations about academic capitalism. We approach this at two levels – considering the book’s contribution to relevant academic debates as well as its potential for practical impact on current patterns of academic labour. Using various labels, scholars have been writing about ‘academic capitalism’ since the 1980s, and there is now a sizeable academic literature on the topic. At the same time, attendant debates have apparently had little practical impact, as the marketisation of higher education continues unabated, at a global level. Against this backdrop, the chapters in this book seem important in two ways. First, they establish a novel dialogue between the critical interrogation of academic capitalism and more recent explorations of the affective dynamics of social life. In doing so, they foreground the capacity of academic capitalism to reach into the deepest, preter-cognitive, preter-emotional layers of academic life. Second, drawing attention to this capacity, this book reveals inconvenient truths about academic capitalism, delineates original pathways for its critical interrogation, and adds to the potential for future challenges to its hegemony.
This chapter is the conclusion to the book, and a summary of the arguments about segregation and eugenics in education is provided by using the Thinking Politically-Sociologically Framework. The argument is that political sociology enables the Critical Education Policy Studies field to think productively in relation to, first, a political sociology of and about the education reform claimocracy; and second, a political sociology for and by the field regarding positioning within and in relation to the claimocracy. It is argued that research and scholarship within and by the field of Critical Education Policy Studies is in danger and so may find the adoption of little agoras and intellectual activism helpful regarding the purposes and practices of research.
Understanding and explaining the durability of segregated education requires the Thinking Politically-Sociologically Framework. Following on from examining vantage points, viewpoints, regimes, and exchange relationships is the need to investigate the knowledge production that underpins the claimocracy. Four policy positions in relation to criticality within Critical Education Policy Studies are identified: description, science, entrepreneurialism, and scholarship, where the primacy of entrepreneurialism is examined. A case study from Theme 4: Knowledge Production is presented where the writing and conceptualisation of intellectual histories demonstrates how policy violence is based on recognising wants, needs, and likes, and the denial of intellectual activism.
Understanding and explaining the durability of segregated education requires the Thinking Politically-Sociologically Framework. Following on from examining vantage points, viewpoints, and regimes is the need to investigate exchange relationships that secure the claimocracy. Five forms of exchange relationships are presented: personal, employment, project, socio-political, and cultural, and it is argued that personal-cultural contractualism dominates. A case study from Theme 3: Policy Actors is presented, where data and analysis about local policymaking are used to demonstrate policy violence through how strategic and tactical change are understood and engaged with regarding academisation.
