Description:
Continuous government reforms to make universities 'world class', entrepreneurial and drivers of the knowledge economy, are transforming the traditional mission and meaning of the public university and its ability to act as 'critic and conscience' of society. This collection explores the new landscapes of higher education emerging across Europe and Australasia.
Brief description:
Susan Wright is Professor of Educational Anthropology at Aarhus University and Director of the Centre for Higher Education Futures (CHEF). She coordinated the EU project 'University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanisation' and the EU ITN project 'Universities in the Knowledge Economy' in Europe and the Asia-Pacific Rim. She co-edits (with Penny Welch) the journal LATISS (Learning and Teaching: International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences) and with Cris Shore and Davide Peró published Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Anatomy of Contemporary Power (2011, Berghahn).
Review Quotes:
"...this book makes a unique and ethnographically-based contribution to the study of universities. Chapters are well written and avoid repetition, despite their overlapping concerns. Finally, as Shore and Wright note in their introduction, the volume focuses on contexts in the Global North, where the 'neoliberal' university is seen as most pervasive and enduring. Explorations of public universities elsewhere, which have received virtually no attention to date, may in future build on the work presented here, exposing further radical possibilities." - Anthropological Forum
"The book is a challenging approach to higher education studies and beyond. Dynamically questioning the relationship between the university and the dominant political economy at present, this book assumes a multidisciplinary approach and brings together macro and micro level analyses allowing the transformations in contemporary higher education to be mapped." - António M. Magalhães, University of Porto