In this debut interview conducted by Social Science Space’s Daniel Nehring, Audrey Verma explains her inspirations in organizing the forum, how her claims of the feminization and racialization of higher ed are borne out in academe, and why critiques of neoliberal impulses in universities have had so little traction in the past four decades.
In the coming weeks, Social Science Space will publish a series of interviews on academic capitalism and academic resistance. These interviews pertain to the event “Between the discourse of ‘resilience’ and death by committee – Reclaiming collective spaces for academic resistance,” organised by the Early Career Forum of the British Sociological Association and hosted by Newcastle University.
The post-referendum public debates in the United Kingdom have been about the future of Britain and British citizens, and questions about the lives and futures of EU citizens in Britain have faded into the background, argues our Daniel Nehring. This absence of an open-ended public conversation about immigration speaks to the ways in which power organizes truth.
With the exception of star academics and leading figures of the United Kingdom’s academic establishment, lecturers today are held in little regard, argues our Daniel Nehring. The specialized aspects of the academic experience are little recognized and even less honored.
The last few weeks have seen a growing public debate about the pay packages of Britain’s academic CEOs. The vice chancellors at a number of universities, including Birmingham, Bath, Bath Spa and others, have come under heavy pressure to justify salaries that far exceed £100,000, Oddly, all the arguments for and against this start with the assumption that universities are just like any other business.
Last week the UK academic world was abuzz about Chris Heaton- Harris’ letter on Brexit. This week it’s not. This lack of lasting public interest in threats to academic freedom is lamentable even as the corporatization of the nation’s universities is the biggest threat facing academic life and flies completely under the public’s radar, argues Daniel Nehring.
Brexit and the concurrent increase in jingoism on the street raises questions about the extent to which British universities may continue to be an attractive choice for foreign students. What message should the UK broadcast on this issue?
Largely missing from the debate about the growth of alt-right-ish movements and cultural currents, argues our Daniel Nehring, is sustained engagement with the consequences of the shifts that are currently underway in education.
Britain’s recent general election has been the first step towards a long-overdue public debate on the social consequences of austerity and growing socio-economic inequality. What does this sea change mean for British academia?
In academic institutions that value hierarchies and compliance and seek to understand scholarship in terms of its economic value, argues our Daniel Nehring, there is little space for a discipline that aims to critically interrogate the intersections of structure and agency and the social production of inequalities.
Sociology today, argues our Daniek Nehring, is defined by a fundamental contradiction between its everyday labor practices and its imaginary ethos.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, our Daniel Nehring insists, academia’s arguments in favor of an open society have remained surprisingly weak.
