Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
2021: From Scholars to Disposable Labor in the Brave New World of Academic Capitalism
In terms of the organization of academic labor, higher education is ever more sharply divided between, on the one hand, an advantaged minority in full-time, long-term employment and, on the other hand, academia’s reserve army of labor.
Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Let’s Talk About ‘De-coupling’ and the ‘China Bubble’
To what extent do the realities of social research in China live up to the favorable image created by job ads on academic recruitment sites?
Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Better Plan Carefully
At their heart, Chinese public universities are deeply parochial bureaucratic structures geared towards the party-state’s priorities for socio-economic development. In response to national and international pressures, some universities have recently begun to internationalize, with notably different degrees of enthusiasm. Others have not. You would do well to determine, the author writes, into what category a prospective employer falls.
Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Better Think Twice
China has become an increasingly attractive destination for Western social scientists, both for those doing research in and on China and for those looking to continue their careers with meaningful, long-term perspectives.
Not What It Used to Be: Academic Capitalism and Sociological Futures in the UK
Sociology today, argues our Daniek Nehring, is defined by a fundamental contradiction between its everyday labor practices and its imaginary ethos.
The Deskilled Academic: Bureaucracy Defeats Scholarship
Intellectual labor comes to be largely external to the objectives of the bureaucratic regimes that dominate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, and academics whose careers were built on intellectual labor turn out to be deskilled workers in organizational settings indifferent to their concerns.
What’s Wrong With Academic Freedom in the UK?
Given the ferocity of the current assault on academic freedom, argues Daniel Nehring, it seems to me that we may be close to a point of no return, past which ‘tone of voice policies’ and similar control mechanisms may become a norm into which coming generations of academics will be socialized as a matter of course.
Young Scholars Fear for the University of Their Future
Universities are at a crossroads. Pushed by governments who want institutions to dominate in the competitive, globalized world of higher education, they are also struggling with questions about academic freedom in the face of the pressures of marketization. Here a group of young PhD students argue for more debate about the kind of places universities are becoming.
