Social Science Space

This seems, writes Daniel Nehring, to be a good time to feel pessimistic about academia in the COVID world, and to turn this pessimism into meaningful debate and effective action.

Higher education is striving to address problems such as access, inclusion, and elitism, but is a neoliberalist foundation undermining these efforts—or even the system itself? An online forum held on April 21, “Deconstructing Neoliberalism in Higher Education: How can we promote greater equity and re-professionalize the professoriate?” addressed this quandary.

Two speakers at the upcoming  “Between the discourse of ‘resilience’ and death by committee – Reclaiming collective spaces for academic resistance” forum say they became interested in the state of the neoliberal university because of attempts to bandage wounds that the current system had inflicted.

In this second of a series of interviews conducted by Social Science Space’s Daniel Nehring, Ewan Mackenzie explains why he joined the May 4 ‘Reclaiming’ event at Newcastle, discusses hallmarks of the modern academic institutions and details some of the events that lead him to believe in both resilience and resistance.

Craig Brandist compares aspects of British higher education to the old Soviet Union, with a similar tendency towards stagnation and strategies that workers adopt to absorb managerial pressure.

The boundaries of academic freedom in the US have shifted, argues Sam Binkley. What is at stake now is not only the freedom to think, speak and generate knowledge, but the freedom, even the requirement that one becomes a certain kind of person in order to think and speak in certain kinds of ways.

Critical scholarship and intellectual dissent are currently being closed down in favour of a model of academic life that accords scholars a limited role as purveyors of practically useful skills in ‘real-world’ labour markets.

Is OA the flip side to privatisation of Higher Education? Is there a way in which OA is a means of justifying the economic inaccessibility of HE by providing a public good?

Alan Bradshaw, University of London, and Mark Tadajewski, University of Strathclyde, published “Macromarketing Roundtable Commentary–The Export of Marketing Education” on September 20th, […]

Much ink has already been spilled to condemn and defend the establishment of the New College of the Humanities (NCH), […]

 In 2009 “The Financial and Economic Crisis of 2008-A Systemic Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism” by David Kotz was published in the […]