Month: January 2019

Reimagining the higher education student – call for chapter-abstracts

Higher education is of considerable importance to policymakers across the world, frequently viewed as a key mechanism for achieving a range of economic, social and political goals. Nevertheless, despite the importance attributed to higher education within policy, we have no clear understanding of the extent to which conceptualisations of ‘the student’ are shared across and within nation-states.

A central aim of the proposed edited collection is thus to bring together a range of scholars from different parts of the world and various disciplinary backgrounds (e.g. education, sociology, geography, media, political science, social policy) to investigate the ways in which contemporary higher education students are understood. The chapters will bring empirical evidence to bear on a range of dominant constructions of the student – for example, as consumers, significant political actors, future workers, dependent adults-in-the-making, as well as learners – and explore the extent to which these are patterned by nation-state, higher education institution, and the social characteristics of students themselves. Of particular interest is the ways in which these conceptualisations sometimes ‘jostle uncomfortably’ in relation to each other, with different stakeholders portraying students in somewhat contradictory or divergent terms

A proposal will be submitted to the Routledge/SRHE Research into Higher Education Series (see http://www.routledge.com/books/series/SRHE/) in spring 2019.

If you would like to have your work considered for inclusion in this edited collection, please send an abstract (of approximately 500 words) and a brief biographical statement to Rachel Brooks at the University of Surrey, UK (r.brooks@surrey.ac.uk) and Sarah O’Shea at the University of Wollongong, Australia (saraho@uow.edu.au) by 28 February 2019. Chapters could focus on one or more of the following areas:

  • Dominant understandings of higher education students within policy (either national or international policy) and the ways in which this reflects (or not) the relevant context
  • Perceptions of ‘being a university student’ as articulated by one or more of the following groups: students, higher education staff, policymakers
  • Media and /or marketing representations of students
  • Differences in understandings of students by particular social characteristics e.g. social class, ethnicity, gender, nationality
  • How understandings of students differ across national contexts and/or within particular national contexts
  • Ways in which academic scholarship has theorised students and the critical implications of this within the sector
  • Differences by academic discipline in the conceptualisation of students

New article: policy influencers’ narratives of difference

A new article from the project has just been published in Studies in Higher Education. In it, we explore how key policy actors conceptualise diversity with respect to the student population, and the extent to which such understandings are shared across national borders. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a range of ‘policy influencers’ in six European countries and an analysis of relevant policy documents, we suggest that dimensions of difference are not always valued equally – with those relating to ‘age’, for example, foregrounded in ways that differences by social class are not. We explore the reasons for this variation and consider the extent to which diversity narratives are underpinned by a social justice agenda. You can read the full article here.