WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A CONTEMPORARY
HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENT?
FREE Online conference, University of Surrey
17 JUNE (1-4.30 PM) -18 JUNE (9.30AM-1 PM) 2021 (UK time)
Keynote: Dr Gritt B. Nielsen, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University
Call for abstracts
Being a higher education student is an increasingly common experience across the world, with participation rates at or above 50 per cent in many nations. Nevertheless, there is relatively little debate about what being a contemporary higher education student actually means. While stereotypes of students are regularly deployed in the media and, in countries where high fees are charged, assumptions are frequently made about students becoming more ‘consumer-like’ in their orientation – empirical evidence is often solely lacking. This conference aims to redress this omission by exploring understandings of contemporary higher education students. We are particularly interested in papers that examine questions such as (but not limited to):
- How do factors like gender, race, and social class account for differences in what it means to be a student? Can we speak of such a thing as ‘the student experience’?
- Has what it means to be a student changed – how, why? How might higher education policies have impacted what it means to be a student?
- Do different social actors share understandings about what it means to be student?
- Are prevalent understandings of what it means to be a student problematic? Why?
- In what other ways could students be conceptualised and/or imagined? What ways of understanding students – and higher education – should we be attempting to move towards?
We will also present data on some of these themes from the ‘Eurostudents’ project – a cross-national comparisons of constructions of students within Europe.
We welcome papers from scholars at all career stages and from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds including sociology, education, geography, youth studies, social policy, media studies and anthropology. Contributions from national contexts other than the UK are warmly invited.
Abstract Submission: Please send abstracts of up to 500 words by 11th April 2021 to the Eurostudents team at surrey.eurostudents@gmail.com
Further information: The conference is being organised by the ‘Eurostudents’ research team (Rachel Brooks, Achala Gupta, Sazana Jayadeva and Anu Lainio). You can learn more about the project here: www.eurostudents.net.
#Eurostudents2021