Posts

Book from the project published

We are delighted that our book, ‘Constructing the Higher Education Student: perspectives from across Europe’ has recently been published. This draws together key findings from the project as a whole, and discuss six key constructions of students – as ‘in transition’; citizens; learners and hard-workers; future workers; stressed; and a threat or object of criticism.

It is available open access, and you can download a copy here.

Project conference

What does it mean to be a contemporary higher education student?

FREE online conference, University of Surrey on 17 June (13:00 – 16.35) & 18 June (9.30 -13:00) 2021 (BST)

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.

The conference programme is available here and the abstracts can be viewed here.

Book launch – 22 April

Reimagining the Higher Education Student: online book launch

Thursday, 22ndApril 2021 (08.00-10.00 UK time; 17.00-19.00 Sydney time)

Reimagining the Higher Education Student, edited by Rachel Brooks and Sarah O’Shea, seeks to question the accepted or unquestioned nature of ‘being a student’ and instead foreground the contradictions and ‘messiness’ of such ideation. Given the increasing number and diversity of higher education students, the book offers a timely discussion of the implicit and sometimes subtle ways that they are characterised or defined.

In this launch event, we will provide an overview of eight of the book’s chapters, as well as some of the overarching themes addressed by the volume as a whole. The first session will focus on constructions of students in Australasia, and the second on students in Europe.

Session 1. 08.00-09.00 (UK time); 17.00-18.00 (Sydney time)

  • Sally Patfield, Jenny Gore and Leanne Fray: On becoming a university student: Young people and the ‘illusio’ of higher education
  • Matt Lumb and Matthew Bunn: Dominant higher education imaginaries: forced perspectives, ontological limits and recognising the imaginer’s frame
  • Thornchanok Uerpairojkit and James Burford: Constructions of náksèuk-saˇa: Tracing contested imaginings of the Thai university student
  • Paola R.S. Eiras and Henk Huijser: Exploring spaces in-between: reimagining the Chinese student in a transnational higher education context in China

Session 2. 09.00-10.00 (UK time); 18.00-19.00 (Sydney time)

  • Emily Danvers and Tamsin Hinton-Smith:The shifting subjectification of the ‘widening participation’ student: the affective world of the ‘deserving’ consumer
  • Kay Calver and Bethan Michael-Fox: Constructing the university student in British documentary television
  • Elisa Alves and Russell King: Between international student and immigrant: a critical perspective on Angolan and Cape Verdean students in Portugal
  • Anu Lainio and Rachel Brooks: Constructing students as family members: contestations in media and policy representations across Europe

You are welcome to join us for one or both hours. Please register for a place here. Once you have registered, you will receive a confirmation email containing a link to the meeting.

Call for abstracts

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  

Students as political actors?

One of themes that we have been exploring in the project is whether students are seen as significant ‘political actors’. In this article, just published in the British Educational Research Journal, we examine the extent to which policymakers, higher education staff and students themselves understand students in this way, and explore both similarities and differences across our six countries. It is published open access so you can download it free of charge.

Asserting the nation

We recently wrote an article for the Society for Research into Higher Education blog, based on our analysis of the narratives about students used by those making or seeking to influence higher education policy across Europe. It’s called ‘Asserting the nation: the dominance of national narratives in policymakers’ constructions of higher education students’ and you can read it here.

The impact of students’ social characteristics

We recently gave a presentation at the Bologna Process Researchers’ Conference on the Future of Higher Education in Bucharest (29-31 January). It discussed the extent to which the higher education staff and students in our project believed that social characteristics have an impact on what it means to be a student. We found considerable differences of opinion between the two groups (staff and students), as well as some interesting cross-national variation. You can read the latest draft of the paper (and the others that were given at the conference) here.

Europe as spatial imaginary?

In our latest article, just published in the Journal of Education Policy, we explore the ways in which the idea of Europe was alluded to by the ‘policy influencers’ we interviewed, in relation to their understandings of higher education students. We argue that the idea of Europe constitutes an important ‘spatial imaginary’ for higher education within the continent, and helps to frame the ways in which students are conceptualised. However, this is not played out in the same way for all respondents. For some, we suggest, Europe act as a distinct place or idealised space; for others, it constitutes an important site of spatial transformation. We explore how these understandings are related to nations’ political and historical contexts, and their contemporary positioning within Europe.

The full article can be accessed here.