We will be helping to launch the Forum for International Education and Pedagogical Issues in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham on 8 November. Rachel will be giving a talk entitled ‘Students as “objects of criticism”? Variations in the construction of higher education students across six European countries’, drawing on our analysis of policy documents across Europe. You can find out more about the event here.
Month: October 2018
New article: Students and university websites
A new article from the project has just been published in Higher Education. It is by Predrag Lažetić, and is called ‘Students and university websites—consumers of corporate brands or novices in the academic community?’. It compares the positioning of students and corporate branding features on higher education institution websites within the higher education systems of Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Spain and Poland, and argues that there is considerable diversity in the portrayal of student applicants, rather than a common construction as only consumers. You can read the full article here.
New article: constructions of students in English policy documents
An article from the project, entitled ‘The construction of higher education students in English policy documents’ has been published (open access) in the latest issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. The article argues that, contrary to assumptions made in much of the academic literature, students are not conceptualised as ‘empowered consumers’; instead their vulnerability is emphasised in documents by both government and unions. It also identifies other dominant discourses, such as students as ‘future workers’ and ‘hard-workers’, 
which articulate with extant debates about both the repositioning of higher education as an economic good and the use of the ‘hard-working’ trope across other areas of social policy. You can read the full article here.