‘What does it mean to be a contemporary higher education student?’ Eurostudents project conference (online), 17-18 June 2021.
The conference programme can be found here and the abstracts are available here. Recordings of the sessions:
Welcome & keynote by Gritt B. Nielsen
Panel 1: ‘Good’ and ‘ideal’ student
Panel 2: Students and place
Panel 3: Wellbeing and disability
Panel 4: Student identities and changing experiences
Panel 5: Purposes and possibilities
Panel 6: International students
Panel 7: Marketisation
Panel 8: Social class and inequalities
Eurostudents panel: Constructing the European higher education student & closing comments
Danish-UK seminar on higher education students, University College London, 14th January 2020
Colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, working on a series of projects on students’ HE choices and experiences, joined us for a one-day seminar during which we shared our research findings and discussed various commonalities in our data.
‘Students in Changing Higher Education Landscapes’, Eurostudents mid-project conference, University of Surrey, 14th June 2019
We held a one-day conference to disseminate some of our findings half-way through the project, and bring together other scholars working on related topics. The programme included a keynote talk by Rille Raaper from Durham University and numerous presentations by other higher education scholars – see here.
Symposium on ‘Constructing the higher education student across Europe’, British Sociological Association Annual Conference, Glasgow, 26th April, 2019
In this symposium, we drew on five data sources (university websites, newspaper articles, student focus groups, policy documents and interviews with policymakers) from six countries (Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain) to examine dominant constructions of the European higher education student. The three papers that made up the symposium each had a different focus, considering: (i) national and institutional variation in online constructions of students (drawing on analysis of university websites in all six countries); (ii) the extent to which students should be conceptualised as consumers (drawing on newspaper articles and student focus groups in Denmark and England); and (iii) how policymakers discuss diversity within the student body (drawing on interviews with policymakers and policy documents in all six countries).
Using Creative and Visual Methods in Comparative Research – one-day seminar at the University of Surrey, 15th June 2018
Increasing use is made of both creative and visual methods in social research. Nevertheless, to date there has been very little discussion of the extent to which such methods can be used in comparative research. This seminar explored some of the challenges of using these methods cross-nationally, examining the different cultural associations that may be brought to bear in different national contexts, and how these are accounted for in research design, data collection and analysis. It also drew on the experiences of researchers working in this area, to explore how such challenges can most effectively be addressed. A list of all the presentations that were given, and recordings of some of them can be found here.
Symposium on ‘Constructing the higher education student: understanding spatial variations’, Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference, 29th August-1st September 2017
We organised a symposium with Johanna Waters (University of Oxford) at the RGS annual conference in the summer of 2017 (abstract below). This is sponsored by the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group (of the Royal Geographical Society). Details about the individual papers can be found here.
Many scholars have argued that, in contemporary society, higher education policy and practice have both been profoundly changed by globalising pressures. Indeed, some have contended that the state’s capacity to control education has been significantly limited by the growth of both international organisations and transnational companies (Ball, 2007) and that the three traditional models of university education in Europe (Humboldtian, Napoleonic and Anglo-Saxon) have been replaced by a single Anglo-American model, characterised by, inter alia, competition, marketisation, decentralisation and a focus on entrepreneurial activity. Nevertheless, this analysis is not universally held. For example, not all European nations have sought to establish elite universities or maximise revenue through attracting international students, and significant differences remain in the way in which higher education is funded. In explaining such variations, scholars have pointed to differences in political dynamics, politico-administrative structures and intellectual traditions, as well as the flexibility and mutability of neo-liberal ideas themselves. However, research to date has focussed primarily on the extent of convergence (or divergence) with respect to top-level policies; as a result, little work has explored the perspectives of social actors, nor the ways in which policy may be ‘enacted’ locally, in ways that diverge from formal policy documents.
In this session we bring together papers that explore the ways in which ‘the higher education student’ is constructed across different spatial contexts. These speak to debates about what it means to be a young person within the contemporary university, as well as to those that relate more specifically to the geographies of higher education.
Symposium on ‘Constructing the higher education student and graduate’, British Sociological Association Annual Conference, 4th-7th April 2017
We ran a symposium at the BSA conference, with presentations from Katy Vigurs, Johanna Waters, Kim Allen and Nicola Ingram, as well as from the Eurostudents team. The symposium abstract is pasted below:
Education, and in particular higher education (HE) is often constructed as the great equaliser of life chances, and an important vehicle for social mobility. However, within the contemporary landscape – with an increasingly global ‘higher education market’ and the repositioning of higher education as a private (rather than public) good – traditional forms of inequality arguably appear magnified. This special session brings together work from four different research projects, investigating what it means to be a contemporary HE student or graduate in England and East Asia, and how these roles are being transformed through particular policy pressures. Overall the session seeks to explore the following broad questions: What does it mean to be a student in HE today? How does the conception of the HE student differ from policy to practice? How does the discourse around education and meritocracy construct some young people as ‘failures’? In a contemporary context of increased tuition fees and debt, how are young people navigating the graduate labour market? What are the mechanisms through which graduates today become identified as ‘ideal’ and ‘employable’ candidates? To what extent are inequalities of class, race and gender being reproduced through these contemporary constructions of students and graduates? To what extent do we see variation across different national contexts?
Launch seminar, University of Surrey, 21st September 2016
We held a seminar to launch the project at the University of Surrey in September. This focused on our current understandings of what it means to be a higher education student in contemporary Europe, exploring both similarities and differences between countries.
We were very pleased to have two great keynote speakers for the event: Johanna Waters, from the University of Oxford and Michael Tomlinson, from the University of Southampton. Both have undertaken research in areas very relevant to the EuroStudents project. Johanna has conducted a wide range of studies exploring the role of mobility within the lives of higher education students, while Michael’s research has included a study of the impact of recent policy changes on student attitudes to learning in higher education.
The final programme for the seminar can be found here.