Higher Education, States of Precarity and Conflict in the 'Global North' and 'Global South': UK, Hungary, South Africa, and Turkey
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Faculty of Education
Abstract
An unprecedented combination of transnational political pressures, conflicts, and policy reforms are today weighing on higher education (HE) institutions, threatening their shared promise to support the public good. Recent research shows that HE is under threats from public sector cuts and the breakup of supra-national governance structures, imperilling HE public missions, academic freedom, and professional integrity. Simultaneously, resurgent nationalisms, populist movements, and forced human displacement impinge on HE's capacity to ameliorate political instability. These developments have coincided with rising political pressures on HE from structurally disadvantaged minorities, particularly over lack of HE access or the curtailing of the social mobility that drove post-war HE aspirations. This constellation of pressures has created a sense of crisis for higher education around the world. Yet little is known empirically about how threats to HE's autonomy and its public mission are manifested cross-nationally in HE contexts across the globe.
There is now an urgent need for systematic comparative investigation of how these pressures and their potentially unpredictable outcomes are affecting higher education institutions and their capacity to fulfil their public missions and civic responsibilities. A recent call by the British Academy has identified education and learning in crises as one of its new strategic aims in response to the rapidly changing political character of nation-states. Our project responds directly to such strategic aims, taking HE and conflict as a primary focus, thereby clarifying threats and risks, both present and future, to HE's mission integrity, its autonomy, its capacity for reducing conflict, enhancing learning and building public trust.This three-year ESRC study will assess these pressures and outcomes for HE public missions through a comparative investigation across four national contexts: the UK, Hungary, South Africa and Turkey. These four states are nominally 'democratic', but each is also undergoing different 'crises of the state', recasting public missions in different ways. The study will explore, across time, the articulations of such crises with changes in the 'public mission' and institutional autonomy of HE.
The project will: 1) identify historical and contemporary political, cultural and transnational HE pressures; 2) investigate how such pressures impact understandings of university missions; and, 3) illuminate the experiences of, and responses to, these pressures on the part of HE actors and civic groups. Methodologically, we will undertake comparative case studies that bring together rich sets of empirical data, including: historical and archival policy documents; quantitative profiles of institutional demographics; records of academic dismissals and other threats to academic freedom; a netnography tracing the presentation of universities in news sources and social media; and interviews and focus groups at two universities in each of the formal case study sites. Through comparative analysis, this project will generate new policy insights to inform stakeholders in defending the university's role in promoting democratic pluralism, pursuing independent knowledge production, and contributing to social mobility. To achieve this, the project will develop a comparative knowledge base to identify global and local threats to HE integrity as an educational space contributing to: conflict reduction; civic stability and development; the assurance of social mobility; new methodological and conceptual models addressing the risks that such conflicts pose for the integrity of HE. Key beneficiaries include actors involved with public mission activities, such as academic managers, student unions, public mission professionals, and civic actors. Beneficiaries will have access to an evidentiary base to advance policy reforms to mitigate negative pressures on HE, including the exigencies of war.
There is now an urgent need for systematic comparative investigation of how these pressures and their potentially unpredictable outcomes are affecting higher education institutions and their capacity to fulfil their public missions and civic responsibilities. A recent call by the British Academy has identified education and learning in crises as one of its new strategic aims in response to the rapidly changing political character of nation-states. Our project responds directly to such strategic aims, taking HE and conflict as a primary focus, thereby clarifying threats and risks, both present and future, to HE's mission integrity, its autonomy, its capacity for reducing conflict, enhancing learning and building public trust.This three-year ESRC study will assess these pressures and outcomes for HE public missions through a comparative investigation across four national contexts: the UK, Hungary, South Africa and Turkey. These four states are nominally 'democratic', but each is also undergoing different 'crises of the state', recasting public missions in different ways. The study will explore, across time, the articulations of such crises with changes in the 'public mission' and institutional autonomy of HE.
The project will: 1) identify historical and contemporary political, cultural and transnational HE pressures; 2) investigate how such pressures impact understandings of university missions; and, 3) illuminate the experiences of, and responses to, these pressures on the part of HE actors and civic groups. Methodologically, we will undertake comparative case studies that bring together rich sets of empirical data, including: historical and archival policy documents; quantitative profiles of institutional demographics; records of academic dismissals and other threats to academic freedom; a netnography tracing the presentation of universities in news sources and social media; and interviews and focus groups at two universities in each of the formal case study sites. Through comparative analysis, this project will generate new policy insights to inform stakeholders in defending the university's role in promoting democratic pluralism, pursuing independent knowledge production, and contributing to social mobility. To achieve this, the project will develop a comparative knowledge base to identify global and local threats to HE integrity as an educational space contributing to: conflict reduction; civic stability and development; the assurance of social mobility; new methodological and conceptual models addressing the risks that such conflicts pose for the integrity of HE. Key beneficiaries include actors involved with public mission activities, such as academic managers, student unions, public mission professionals, and civic actors. Beneficiaries will have access to an evidentiary base to advance policy reforms to mitigate negative pressures on HE, including the exigencies of war.
Planned Impact
Impact Summary: This project addresses universities' relationships across time with wider political dimensions of the state and the public good in times of rising conflict and political upheaval. It does so within the context of transnational transformations in HE funding and governance, and challenges to the 'global' status of HE and its post-war political identity as an institution with a leading concern for reducing conflict and addressing unpredictable global threats and crises. The project will generate a systematic and comparative evidence base providing beneficiaries with a comprehensive resource both to engage the encroachment of HE privatization and monitoring policies and to illuminate strategic opportunities for national reforms to mitigate a constellation of negative pressures upon HE.
'Engaing Up/Engaging Down': Drawing upon Bacevic's (2017) definition of beneficiary impact, we utilize a dual approach designed to "engage up" by focusing upon wider social actors engaged with HE (e.g., HE policy-makers, HE mission & governance bodies) and to "engage down" through policy impact with NGOs, the social sector and intergovernmental organisations (e.g., CSaP, INEE, GCPEA) involved in university engagement activities and marginal groups seeking to access HE. Key Beneficiaries are:
1. Academic communities and outward-facing NGOs which support HE, particularly the social sciences and humanities, peace and conflict scholars, and those addressing wider political economies of HE. However, because this work investigates political conflict and HE missions, the knowledge outputs will also find purchase in academic governance contexts with senior leaders and management focusing on political risk and needs assessments relative to HE mission practices. Links between NGO beneficiaries and HE beneficiaries are crucial because they are designed to address public/private sector divides and tensions.
2. Labour market partners, particularly in relation to uneven employment risks such as the respective 'youth bulge' particularly in SA and Turkey, and in particular regions of the UK (North-West, including the impact of Brexit on employment opportunities and HE funding), and HE missions and mobility imperatives. The impact outcomes will be drawn upon to engage NGOs, policy think tanks, public and private sector employment interests, and social sector communities which seek focused data on HE inclusion, conflict and missions. The team will generate a series of 'impact' related innovation packages which can be delivered to beneficiaries, outlining the ways in which the differentiated effects of political conflict and mission impinge upon the state, and the role of HE in promoting political stability and widening participation.
3. Policy makers at global, national and local levels by contributing to international efforts by organisations such as UNESCO to further understanding about the role of HE in supporting a democratic citizenry by delineating the political, social and economic issues underpinning HE integrity. At the global level, we aim to influence how HE addresses their commitments to such organizations, ensuring that 'soft power' is utilized to encourage debate in HE over the need for a diversity of HE political perspectives and as a space for peace-building. In light of the current and future potential precarity of HE in the case studies we have identified, the measurement of particular political risks and threats, together with HE's response to them, is a key benefit of the research for cross-national reflection and for a reimagined consideration of governance and mission conceptualisations. Participating HE organisations, participating sector organisations and participants will learn from each other through scheduled cross-cultural networking, jointly produced work, knowledge interchanges and through exposure to the processes of academic research that this entails (e.g., paired research training, peer to peer interviews).
'Engaing Up/Engaging Down': Drawing upon Bacevic's (2017) definition of beneficiary impact, we utilize a dual approach designed to "engage up" by focusing upon wider social actors engaged with HE (e.g., HE policy-makers, HE mission & governance bodies) and to "engage down" through policy impact with NGOs, the social sector and intergovernmental organisations (e.g., CSaP, INEE, GCPEA) involved in university engagement activities and marginal groups seeking to access HE. Key Beneficiaries are:
1. Academic communities and outward-facing NGOs which support HE, particularly the social sciences and humanities, peace and conflict scholars, and those addressing wider political economies of HE. However, because this work investigates political conflict and HE missions, the knowledge outputs will also find purchase in academic governance contexts with senior leaders and management focusing on political risk and needs assessments relative to HE mission practices. Links between NGO beneficiaries and HE beneficiaries are crucial because they are designed to address public/private sector divides and tensions.
2. Labour market partners, particularly in relation to uneven employment risks such as the respective 'youth bulge' particularly in SA and Turkey, and in particular regions of the UK (North-West, including the impact of Brexit on employment opportunities and HE funding), and HE missions and mobility imperatives. The impact outcomes will be drawn upon to engage NGOs, policy think tanks, public and private sector employment interests, and social sector communities which seek focused data on HE inclusion, conflict and missions. The team will generate a series of 'impact' related innovation packages which can be delivered to beneficiaries, outlining the ways in which the differentiated effects of political conflict and mission impinge upon the state, and the role of HE in promoting political stability and widening participation.
3. Policy makers at global, national and local levels by contributing to international efforts by organisations such as UNESCO to further understanding about the role of HE in supporting a democratic citizenry by delineating the political, social and economic issues underpinning HE integrity. At the global level, we aim to influence how HE addresses their commitments to such organizations, ensuring that 'soft power' is utilized to encourage debate in HE over the need for a diversity of HE political perspectives and as a space for peace-building. In light of the current and future potential precarity of HE in the case studies we have identified, the measurement of particular political risks and threats, together with HE's response to them, is a key benefit of the research for cross-national reflection and for a reimagined consideration of governance and mission conceptualisations. Participating HE organisations, participating sector organisations and participants will learn from each other through scheduled cross-cultural networking, jointly produced work, knowledge interchanges and through exposure to the processes of academic research that this entails (e.g., paired research training, peer to peer interviews).
Organisations
- University of Cambridge (Lead Research Organisation)
- University of Cambridge (Collaboration)
- Trinity College (Collaboration)
- University of Toronto (Collaboration)
- Aarhus University (Collaboration)
- University of Verona (Collaboration)
- Central European University (Project Partner)
- Centre for Science and Policy (Project Partner)
- Human Sciences Research Council (Project Partner)
- Civic Space Studies Association (Project Partner)
Publications
Al Azmeh Z
(2023)
Correction: Authorial Power, Authoritarianism, and Exiled Intellectuals: Syria and Turkey
in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
Al Azmeh Z
(2024)
'Trauma work' as hindrance to political praxis during democratisation movements
in Theory and Society
Al Azmeh Z
(2023)
Authorial Power, Authoritarianism, and Exiled Intellectuals: Syria and Turkey
in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
Al Azmeh Z
(2023)
The Politics of Silence, Voice, and the In-Between
Bassi D
(2023)
Book review: La dottrina fascista, o il fascismo nella storia superiore del pensiero, A. Caffi
in Rivista storica del socialismo
Bassi D
(2024)
Elgar Companion to Hannah Arendt
Bassi D
(2023)
Book review: Hannah Arendt e il cosmopolitismo. Stato, comunità, mondi in comune, A. Taraborelli
in Filosofia Politica
| Title | Podcast Series for Scholars in Exile Globally |
| Description | We have developed a series of both mid-project and end-project podcasts about the findings of this work. We have also developed a podcast series for scholars in exile globally and these can be found on the project website -https://universitiesandcrisis.org/events/ |
| Type Of Art | Artefact (including digital) |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Impact | Creation of podcast series |
| URL | https://universitiesandcrisis.org/events/ |
| Description | Key Findings up until the end of the report: 1. Populist interventions in higher education (HE) are increasing across all four case studies, both in already autocratic university spaces and in previously less autocratic ones. 2. Risks to HE, including increased surveillance of academics, diminished academic freedoms, heightened managerialism, and intensified culture wars, are taking a severe toll on each case study. Academic freedom is now virtually non-existent in Turkey and Hungary and has been substantially diminished in the UK. 3. The number of scholars and students living in exile during or after conflict has significantly increased, with most experiencing high levels of employment precarity and displacement in host societies and universities (where employment is secured). 4. Populist and far-right parties are increasingly using universities as lobbying spaces, with this practice expanding substantially in all four countries since 2014. 5. Ultra-conservative right-wing networks and political influencers are playing a central role in this transformation, particularly through elite capture of HE institutions. 6. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has significantly accelerated the erosion of political trust in HE in Hungary, allowing the Hungarian government to capture public universities through elite networks. This shift towards the populist right and illiberal governance has turned HE into a lobbying space for right-wing ideologies, promoted heterodox science, and undermined liberal academic freedoms. Academics in Hungary report feeling systematically undermined, and the country's capacity for innovation through HE has been significantly curtailed. 7. Similar patterns are emerging in the UK, where free speech legislation, rising tuition fees, and intensified managerialism have increasingly transformed universities into spaces of calculation and bureaucratic control, reducing the scope for robust knowledge production and innovation. 8. Universities in all four case studies face significant threats due to political efforts to damage their public reputation and the sharp reduction in public funding. 9. New governance practices - including state-led reforms framed as democratic measures, such as the Prevent Duty in the UK and the expansion of university administrative powers - are exacerbating inequality within HE and further undermining academic freedom and innovation. 10. Taken together, these political shifts are discouraging future generations of scholars and thinkers from pursuing careers in universities, impacting the long-term future of higher education in each of the four cases. |
| Exploitation Route | A number of outcomes are being taken forward and used by others: 1. Aarhus University is drawing on the project's work through the COST EU action on Higher Education (HE) and Neo-nationalism to develop both theoretical frameworks and methods for studying the impact of neo-nationalism on HE. 2. A grant proposal is currently being prepared in collaboration with OISE/UT and other project partners to extend the study's work to new geographic sites and pursue new research objectives related to the global right. 3. An international network of experts focused on HE in times of crises and emergencies is now fully operational. This network is being actively consulted for EU legislative work on academic freedom and is part of the COST EU network program, which offers training to EU scholars and early career researchers (ECRs) on how to assess and study the impacts of neo-nationalism on HE in up to ten countries, including Serbia, Hungary, Turkey, Romania, Czech Republic, Germany, France, the UK, Denmark, Poland, Portugal, and Spain. 4. A new consortium, entitled the Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crises and Political Transformation, has been formally established at the University of Cambridge in direct response to this project. The consortium brings together scholars from the Faculty of History, Architecture, Classics, Sociology, Education, Gender Studies, and Political Science to advance interdisciplinary research on political transformation in HE. 5. A series of new networks dedicated to supporting scholars in exile have been established in collaboration with CARA (Council for At-Risk Academics) and the Scholars in Exile network, allowing for greater institutional support for displaced academics. 6. A coalition of EU and UK scholars is actively working on strengthening EU legislation to protect scholars from the erosion of academic freedom, with particular attention to higher education systems vulnerable to populist and autocratic interventions. 7. Project team members are collaborating with US scholars and university unions to resist the erosion of academic freedom in both the US and the UK. This work specifically addresses crises such as mass layoffs, redundancies, and institutional restructuring that threaten academic job security and research integrity. 8. Project leads are currently working with their respective universities to develop new indicators of robust research culture and define new metrics of research excellence for the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK. This work aims to counteract the growing pressures of managerialism and market-driven assessments of research value. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Education Government Democracy and Justice Culture Heritage Museums and Collections Security and Diplomacy |
| URL | https://universitiesandcrisis.org/events/ |
| Description | We have summarised some of the impacts elsewhere in the report and will therefore not repeat these events and outcomes here. We will, however, summarise the more general findings under the following categories: Emerging economic and societal impact arising from the award that you are reporting on (including how it has evolved): - Economic and societal impact is taking place across both the scholars in exile domain and within the university, particularly in relation to academic freedom, advice to government bodies, and university bodies on academic freedom, as well as the risks and threats posed to HE through populism. - Particular emphasis here needs to be placed on the role of elite capture of HE and its use as a space for political lobbying, especially in the most illiberal and autocratic HE spaces. - This work is also being drawn upon by several national HE unions designed to support academics in exile and academics under threat, where diminishing academic freedom is of critical concern. - We are also reporting through CSAP the policy impacts and policy briefings for all HE scholars working in education and diplomacy and are creating a network through COST EU to protect academics at risk in the current political climate. A summary of how the findings from your award are impacting the public, private or third/voluntary sectors, and elsewhere: - Our work is being particularly used by those working with scholars and students in exile in universities and the third sector across Germany, France, the UK, and Austria (due to the relocation of CEU to Vienna, Austria). - Our work is also moving globally through our team members and networks, influencing university mission statements and practices in response to the growing risks and threats to scholars and the integrity of the university as a space for innovation and robust problem-solving. We are currently working with a number of organisations worldwide to respond to the broader crises of conflict and HE and have collaborators in several European countries. - We are also particularly influential through the COST network in supporting European networks on academic freedom and producing data visualisation outputs that comparatively map the landscape of HE, populism, and threats to academic freedom. Challenges overcome to achieve impact: - Our work has faced challenges in navigating the ongoing political pressure placed on HE, particularly in contexts where populism and autocratic governance are actively undermining academic freedom. - Despite these challenges, we have developed strong partnerships with key organisations that work with scholars in exile, allowing us to contribute to policy discussions and offer practical recommendations to universities and government bodies. Significant impact within academia, for example the nucleation of a new research area: - Several new research projects have emerged from this work. One new project has secured funding through Research and Development initiatives in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. - Two additional projects are being developed from the original ESRC project: one supported by the Spencer Foundation in the US, which explores the transatlantic pressures exerted on HE by conservative political influence from the early 20th century to the present; and another in collaboration with the University of Cape Town, supported by Alborado Funding, examining the rise of populist politics and its impact on university and student politics in 2025. - Our findings are being actively used by scholars and NGOs globally, including Education in Emergencies, CARA, Scholars in Exile, Whitehall, University of Toronto, Aarhus University, Charles University, University of Vienna, and the UCU, to respond to the challenges emerging from new managerialisms, heightened rationalisation of university labour, growing infringements on academic freedom, and diminishing protections for scholars and students (such as the risk of arrest if protesting against university policy). - Our findings are also being incorporated into training for early career researchers (ECRs) on how to study populism and higher education into the future. Team members have attended summer schools on academic freedom, and the University of Cambridge team has partnered with scholars at Aarhus University to deliver these schools and conferences, particularly through the ESRC and COST networks. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2022 |
| Sector | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Security and Diplomacy |
| Impact Types | Cultural Societal Economic Policy & public services |
| Description | Advisory Work with Beams Foundation, Syrian Scholars Network, Sussex, Cambridge on HE Strategy |
| Geographic Reach | Multiple continents/international |
| Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
| Description | Advisory work with INEE, UNICEF, UNESCO, CARA, The American Political Science Association, Scholars in Exile, and the Global Education Cluster |
| Geographic Reach | Multiple continents/international |
| Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
| Description | COST Action, Working Group 1 (Genealogies of Academic Freedom), EP Academic Freedom Monitor 2024 |
| Geographic Reach | Europe |
| Policy Influence Type | Contribution to a national consultation/review |
| Description | CSAP Work Influencing HE Policy on Academic Freedom |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Policy Influence Type | Contribution to a national consultation/review |
| Description | Graduate training in Higher Education and Neo-Nationalisms through ESRC grant, conference, and work with Aarhus University and FOE |
| Geographic Reach | Europe |
| Policy Influence Type | Influenced training of practitioners or researchers |
| Description | Impact on Scholars in Exile Associations and University Policy on Academics in Exile |
| Geographic Reach | Europe |
| Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
| Description | Rising nationalisms, shifting geopolitics and the future of European higher education and research openness (OPEN) |
| Amount | € 400,000 (EUR) |
| Organisation | European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | Belgium |
| Start | 09/2023 |
| End | 10/2027 |
| Title | Data Visuaiisation Archive on Academic Freedom and HE |
| Description | This is a method developed through the work of the ESRC and the comparative project. In each case study we undertook an extensive analysis of the temporal time frames listed in the project application to create a method that allowed for rapid data visualisation methods to be used with policy makers that showcased in a digital format the contectual and episodic factors influencing the robustness of academic freedom in each case study. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This method is being shared with ECR's in the ESRC summer school training and the COST EU action -Shifting Geopolitics and Neo-nationalisms in HE - which houses over 200 EU scholar members, students, and Early Career Scholars. The COST EU project will be publishing the method on its website, using the tool to teach ECR's and will be trialed at the annual meeting in May 2025. Whilst there are indexes that identify the rise and fall of academic freedom there are no visualisation methods for exploring the contextual and episodic events shaping academic freedom and its realisation inside the HE space. There is also no method for exploring these factors in relation to the changing definition of the term inside and beyond universities, particularly in relation to the populist right. |
| Description | COST OPEN ACTION - Neo-nationalism and Higher Education |
| Organisation | Aarhus University |
| Country | Denmark |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This COST OPEN ACTION is an EU funded project that is designed to build networks and support early career researchers in developing a field of study in relationship between geopolitics and neonwationalism, alongside the impact of populism. Dillabough (the ESRC PI) has been central to the development of this action and is the lead of Working Group 1 of this COST action. She is also the UK lead for there COST ACTION. The grant is worth 400, 000 Euros and will be shared across EUROPE in developing associated networks and ECS's. It is a highly competitive grant that incorporates a vast number of scholars across Europe and the UK. We are in collaboration with Arrhus University and the leads are Katja Brogger and Hannah Moscovitz. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Aarhus leads the overall endeavour, while Dillabough leads Working Group 1 and serves as the lead UK representative for COST. A post-doctoral researcher, Dr. Hannah Moscovitz, has been housed at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, to support the work of the COST ACTION. Dillabough, J (2025). Working Group 1 Elected Chair, Lead Researcher on Genealogies of Academic Freedom, Special Issue Preparation and Digital Visualisation output. Dillabough, J (2025) Working Group 1 Elected Chair, Lead Researcher on How to Study Academic Freedom in an age of New Extremes, EU Case Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. |
| Impact | See also https://www.au.dk/opencostaction/working-groups/wg1#c3254089 1. A conference that will take place in Aveiro, Portugal on the OPEN COST ACTION 2. A special issue for the European Journal of Higher Education 3. A workshop for ECR's at the University of Cambridge (October, 2023) |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | COST OPEN ACTION - Neo-nationalism and Higher Education (Renewed for 2025) |
| Organisation | Aarhus University |
| Country | Denmark |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Dillabough, J (2025). Working Group 1 Elected Chair, Lead Researcher on Genealogies of Academic Freedom, Special Issue Preparation and Digital Visualisation output. Dillabough, J (2025) Working Group 1 Elected Chair, Lead Researcher on How to Study Academic Freedom in an age of New Extremes, EU Case Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. |
| Collaborator Contribution | In 2025 Dillabough led the COST working group on two new collaborative initiatives. The first is a comparative analysis of academic freedom (Genealogies of Academic Freedom, March 2024-March 2025) in the UK and the EU and the second is a digitally based data visualisation of academic freedom in 6 countries (Serbia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, Turkey, UK), and presented to the COST network in 2025 as part of the work of the ESRC. Presentation and publication outputs are listed below. |
| Impact | Dillabough, J. & Rosenvaig, M, (2025). Genealogies of Academic Freedom in an age of new extremes. Presented to the Faculty of Political Science, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen Czech Republic, COST EU ACTION Working Group Leader Presentations. Rosenvaig, R & Dillabough, J. (2025). Manufaturing Crises in Higher Education: Populism, Power and Transformation. Presented to the Faculty of Political Science, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen Czech Republic, COST EU ACTION Working Group Leader Presentations. Rosenvaig, M. & Dillabough, J (2025). Manufacturing Crises in Higher Education: Populism, Power and Transformation. Paper to be published in Discourse. Dillabough, J. (2025). Roundtable Collaborative Project - Conservative Intellectual Elites and Shifting Higher Education Governance: The Erosion of Public Trust, Expertise, and Democratic Norms. Presented to the Faculty of Political Science, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen Czech Republic, COST EU ACTION Working Group Leader Presentations. |
| Start Year | 2025 |
| Description | Collaboration between University of Cambridge and University of Arhuss |
| Organisation | Aarhus University |
| Department | Danish School of Education |
| Country | Denmark |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | We are currently engaging in a collaboration on the joint UK case study work we are undertaking with Aarhus University. The Danish team is examining policy and HECrises and we are working on a study of the relationship of HE stakeholders and rising populism. We have just received news that we have been successful in obtaining a high impact dissemination workshop panel slot this summer (2023 at ECPR). Professor Dillabough taught at the Summer School that the project in Denmark has championed and the lead PI from Denmark will be teaching on an HE and Crises module in MT term at the University of Cambridge (2023). |
| Collaborator Contribution | We are working on different aspects of the UK case study to both avoid overlap and expand impact. |
| Impact | The collaboration is multidisciplinary and outputs for this collaboration have emerged in year 2 of the project and will continue into year 3. |
| Start Year | 2021 |
| Description | Conservative Intellectual Elites and Shifting Higher Education Governance: The Erosion of Public Trust, Expertise, and Democratic Norms |
| Organisation | Trinity College |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This is beginning of a partnership with scholars at the University of Toronto (OISE, E. Buckner), Trinity College (Isaac Kamola), and Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP, P. Melo). We have begun this partnership through a large scale grant application related to wider questions of democracy and trust in in HE. The formal title is below Higher Education and the Erosion of Public Trust and Democracy. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Contributions are related to the writing and preparation of a joint grant application. Dillabough is the lead PI in the UK |
| Impact | No outputs as of yet apart from the grant submission and current planning and collaboration for future joint writing. One of the current researchers on our ESRC project is writing a series of blogs and short pieces on the global conservative right to be published in 2024. |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | Conservative Intellectual Elites and Shifting Higher Education Governance: The Erosion of Public Trust, Expertise, and Democratic Norms |
| Organisation | University of Toronto |
| Country | Canada |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This is beginning of a partnership with scholars at the University of Toronto (OISE, E. Buckner), Trinity College (Isaac Kamola), and Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP, P. Melo). We have begun this partnership through a large scale grant application related to wider questions of democracy and trust in in HE. The formal title is below Higher Education and the Erosion of Public Trust and Democracy. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Contributions are related to the writing and preparation of a joint grant application. Dillabough is the lead PI in the UK |
| Impact | No outputs as of yet apart from the grant submission and current planning and collaboration for future joint writing. One of the current researchers on our ESRC project is writing a series of blogs and short pieces on the global conservative right to be published in 2024. |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | Hannah Arendt Center for Political Studies and the University of Verona |
| Organisation | University of Verona |
| Country | Italy |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The University of Cambridge has agreed to host Visiting Scholars and Visiting Students at the Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crisis and Political Transformation. The University of Cambridge has also agreed to join the Arendt Centre for Political Studies in joint research projects and we are entering into a shared teaching agreement so that parties from both centres can teach their student constituencies on HE, Crises, Populism, and the Work of Hannah Arendt. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The University of Verona has agreed to host Cambridge Consortium members as Visiting Scholars and Visiting Students in their annual cycle of events at the Arendt Centre for Political Studies. They have also agreed to join the Consortium in joint research projects and we are entering into a shared teaching agreement so that parties from both centres can teach their student constituencies on HE, Crises, Populism and the Work of Hannah Arendt. |
| Impact | Forthcoming workshop on Exile and Statelessness by the Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crisis and Political Transformation scheduled for March 26, 2025 at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. This workshop aims to bridge disciplinary and methodological divides, fostering dialogue around exile, statelessness, and political belonging. At a time marked by deepening global insecurity, political mistrust, and a sense of placelessness, we seek to examine how notions of home, civility, state, and belonging are reshaped by populist imaginaries and shifting power dynamics. Through this exploration, we aim to generate fresh insights into the lived realities of exile and statelessness while also drawing on historical contexts and conceptual frameworks. Forthcoming event (scheduled from June 25 to 27, 2025) to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hannah Arendt's passing, the Arendtian Counciliarism: Visions and Care for Democracy seminar will be held at the University of Verona. This event will bring together scholars to explore Arendt's concept of a federal council system and its enduring relevance for contemporary democratic thought. This seminar aims to foster a critical dialogue on the theoretical and practical dimensions of Arendt's political philosophy and its implications for modern democracy. We encourage submissions that engage with these themes and contribute to the ongoing discourse on participatory democracy, institutional frameworks, and political equality. |
| Start Year | 2024 |
| Description | Rising nationalisms, shifting geopolitics and the future of European higher education/research openness |
| Organisation | Aarhus University |
| Country | Denmark |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | As PI, Professor Joanne Dillabough is a collaborator, alongside Professor Katje Brogger from Aarhus University, on a COST Action application (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). This is an EU funded network grant application designed to enhance our global understanding of Higher Education and Neo-nationalisms. This collaboration began in Year 1 of the grant and was completed with the grant application submission in October 2022 during the life cycle of year 2 of the ESRC. We assisted in particular in the conceptualisation of the network as our grant is related to Brogger's existing grant in Denmark (Aarhus University) on Higher Education and Neo-nationalisms. We also assisted in developing the network membership, reaching out to other potential partners. As secondary partners, we assisted in the development of ideas framing the concept of the network, and have engaged in knowledge exchange in order to enhance it's capacity and realise its structure and regional forms of organisation if we are to be funded. We are currently working on a second joint summer school impact project in the area of knowledge exchange and dissemination where our focus has been to think through the complexity of the network. We will know about the outcome of this network application in April 2023. If it is to be funded, we will lead in the regional side of the network and coordinate activities related to the dissemination of our respective research projects and to mentor early career scholars in career mobility. Alongside its scholarly focus, the network is designed to constitute the core values of knowledge exchange, impact dissemination and early career mentoring. We are working towards the development of thinking hubs on the nature of HE and Neo-nationalisms, nurturing early career scholars in developing expertise in this area, and seeking wide networking dissemination and impact mechanisms. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Our collaborators are the lead in this networking grant and we are uncertain at this point how funds will be shared regionally once it is funded. |
| Impact | 1. Jointly organised summer schools for doctoral students on HE and Neo-nationalism 2. Jointly shared workshop and dissemination meetings at European conferences 3. Jointly led reading groups and webinars 4. Potential offer of visiting studentships 5. International Workshops |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | Syrian Academics and Researchers' Network (SARN) UK |
| Organisation | University of Cambridge |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Our ESRC team assisted in supporting the development of the network and provided intellectual support to one of the SARN leads in order to expand on cross country comparison and build more extensive networks in the area of Syrian Scholars in Exile. We also have joined in collaborating with members of the Network on projects related to exile and HE. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The SARN members, particularly Dr Al Azmeh, has contributed to the running of seminars and workshops on the concept of the exilic intellectual within the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. |
| Impact | Forthcoming workshop (scheduled for March 26, 2025) on Exile and Statelessness by the Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crisis and Political Transformation at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. This workshop aims to bridge disciplinary and methodological divides, fostering dialogue around exile, statelessness, and political belonging. At a time marked by deepening global insecurity, political mistrust, and a sense of placelessness, the workshop will seek to examine how notions of home, civility, state, and belonging are reshaped by populist imaginaries and shifting power dynamics. Through this exploration, researchers will aim to generate fresh insights into the lived realities of exile and statelessness while also drawing on historical contexts and conceptual frameworks. |
| Start Year | 2024 |
| Description | The Hannah Arendt Centre for the Study of Crises and Political Transformation, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge (established 2023-2024) |
| Organisation | University of Toronto |
| Department | Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISEI) |
| Country | Canada |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | We are currently in the early stages of applying for additional funding for our newly established university centre on HE and Crises (the Arendt Centre0 that has emerged through this grant and draft applications are in progress through the Leverhulme Foundation, the British Academy and Werner Gren Foundation. Our plan is to collaborate with OISE/UT in this endeavour as they are our current partners. We also hope to extend this invitation to Aarhus University as we now have won a successful COST GRANT with Professor Katje Brogger (lead) in the Department of Political Science (COST, European Cooperation in Science and Technology) and it is currently under review . Through this centre, we are striving to set the stage for a hub on of global expertise on HE in Emergencies and HE and Crises. There are a number of initiatives planned for this centre but we are still completing grant applications to support such a centre. We will also ensure that visiting doctoral researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of Aarhus will assist in the launching of this centre if we are to be successful in bids. |
| Collaborator Contribution | This is a joint collaboration that is in progress but we are uncertain at this point about its outcomes. |
| Impact | 1. Knowlege Exchange 2. Summer School Workshops 3. Webinar Attendance 4. Visiting lecturers |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | The Hannah Arendt Centre for the Study of Crises and Political Transformation, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge (established 2023-2024) |
| Organisation | University of Verona |
| Country | Italy |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | We are currently in the early stages of applying for additional funding for our newly established university centre on HE and Crises (the Arendt Centre0 that has emerged through this grant and draft applications are in progress through the Leverhulme Foundation, the British Academy and Werner Gren Foundation. Our plan is to collaborate with OISE/UT in this endeavour as they are our current partners. We also hope to extend this invitation to Aarhus University as we now have won a successful COST GRANT with Professor Katje Brogger (lead) in the Department of Political Science (COST, European Cooperation in Science and Technology) and it is currently under review . Through this centre, we are striving to set the stage for a hub on of global expertise on HE in Emergencies and HE and Crises. There are a number of initiatives planned for this centre but we are still completing grant applications to support such a centre. We will also ensure that visiting doctoral researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of Aarhus will assist in the launching of this centre if we are to be successful in bids. |
| Collaborator Contribution | This is a joint collaboration that is in progress but we are uncertain at this point about its outcomes. |
| Impact | 1. Knowlege Exchange 2. Summer School Workshops 3. Webinar Attendance 4. Visiting lecturers |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Title | Digital Data Visualization Output and Open Access Archive of Shared Data |
| Description | We have developed a digital data visualization output that shows comparatively the ways in which academic freedom is understood in the comparative case studies. We also have an open access archive of shared data sources between the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Impact | -Digital data visualization output -Open access archive of shared data sources |
| Description | 50th anniversary of Hannah Arendt's passing and the Arendtian Counciliarism: Visions and Care for Democracy Seminar |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Forthcoming event (scheduled from June 25 to 27, 2025) to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hannah Arendt's passing, the Arendtian Counciliarism: Visions and Care for Democracy seminar will be held at the University of Verona. This event will bring together scholars to explore Arendt's concept of a federal council system and its enduring relevance for contemporary democratic thought. This seminar aims to foster a critical dialogue on the theoretical and practical dimensions of Arendt's political philosophy and its implications for modern democracy. We encourage submissions that engage with these themes and contribute to the ongoing discourse on participatory democracy, institutional frameworks, and political equality. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |
| Description | Blog |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The project launched its 'research blog' in March 2022 with the aim of publishing contributions by project team members on various topics including initial observations related to case studies, methodological, procedural, practical and theoretical reflections and teaching and learning materials on the challenges and opportunities arising from the deployment of interdisciplinary methods and approaches, risk management strategies, and the handling of ethical issues, particularly for those studying highly sensitive dimensions of risk and conflict. This novel approach to the qualitative investigation will support HE capacity building skills in relation to the HE pressures as a conflicted space of multiple market and political forces. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022,2023 |
| URL | https://universitiesandcrisis.org/blog/ |
| Description | Book discussion by Zeina Al-Azmeh with author Eylaf Bader Eddin on the launch of his book Translating the Language of the Syria Revolution at the University of Sussex on February 14th 2024 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Dr Zeina Al-Azmeh, one of the team members of the project, served as the book discussant with author Eylaf Bader Eddin on the launch of his book "Translating the Language of the Syria Revolution" at the University of Sussex on February 14th 2024. The book analyses the various translations of the language of the Syrian Revolution (2011-2012) from Arabic to English and studies the discursive and non-discursive dimensions of the revolution as another act of translation, tracing the language of the banners, slogans, graffiti, songs, and their representation in English. Eylaf Bader Eddin is a Research Fellow on the project 'The Prison Narratives of Assad's Syria: Voices, Texts, Publics' (SYRASP) and a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110767698/html?lang=en |
| Description | COST ESRC Collaboration, ESRC Early Career Scholars Conference, University of Cambridge, ESRC and EU wide dissemination and network building event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | On September 18-19, 2024, the University of Cambridge hosted the COST ESRC Collaboration and ESRC Early Career Scholars Conference, an ESRC and EU-wide dissemination and network-building event. Convened by Jo Dillabough, it gathered 25 COST and five FOE members to discuss neo-nationalisms, geopolitics, and higher education. The event disseminated the project's theoretical work on academic exile and related dissertations, leading to a formal partnership between the University of Verona's Hannah Arendt Centre and the HAC ESRC Consortium on Crises and Political Transformation. Its goal was to strengthen academic networks in HE and populism research while impacting EU and UK policy. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Coorganization of the Annual conference for the Syrian Academics Network at University of Cambridge |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project member Dr Zeina Al-Azmeh co-organized the "Syrian Academics' and Researchers' Network Launch Event: Building Bridges, Advancing Knowledge", which took place at University of Cambridge on 16th & 17th of Sep 2023. She also participated in this event as one of the discussants of the panel on "Syrian Academics in Exile". The Syrian Academics and Researchers Network-UK is established as a multi-disciplinary network for Syrian academics and researchers in the UK. The network works towards establishing and strengthening collaboration and communication between Syrian academics and researchers, both within the UK and international academic community. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.sarn-uk.org/events/conference-2023 |
| Description | Digital security for social science research: an introduction to threat modeling |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Led by Julia Slupska from the Oxford Internet Institute, this online training introduced participants to the basics of digital security, including a step-by-step guide to 'digital threat modeling' for research design, data collection and data storage. The workshop was designed to help researchers and practitioners who grapple with questions like: Can digital environments provide truly confidential spaces for research? Does your work involve research on contexts with an illiberal or authoritarian government? Do you know the extent to which government entities can track and hack your activities online? Do you use your personal digital devices for research activities? If yes, do you know that security vulnerabilities and third-party data agreements for major digital platforms and apps may put intimate details from your personal life within close reach to those who may monitor your work? Does your research involve online communication with socially or politically vulnerable groups? If yes, what is your ethical framework for thinking through the kinds of questions or discussions that are safe to have with them online? Is it adequate to assume participants know best when it comes to digital security and disclosure, or does the technical complexity of risk warrant additional safeguarding? Are you working with large data sets containing sensitive or personally identifiable information? How did you determine the parameters for safe digital transmission and storage of this information? The training was open to all students, faculty and staff of the university and it was directly related to research expertise emerging from the Turkish case study on issues of research security for participants and researchers in conflict spaces but also more widely. RA, Jee Rubin is also a member of this training team. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Discussion about potential solutions in the battle for gender studies |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Elizabeth Maber, a co-PI on the project, wrote a blogpost entitled "Gendered authoritarianisms: Exploring potential solidarities in the battle for gender studies" for the Universities & Crisis blog site where she discusses the construction and reinforcement of gender in society and the role and potential of education for transformation. Particular reference is made to the Hungarian case study. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://universitiesandcrisis.org/blog/ |
| Description | Dissemination event (Wolfson College, University of Cambridge) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | In June 2022, the project team organized a dissemination event around the ESRC project titled 'Higher Education and Crises Scholarship: Celebrating new fields of research through the work of Susan Robertson and Roger Dale'. The event was held at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge and was attended by scholars from across the UK, Latin America, the US and Europe. There was also hybrid attendance at this meeting. At this event we shared preliminary results from our case study research and celebrated novel developments in the field of Sociology of HE, HE and Emergencies and the study of cultural political economy in HE. The event was attended by a broad Sociology and HE scholarly community as well as those working in the area of Education and Emergencies. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | ESRC Cost Network Meeting, Shifting Geopolitics and New Nationalisms in HE, Paper presentation of Working Group 1 Projects for Cost Networks, Genealogies of Academic Freedom, Reconceptualisaing Geopolitics in an Age of New Extremes |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | In April 2024, the ESRC COST Network Meeting, Shifting Geopolitics and New Nationalisms in Higher Education, was held in Aveiro, Portugal, with 150 participants. The event featured the presentation of Working Group 1 (WG1) projects for COST Networks, focusing on Genealogies of Academic Freedom and Reconceptualizing Geopolitics in an Age of New Extremes. Jo Dillabough, as the lead for WG1, presented the group's findings to the EU COST Network, providing an overview of its conceptual contributions to the COST WG1 project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Engagement Event, Budapest |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This was an engagement event organised in part the project in Budapest with affiliates of the Central European University. It was comprised of two events: an on-line hybrid event that Dr Dillabough attended that was offered by CEU on the status of Gender and Education in HE and a smaller event where knowledge exchange between a CEU Gender and Education specialist and an ESRC team member met to plan a Cambridge based dissemination event. It also involved an engagement with a CEU Education colleague from the Vienna site who will join us this year in conducting further research on HE and populism. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Ethnographic data presentation at HE and Crisis workshop, University of Cambridge, UK |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Project team member Dr Lakshmi Bose presented the preliminary data of her ethnographic study on "Culture Wars, The HE Free Speech Crisis & The Global Conservative Right" at the HE and Crisis workshop by organized at University of Cambridge. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Expert panelist presentation at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Jo-Anne Dillabough was an invited expert speaker at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, University of Cambridge. Her talk was entitled 'Growing up Insecure: How does insecurity impact youth well-being?' |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Final Dissemination Event, ESRC, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Final Dissemination Event, ESRC, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |
| Description | Final Dissemination Event, ESRC, Faculty of Education, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Final Dissemination Event, ESRC, Faculty of Education, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |
| Description | Final Dissemination Event, ESRC, Faculty of Education, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | On March 12, 2024, the Faculty of Education at the University of Manchester hosted the Final Dissemination Event for the ESRC project, bringing together 100 participants. Titled Higher Education, States of Precarity and Conflict in the 'Global North' and 'Global South': UK, Hungary, South Africa, and Turkey, the event was led by Jo Dillabough, Maber, Robertson, and Martini. It marked the culmination of the project, providing an in-depth exploration of all case study findings and presenting a forecasting brief. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Finalization of the agreements for the establishment of the Hannah Arendt Center at University of Cambridge |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project lead PI Professor Jo-Anne Dillabough has finalized the agreements with the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge for the establishment of the "The Hannah Arendt Centre on Crises and Political Transformation". Dillabough and other project team members such as senior research associate Daniele Bassi, who is a specialist in Arendt Studies, Jee Rubin alongside other project members and interdisciplinary faculty from the University of Cambridge are working on the concept planning, website design and network building activities for the soon to be launched center. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | HE & Crisis Podcast series |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The HE & Crisis podcast series explores the social, economic and political forces shaping higher education today. Each month, Jee Rubin speaks with academics, students, activists and policymakers working to protect the public mission of universities around the globe. In the first episode, Dr. Zeina Al Azmeh and Professor Jo Dillabough discuss the histories and experiences of intellectuals in exile. Drawing examples from their research on Syria and Turkey, Zeina and Jo reflect on the challenges facing such individuals, including constraints on their political agency, professional trajectories and personal wellbeing. In the second episode, Professor Susan Robertson discusses the economic interests transforming UK higher education, including efforts to privatise the sector that have deepened inequalities across Britain. In the third episode, Dr. Ivette Hernandez Santibanez discusses the history and legacy of the Chilean Student movement, from Pinochet and the neoliberalisation of the country in the 1970s through to the rise the Chilean Popular Front today. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022,2023 |
| URL | https://soundcloud.com/universitiesandcrisis |
| Description | HE & Crisis writing workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | This event was a one day retreat where project team members presented their work in progress for discussion, feedback, and input. The hybrid event was hosted on December 6th 2022 at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, across the Cambridge and Toronto teams and with the presence of external members of the research community for feedback. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Honorary Distinguished Daxia Lecture Series (Graduate Student Training) by Jo Anne Dillabough, East Normal China University, Shanghai, China |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Project lead PI Professor Jo Anne Dillabough gave a Graduate Student Training in scope of her Honorary Distinguished Lecture Series at East Normal China University, Shanghai, China. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Honorary Distinguished Lecture by Jo Anne Dillabough at East Normal China University, Shanghai, China |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project lead PI Professor Jo-Anne Dillabough gave an Honorary Distinguished Lecture at East Normal China University, Shanghai, China on "Young Lives on the Move: 21st Transnational Challenges for Higher Education and Policy in Global Comparative Contexts". |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Hungarianisation, Horrorism and a 'Funeral for Higher Education' - paper presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Project PI Professor Jo Dillabough organized a panel at the European Conference of Political Research in Innsbruk, Austria titled Higher Education, Paradox and Transnational Political Crises: New Political Imaginaries, Knowledge Making and the Case of HE. As part of this panel Professor Dillabough also presented, with Dr Lakshmi Bose, a paper titled "Hungarianisation, Horrorism and a 'Funeral for Higher Education' - Populist Imaginaries and Knowledge-Making in 21st Century Hungary". This work stems directly from data collected for the Hungarian case study and ideas were workshopped with the community in order to obtain feedback and engage in knowledge exchange with a view towards developing a special issue with the Aarhus team. In this work, the authors explore Heller's concerns about 'Hungarianisation' within HE, with a particular focus on its 'inner circle' of elite knowledge makers and HE student resistance to authoritarianism. Drawing from the work of Arendt, Caverero, Dragos, and Mbembe, this work examines the rise of populism in HE as a moralistic governing strategy through three distinct avenues. First, drawing upon archival and journalistic sources, it examines the history of conservative elite knowledge-makers accounts (e.g., lawyers, theologians) of ethnonationalist citizenship as a claim to historical 'victimhood' to justify the introduction of novel forms of neo-nationalism into HE (Brogger, 2021; Dragos, 2020). Second, placing oral history interviews and theoretical activist writings about state-making dating from the 1950s until the present into context, the work explores how modalities of HE student resistance sought to challenge authoritarian strains within Hungarian HE. Finally, drawing on interview data and visual representations of student political action, the study examines activist accounts of the forced move of the CEU across the European frontier space to Vienna. In so doing, the authors argue that Hungary's claim to legal forms of authoritarianism in HE have fulfilled, at least in part, the mission of Hungarian statecraft to energise a 'folktale of historical injustice' (Felman, 2001) about the place of Hungary in global geopolitics and the history of empire. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PaperDetails/65408 |
| Description | Illiberal Universities, The World of Higher Education Podcast |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Our guests this week are Andrea Petö from the Central European University in Vienna and Jo-Anne Dillabough of Cambridge University in the UK. These two are collaborators on the UK ESRC project Higher Education, States of Precarity and Conflict in the 'Global North' and 'Global South': UK, Hungary, South Africa, and Turkey and the Horizon Europe project Rising nationalisms, shifting geopolitics and the future of European higher education and research openness. In early May, they jointly penned an article for University World News entitled New Deceptions: How Illiberalism is hijacking the university. Today's discussion ranges over the history of higher education (haven't universities been illiberal for most of their history), institutional ownership (are private universities necessarily illiberal?) and the role of federalism in moderating illiberalism. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Invited lecture at Bard College, New York Professor Joanne Dillabough and Simina Dragos |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Professor Jo-Anne Dillabough and Dr Simina Dragos were invited to give a lecture at the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College, New York. The lecture was titled 'The Arendtian Archive as a Critical Spatial Project: Re-Reading the Imperial Blueprint and Authoritarianism in the 21st Century Academy'. In this joint lunchtime talk, Prof Dillabough and Dr Dragos focused on the role of critical global social theory, particularly Arendt and some of her contemporary interlocuters, in confronting novel forms of nation-building and populist political imaginaries through modern educational institutions, particularly HE. They focused on the concept of political 'crises' in the knowledge-making project, a crisis of the intellectual, a crisis in History and Memory Studies and a crisis of critique. This meeting also involved a discussion about a potential collaboration between the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard and a related centre at the University of Cambridge. Importantly it became clear that an American case study would be an important potential extension of this work. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.bard.edu/news/events/lunchtime-talk-jo-dillabough-and-simina-dragos |
| Description | Invited speaker at King's College London |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Professor Dillabough was invited to present a seminar at King's College London titled "Colonial Childhoods and Young MK Freedom Fighters in an Apartheid Past : memory, urban frontier spaces and political power". This presentation formed part of the CPPR lunchtime seminar where Dillabough sought to expand on the role of oral testimony of activist cultures in challenging authoritarianism in education in South Africa, both in formal schooling and HE. Specifically, the presentation drew upon a series of collaborative oral histories voicing politically charged memories of a youthful 'traumatic mark' (Field, 2012) and illuminating activist experiences that are simultaneously political and liminal within the context of state conflict. These memories are brought together with commensurate archival data to reveal what it was like to be a young MK freedom fighter against the practices of apartheid which then marked the political geographies of the South. It focuses particularly on the role of education and higher education in the making of activist cultures. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/colonial-childhoods-and-young-mk-freedom-fighters-in-an-apartheid-past |
| Description | Invited speaker at University of Bristol |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Professor Jo Dillabough was invited to give a talk on "Higher Education, Violent Modernities and the 'Global Present': The Paradox of Politics and New Populist Imaginaries in HE" at the Faculty of Education as part of the Bristol Conversations Series at the University of Bristol. This invitation was extended based on an earlier keynote given on the topic of HE and Crises and has been a sought after topic since the EERA keynote that launched some of the theoretical framings of the project. In this talk Professor Dillabough argues that "Higher Education constitutes a space that calls urgently for new understandings in the contemporary political moment. One way of establishing such an understanding of HE is to consider more fully the work of political theorists in relation to questions of power in the modern nation-state, particularly as these impinge upon the key problem of the rise of populism in the twenty-first century. In this task, I argue that a productive conceptual approach is to be found in the recurring idea of political paradox in the political philosophy literature (e.g., Rousseau, Cavarero, 2008; 2021; Honig, 2007; Laclau, 2005; Mbembe, 2019; Mouffe, 2000a, Mouffe, 2000b; see also Bose, 2019), an idea which I utilize to explore the role of conflicted national politics, moralising state practices, and scientific rationalities in reconfiguring the governing rationales of HE. Whilst Rousseau's paradox of politics, as outlined in The Social Contract, is not my particular concern in this reflection, it provides a valuable medium for conceptualising HE as a 'problem space' for exploring its role in the emergence of populism in HE (Scott, 1997; 2004; Carr, 2019)." |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/higher-education-violent-modernities-and-the-global-present-tickets-3... |
| Description | Invited speaker at the G7 Research Group and the Centre for the Study of Global Japan |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dr Elizabeth Buckner was invited to give a speech for the G7 Research Group and the Centre for the Study of Global Japan on February 15, 2023. The speech was part of the summit's "Prospects and Possibilities for Japan's G7 Summit 2023: How Can Universities Contribute?". Buckner contributed to the panel on Innovation, Education, and Human Capital which focused on question like: What are the prospects and possibilities for education in the post-Covid world? What kind of role can universities play in promoting innovation and raising human capital in G7 countries and around the world? How can we foster greater inclusion and diversity? What kind of innovations are being implemented in educational contexts around the world? How can governments help improve quality of education and access to learning? |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/conferences/2023/G7-U7-Conference-2023.pdf |
| Description | Keynote Speech and Leading Workshop Facilitation by Jo Anne Dillabough for Beams Educational Foundation in Thailand |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Policymakers/politicians |
| Results and Impact | Project lead PI Professor Jo Anne Dillabough gave a high impact presentation related to Higher Education and Crises and facilitated a day long workshop to Indigenous Education Leaders and the National Unity Government in Exile and many third sector groups for Beams Educational Foundation in Mae Sot, Thailand and Burmese Border. This work is designed to develop a transition year program for all students and scholars in exile and who need to complete their education. Dillabough is the lead on this initiative in this region and the work has come directly as a result of the HE&Crises project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Keynote speech by Jo Anne Dillabough at Manchester Metropolitan University |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project lead PI Professor Jo Anne Dillabough gave a keynote speech on "The politics of implication and the scholar in a populist moment" in the symposium "Productive tensions? Engaging with pluralism, politics and conflict in education" organized by Manchester Metropolitan University. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Launch of HAC, Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crises and Political Transformation, University of Cambridge Faculty Wide Consortium, ESRC Pathways Event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | On September 26th and 27th, the University of Cambridge hosted the launch of the Hannah Arendt Consortium (HAC) on Crises and Political Transformation as a faculty-wide ESRC Pathways event. Bringing together 200 participants over two days, the conference explored the work of the ESRC project with stakeholders from the US, Italy, Israel, Brazil, Syria, Turkey, Canada, the UK, and Cyprus. This major event convened scholars researching populism, higher education, and the work of Hannah Arendt. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | New deceptions: How illiberalism is hijacking the university |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Dillabough, J. & Peto, A. (2024, May). New deceptions: How illiberalism is hijacking the university. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240501143215958 |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Online lecture on the forced migration of academics and intellectuals |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Zeina Al Azmeh published an online lecture on the forced migration of academics and intellectuals for the University of British Columbia and as part of the Critical Internationalization Masterclass project. This masterclass on critical internationalization studies is part of a research project entitled "Internationalization for an Uncertain Future: Setting the Agenda for Critical Internationalization Studies." Following are excerpts from the project brochure: The project, weaves together a range of critical and decolonial perspectives, all of which seek (in their own ways) to identify, challenge, and ultimately interrupt the ways that mainstream approaches to the study and practice of internationalization have contributed to the reproduction of systemic harm in education and beyond. Following the orientation of the main project, this series of videos also invites viewers to "reimagin[e] internationalization in the service of addressing shared global challenges in more equitable, sustainable, and ethical ways" (Stein, 2019, p. 1). The project curated an open-access online library of video lectures from educators across the globe that address different dimensions of international education. More specifically, two sets of educational experts were called upon to create these videos and to guide this resource. In her lecture, Dr. Al Azmeh describes the phenomenon of forced migration and explains the causes that induce displacements, such as conflict, development, or disasters. She then focuses on conflict-induced displacement of academics and intellectuals. Dr. Al Azmeh then reflects on how these displaced academics better navigate the complexities of pushing scholarship forward while experiencing personal trauma and loss, feelings of guilt for leaving, and difficulties in producing scholarship about a context they are estranged from. Dr. Al Azmeh finishes her talk by delving into the contributions that these academics and intellectuals have to their host communities |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpxNwK-1Irk&list=PLe90oso-vIacVKM1CQ6mXPDMaSEToxhjx&index=14 |
| Description | Online magazine article |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dr Elizabeth Buckner contributed a magazine article for the summer 2022 issue of Academic Matters: the official journal of higher education for the The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). Dr Buckner's article was entitled "The futures of internationalization in the wake of COVID" which examines the degree to which the pandemic might have be an opportunity for universities to re-examine their approach to international student education. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://academicmatters.ca/the-future-of-internationalization-in-the-wake-of-covid/ |
| Description | Online stakeholder engagement activities |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | As part of the project's outreach activities, we have launched a project Twitter account and a project website both titled 'universities and crisis'. The Twitter account (@UniCrisis) Our Twitter content is organised around a set of pillars aligned with the project's goals. In order to maximise impact, the targetted primary audience for the project's Twitter account is HE stakeholders including civic groups, non-governmental and inter-governmental groups interested in restoring the public mission of HE. The secondary, though also important, audience for the Twitter account are academic peers: researchers working in HE, Comparative Education, Sociology of HE, Critical Security Studies, Youth Studies, Conflict Studies, Global Citizenship Education, HE and International Diplomacy and Education in Emergencies (EiE) The contents is organised around three pillars: 1- Education: these tweets are educational by nature. They could include project findings, seminar live-tweets as well as excerpts from previous research by project researchers or retweets from peers, relevant organisations, or research projects that are aligned with the project's focus and objectives. 2- Inspiration: these tweets are more informal and political in tone. They contain an element of inspiration to action or narrate real-life stories/anecdotes/interview soundbites that illustrate the nature of the crisis, possible courses of action, and the importance of the work we are doing. 3- Community-building: these tweets focus on building a scholarly community around the project including announcing events where people could meet peers with similar research interests, they might also highlight relevant discussions, events and platforms around us in the community. The account currently has 286 followers from around the world including scholars, practitioners, graduate students, NGOs, and others. The Website (universitiesandcrisis.org) The website has three key objectives: 1. Building awareness of the project amongst relevant audiences 2. Facilitating interaction and network building across relevant audiences 3. Facilitating knowledge exchange and impact At the moment, the website content is mostly focused on providing information about the project, upcoming events and the seminar series, and uploading project output in the form of papers, book chapters, presentations, talks etc. We are also working on a podcast and blog that we aim to launch during phase 2 of the project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://universitiesandcrisis.org/events/ |
| Description | Organizing a seminar series |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The project has launched a seminar series that has been running since October 2021. Lasting about two hours, each seminar features a key presenter, a discussant and a moderator and engages a broad audience of interested practitioners, students, academics and members of the general public. The seminars are held twice per term and feature either a project researcher presenting the work they are doing for the project, or a guest speaker who is distinguished scholars within the field giving a short seminar on their own work or engaging with the project and its outputs. The seminars have so far been held online with the view of shifting to a hybrid format as COVID infection rates ease up. The seminars have also formed the basis for some of the project's external communications including providing content for social media engagement (through live tweets for each seminar), website content updates, and direct stakeholder communication. Following is a list of completed seminars with synopses: Seminar 1: 22, October, 2021 Education, Conflict & Crisis: From Critique to Transformation Speaker: Mario Novelli, University of Sussex Discussant: Jo-Anne Dillabough, University of Cambridge Moderator: Susan Robertson, University of Cambridge Whilst the current COVID19 pandemic has brought home to many citizens in the Global North the fragility of their existence, including a lack of resilience in education systems and exacerbation of widespread learning inequalities, in the Global South this is but one more crisis in a long list that has punctuated daily lives and educational journeys. This seminar seeks to go beyond narrow understandings of education and its relationship to economy and society by critically exploring the complex ways that education systems and state education policies and practices are linked to war, peace and crises, not merely as victims but also as drivers and catalysts. In doing so I will seek to highlight that education systems and actors have agency - they are capable of producing conflict-ridden and crisis-prone systems as well as radically transforming them - and that policy and practice matters in the pursuit of more socially just and equitable educational systems and a fairer and better world. Drawing on evidence from a series of research projects, the session will critically reflect on the ways in which the relationship between education, conflict and crisis has been constructed, nationally and transnationally, as a field of research and practice. It will also highlight the ongoing need for critically informed research on the education/conflict /crisis relationship that can decouple itself from the hegemony of Global North funders, agencies and actors and the inherent biases and injustices within dominant lenses, priorities and perspectives. Professor Mario Novelli is a Professor in the Political Economy of Education at the Centre for International Education, University of Sussex and Deans Distinguished Research Fellow (2021-2024) at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Seminar 2: 26, November 2021 Higher education, violent modernities and the 'global present': the paradox of politics and new populist imaginaries in HE Speaker: Jo-Anne Dillabough, University of Cambridge Discussant: Lakshmi Bose, University of Cambridge Moderator: Mariano Rosenzvaig, University of Cambridge Higher Education constitutes a space that calls urgently for new understandings in the contemporary political moment. One way of establishing such an understanding of HE is to consider more fully the work of political theorists in relation to questions of power in the modern nation-state, particularly as these impinge upon the rise of populism in the twenty-first century. In this task, Dillabough argues that a productive conceptual approach is to be found in the recurring idea of political paradox in the political philosophy literature (e.g., Rousseau, Cavarero, 2008; 2021; Honig, 2007; Laclau, 2005; Mbembe, 2019; Mouffe, 2000a, Mouffe, 2000b), an idea which she utilize to explore the role of conflicted national politics, moralising state practices, and scientific rationalities in reconfiguring the governing rationales of HE. Whilst Rousseau's paradox of politics, as outlined in The Social Contract, is not of particular concern in this reflection, it provides a valuable medium for conceptualising HE as a 'problem space' for exploring its role in the emergence of populism in HE (Scott, 1997; 2004; Carr, 2019). This discussion engages the work of political thinkers who have sought to understand the role of modern nation building, the changing features of modern power, violence and authority, and the rise of bureaucracy and technocratic rationalities as they impact upon political institutions - in this case, how they impact particularly upon HE. It draws chiefly from Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig, Adriana Cavarero, Chantelle Mouffe, Etienne Balibar, Frederiche Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Gurminder Bhambra, de Souza Santos and Achilles Mbembe, amongst others, to articulate the paradox that concerns us - to consider how and why populist strains of national and transnational governance may find a home in HE as a consequence of unresolved and contradictory political dilemmas and conflicts. Importantly, in this context, the paradox of politics in HE is not necessarily the naming of a discrete conflict between two political logics or the process of a mass movement seeking to overtake HE in the name of a popular constituency. Rather, it involves a highly complex set of forces - emerging out of the bureaucratic machinery of modernity and the fundamental paradox of liberalism itself - that positions the university as a testing ground for the tasks of politics and governance, particularly in relation to state crises, crises in knowledge-making and in critique (see Kosselack, 1979) and geo-political conflicts and most importantly in forms of 'horrorism' that shape our modern landscape. Seminar 3: 25, February 2022 Higher education, conflict and crisis: The 'publicness' of the national university in Lebanon Speaker: Helen Murray, University of Sussex Discussant: Jee Rubin, University of Cambridge Moderator: Zeina Al Azmeh, University of Cambridge For a long time, higher education has been absent from research and policy priorities in the field of education, conflict and peacebuilding. This is now changing but it remains within an economic paradigm that focuses almost exclusively on questions of access and human capital, marginalising the political significance of universities in contexts of conflict and post-conflict recovery. At the same time, there is an under-theorisation of the political dimensions of universities, including the question of what makes a university 'public' in a political democratic sense. Overlooked in theory, disregarded in policymaking, and largely ignored in research and practice, this paper makes the case for re-centring the 'publicness' of universities in societies affected by conflict. Following the history of the national university in Lebanon over a period of 60 years, through periods of social and political transformation, protracted civil war and post-war neoliberal reconstruction, it sheds light on the evolving 'publicness' of Lebanon's only public university. This longue durée perspective points to both the democratic significance and precarity of the Lebanese University in a society divided by war, highlighting the ways in which its publicness has been continually constructed and contested in the face of relentless political and economic neglect by the state. Drawing on narrative research interviews with current and former university students, faculty and administrators, conducted between 2017 and 2019, along with extracts from newspaper archives stretching back over 50 years, the evolving publicness of the Lebanese University is discussed in a dialogue with political theory. From Mahdi Amel's (1968) observation that the Lebanese University was an arena for clashing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic interests to Bonnie Honig's (2017) argument that 'Public Things' are vital objects for societal conflict, this paper goes beyond economistic and instrumentalist understandings of what makes a university 'public' to consider the publicness of universities. The suffix 'ness' denotes a spectrum - that universities can be more or less public, their publicness is not fixed but fragile, closely relating to wider conditions and struggles for democracy. Helen Murray is a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Education, University of Sussex. She works with the Political Economy of Education Research Network (PEER), a 3-year collaboration between the Universities of Cape Town, Nazarbayev, Sussex and Ulster, aiming to strengthen critical political economy analyses of education systems in societies affected by conflict. In 2021 she completed her ESRC-funded PhD on the topic of 'Universities, Conflict and the Public Sphere: Trajectories of the Public University in Lebanon'. Prior to this, Helen worked for 15 years on issues of education justice, conflict and development. Her particular interest in higher education was ignited by experiences of studying and later working at Birzeit University in Palestine, where she coordinated the Right to Education Campaign between 2004-2006. She has subsequently worked for a range of local and international organisations in policy, programming and research roles, most recently the Open Society Foundations, where she was engaged with OSF's education and higher education work. Seminar 4: 18, March 2022 Globalisation, Culture and Higher Education Speakers: Susan L Robertson, Mariano Rosenzvaig & Elizabeth Maber Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK In this presentation, we ask: what does it mean to take 'the cultural turn' seriously, and in our case, to engage it in research on globalisation and higher education? We argue that this involves adding a cultural lens to engage with, rather than depart from, an analysis of the global political economy of higher education. This means problematising both globalisation and culture as concepts to provide clarity about the philosophical and knowledge claims being made. Our presentation is developed in two ways. We begin by firstly laying out our theoretical thinking and approach before, secondly, exploring how these conceptual resources help research three global higher education dynamics: globally competitive universities, global market making, and world-class universities. We conclude by reflecting on what researchers might learn from a cultural turn, and what it means substantively, theoretically, and methodologically. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022,2023 |
| URL | https://universitiesandcrisis.org/events/ |
| Description | Panel at European Consortium of Political Studies General Conference 2023, Charles University, Prague |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A panel entitled "The politics of knowledge-making and knowledge-makers in times of political turmoil: lessons from Turkey, Syria, Hungary and The United Kingdom" was organized by the project members Jo Dillabough, Jee Rubin, Taylor Hughson, Simina Dragos. Hughson & Dragos presented their paper "Ontological Insecurity and the Populist "Free Speech Crisis" in the UK: Tracing the Rise of a Discourse" and Rubin presented their paper on Russian spectacle, power and politics in Syrian higher education. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Panel at the British Sociological Association Conference 2023, University of Manchester, UK |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project members Taylor Hughson, Liz Maber, Jo Dillabough and Simina Dragos organized a panel at the British Sociological Association Conference at University of Manchester, UK. The panel was entitled "Populism, authoritarianism and the re-making of the university: actors in higher education and the contestation of the sovereign subject across four different sites". Hughson & Dragos presented their paper "Nascent Authoritarianism and the Populist 'Free Speech Crisis' in the UK", Maber presented her coauthored paper with Lakshmi Bose on "Academic Fantasies', 'Lines of Interiority' and the Rituals of Student Politics" and Dillabough presented her coauthored paper with Zeina Al-Azmeh on "Beyond 'victim' and 'perpetrator' working in the grey zone of the modern academy: the paradoxical 'problem spaces' of implicated post-colonial scholars in exile". |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Panel on "The Syrian Uprising 13 years on", St Andrews University Syria Studies Centre |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project member Zeina Al-Azmeh will participate as one of the panelists for the event titled "The Syrian Uprising 13 years on: What role for the Syrian diaspora?" organised by St Andrews University, Syria Studies Centre on Friday 15 March 2024, which will mark the thirteenth anniversary of the Syrian uprising. This webinar will look at the diverse characteristics of the Syrian diaspora and discuss the potential role of the Syrian diaspora in reconstruction, healing, and contributing to a future political vision for Syria. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://events.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/the-syrian-uprising-13-year-on-what-role-for-the-syrian-diasp... |
| Description | Paper presentation at ECPR General Conference 2023, Charles University, Prague |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project lead PI Professor Jo Anne Dillabough presented her coauthored paper with Zeina Al-Azmeh on "Beyond 'victim' and 'perpetrator' working in the grey zone of the modern academy: the paradoxical 'problem spaces' of implicated post-colonial scholars in exile" in scope of the panel "The politics of knowledge-making and knowledge-makers in times of political turmoil: lessons from Turkey, Syria, Hungary and The United Kingdom" at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Annual Conference 2023 at Charles University, Prague. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Paper presentation at International Sociological Association World Congress |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project members Taylor Hughson and Simina Dragos participated in the panel on the Sociology of Education at the International Sociological Association World Congress 2023 in Melbourne, Australia and presented their papers "Nascent Authoritarianism and the Populist "Free Speech Crisis" in the UK: The Importance of the Sociology of Education" in the session "Re-Thinking the Role of Sociology of Education in Tackling the Global Rise of Authoritarianism, Populism, Xenophobia, and Racism." |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Paper presentation at the British Sociological Association (BSA) Virtual Annual Conference 2024 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project team member Dr Zeina Al-Azmeh will present her coauthored paper with the project lead PI Professor Jo-Anne Dillabough on "Authorial Power, Authoritarianism and Exiled Intellectuals: Syria and Turkey" at the British Sociological Association (BSA) Virtual Annual Conference 2024 on Crisis, Continuity and Change on 3-5 April 2024. In the paper the authors draw upon data collected from exiled Turkish and Syrian academics to argue that the critical commitments exiled intellectuals presume are under threat as rising authoritarianisms take hold globally and advanced neo-liberal practices tighten their grip on universities. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/bsa-virtual-annual-conference-2024/ |
| Description | Paper presentation at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference, University of Innsbruck |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dr Elizabeth Maber presented her paper "Gender diversity and academic solidarities in response to authoritarianism and crisis" at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference, at the University of Innsbruck. In this paper, Dr Maber argues that, "The conceptualisation of gender is a key battleground for populist ideology, with a quasi-return to 'traditional' gender roles and responsibilities central to the populist reimaginings of the state. Authoritarianism thrives in binary discourses and the construction of threat through challenges to perceived stability: stability which is frequently epitomised by the heterosexual nuclear family. The image of the stable family reinforces a clear division of reproductive labour and the expectation for national identity to be consolidated and reinforced through child-rearing. These discourses are also frequently racialised in response to constructed threats from beyond (or within) national borders. Deviation from, in terms of personal gender identity and expression, and challenges to, in terms of academic theorisation, these hegemonic binaries are therefore perceived as threats to the imagined nation or failures to uphold 'patriotic' duty. The threat of gender diversity therefore brings higher education institutions into this key battleground in which the academic study of gender, sexuality and feminism, which overtly contest, problematise and expose these narrow discourses, is pitted against conservative political stand-points often within as well as outside those same institutions. This paper explores examples of these tensions affecting higher education in the contexts of Hungary, the UK and Turkey, building on research conducted through the collaborative project Universities and Crisis. Through exploring these examples I propose that these conflicts may be generative sites for the creation and consolidation of new solidarities across academic, activist and civil society spheres which offer a response to questions of the public role of the university." |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PaperDetails/65411 |
| Description | Paper presentation at the Inaugural British Journal of Sociology Conference |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dr Zeina Al-Azmeh, one of the project team members will present her paper on "The Rise of Persecution Capital: Social Movements, Deference Politics, and Elite Capture" in the third session on "Global and transnational approaches to race and racism" at the Inaugural British Journal of Sociology Conference at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) on 15 and 16 April 2024. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/british-journal-of-sociology/inaugural-british-sournal-of-sociology-... |
| Description | Paper presentation at the Italian network of intellectual history researchers conference, University of Verona, Italy |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project team member Daniele Bassi presented a paper on "Andrea Caffi e l'urgenza di una retroguardia culturale" [Andrea Caffi and the need for a cultural rearguard] at the conference "Filosofia e storiografia filosofica in Italia: voci, testi, problemi" [Philosophy and philosophical historiography in Italy: voices, texts, problems] organized by the Italian network of intellectual history researchers at University of Verona, Italy. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Paper presentation at the symposium "Supporting and Learning from Universities in Times of Conflict", PEER Network, University of Sussex |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project members Jee Rubin and Zeina Al-Azmeh presented their paper on "Foreign Aid, Higher Education and the 'Right to Meaning' in Syria" at the symposium "Supporting and Learning from Universities in Times of Conflict: Towards Resilience and Resistance in Higher Education" organized by Political Economy of Education Research Network (PEER) at University of Sussex, Institute of Development Studies. This symposium addressed the long neglect of higher education in times of war and conflict at a moment of intensifying crises for universities across the globe. Rubin and Al-Azmeh's paper addresses two somewhat oppositional aims within research and practice on 'Higher Education in Emergencies'. The first is to better incorporate universities into the international aid apparatus as a way to address its abandonment by humanitarian actors. The second is to cultivate critical awareness and political solidarity with HE institutions operating under conditions of crisis. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://peernetworkgcrf.org/peer-events/peer-network-symposium/ |
| Description | Paper presentation to the Hannah Arendt Centre at the University of Verona, Verona, Italy. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Project PI Jo Dillabough presented a paper entitled 'Higher Education, Violent Modernities and the 'Global Present': Political Paradox and New Populist Imaginaries in HE. ' at the Hannah Arendt Centre at the University of Verona, Verona, Italy on October 8th, 2021. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Paper presented at Comparative and International Education Society Annual Conference 2023, Washington, DC, USA |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project members Zahra Jafarova and Elizabeth Buckner presented their paper on "Universities, precarity and political crises: Comprehending new authoritarianism in changing Higher Education landscapes" at the Comparative and International Education Society Annual Conference 2023 in Washington, DC, which was organized under the theme "Improving Education for a More Equitable World". |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Paper presented at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Annual Conference 2024, Miami, FL |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project team member Zahra Jafarova has presented her paper on "New Authoritarianism and the Erosion of Academic Freedoms: Exploring the Global Dynamics in Higher Education between 1900-2022" in the panel "Higher education's resistance of new authoritarianism, hegemony, and the erosion of democracy" at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Annual Conference 2024 in Miami, FL. This study aims to investigate the emergence of new authoritarianism and its convoluted political effects over HE, specifically academic freedom at the national level. The major research question for this paper is: Which political factors impact the conditions of academic freedom at a national level worldwide and is there a variation in this impact across different dimensions across time and space? To answer this question, Jafarova employs quantitative analysis of different political factors, such as democratic decline, illiberalism, ideological pressure, right-wing and extreme right-wing parties in power, centralization of university governance, the rise of conservative and nationalist economic policies in higher education, including the employment of financial tools used to "tame" universities. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/cies/cies24/index.php?program_focus=view_session&selected_se... |
| Description | Paper presented at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Conference, Washington DC, USA |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Taylor Hughson and Simina Dragos have presented their joint paper "The post-Brexit 'free speech movement', nation-building and emergency politics in UK Higher Education" at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Conference, Washington DC, United States of America, in February 2023. They are ESRC RA's and are working on the UK Case Study. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Paper presented for the European Conference of Political Research, University of Innsbruck, Austria. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dr Zeina Al Azmeh and Prof Jo-Anne Dillabough presented their paper "Authorial power, authoritarianism and the sociology of intellectuals in Turkey and Syria" at the European Conference of Political Research, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria. This paper has now been reviewed by the Journal Politics, Culture and Society and we are undertaking revisions. In this paper the authors argue that the "moral authority" of scholars in HE is a well-rehearsed concept in the sociology of intellectuals. And while it may sometimes represent political narratives of the state, reconceived as 'social justice' or 'speaking truth to power', it often gravitates towards, or formulates, critical sites of resistance to political power within HE. In the context of Turkey, both conservative populist intellectuals of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) (Gürpinar, 2020) and the critical intellectuals of the Academics for Peace movement (Buckner, 2022) have drawn on and performed such 'moral authority' in numerous ways with the goal of addressing diverse publics and audiences. As this article argues, drawing on interviews with Turkish academics living in exile as a consequence of ascending authoritarianist politics, the idea of moralising discourse as a form of authority has a genealogy that needs examination. If 'good' according to Nietzsche is that which 'heightens the feeling of power, will to power and power itself', then in what ways and to what extent are intellectuals' moral authority itself another form of power, even where it resists and uncovers the machinations of power. And more importantly, how do we engage with critical intellectualism as a 'problem space' (Scott, 2004, p. 4), that is, as a space of dispute, political contestation and rival views where previous questions, concepts, constructs, ideas, configurations, and so on have irrevocably changed, and where new historical conditions make old questions 'not so much wrong as irrelevant'. The paper also queries the place of the postcolonial intellectual in this problem space and the figurations it can or might offer to shift registers of resistance in the academy from one of 'moral authority' to more humble figurations such as that of the 'cartographer' of knowledge, power and resistance (Braidotti, 2021, p. 531). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PaperDetails/65409 |
| Description | Paper presented to the Memories in Transit Conference, University of Cambridge, UK. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Jo-Anne Dillabough and Zeina Al-Azmeh participated in the conference 'Memories in Transit : Transnational memory and identity across modern regimes of displacement and dispersion' at the University of Cambridge, UK held 8-9 June 2020. This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars from various disciplines researching transnational dimensions of memory, subjectivity and identity formation, broadly defined. Exploring the social-political processes and identities that resist or transcend neat categorisations of the 'local', 'national' or 'global', this conference explores different modes of transnational memory and commemoration that shape identities such as race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, and sexuality. The conference seeks to refine conceptual and methodological issues surrounding transnational memories, forms of remembering, and identities through a discussion of contemporary and historical case studies from across the globe as well as theoretically focused contributions to the field. The conference will be relevant to sociologists, historians, literary critics, political scientists, and human geographers interested in the relationships between memory and mobility. Zeina Al Azmeh was a co-organiser of the conference and presented her paper 'From a politics of being perceived to a politics of perceiving.' Jo-Anne Dillabough presented her paper 'Researching Syrian Memories of Academic Displacement and Exile in Higher Education: Time, Memory, and Conflicted Tales of 'home'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.humanmovement.cam.ac.uk/Research/memories-in-transit |
| Description | Presentation at the Human Rights Doctoral Triangle |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Zeina Al Azmeh gave a presentation during the Cambridge - Essex- LSE Human Rights Doctoral Triangle entitled 'The Right to Meaning: A Syrian Case Study'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.cghr.polis.cam.ac.uk/2021-doctoral-triangle |
| Description | Quo vadis: universities in Times of Increased Geopolitical Tensions, De-colonial Critique of Knowledge, and Authoritarianism |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | In September 2024, Adam Woodage and Jo-Anne Dillabough presented on panel titled 'Quo vadis: universities in Times of Increased Geopolitical Tensions, De-colonial Critique of Knowledge, and Authoritarianism', at the Centre for Higher Education Researchers Conference in Luxembourg. The title from the conference panel was 'Necropolitics and knowledge-making in an age of civilisational imaginaries'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Office in Greece Seminar |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Professor Susan Robertson gave an online seminar with the title "Just Education Futures" in scope of the "Politics of Liberation" seminar series organised by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung - Office in Greece. In this work. Professor Robertson problematise accounts that suggest the lack of contestation of increasing social inequalities in Wester societies is a consequence of the transition to a knowledge society or the result of a cleavage, along education lines. She offers four points for this argument about such accounts: "First, they promote an overly teleological, cosmopolitan, view of the knowledge society as an inevitable shift from industrialisation to a new mode of production (Kitschelt and Rehm 2021). I contrast this with the ongoing work by corporate elites, multilateral agencies, and political power to advance a knowledge economy premised on services, human capital formation, innovation, digital technologies, and intellectual property (Robertson 2009). Second, that the work logic tied to the rise of people-to people occupations (Oesch 2006) are assumed to be part of the state and presumed to engender a left politics. I argue that many of these occupations are part of a privatised social policy sector; it therefore does not follow that the work logic of person-to-person labouring sits outside neoliberal governing. Rather, many services sectors, such as education, care and health work, are themselves governed by the 'engines of anxiety' and 'cruel optimism' of neoliberalism (Epseland and Sauder 2016; Davies 2018; Mijs 2022; Ibled 2022). Third, higher education is black boxed and placed beyond ideology. However, Mijs (2021) shows that being well educated does not necessarily result in the embrace of structural accounts of social inequalities. Instead, in highly unequal societies, its citizens (both well-educated and less well-educated) are more likely to explain success in meritocratic terms, as 'individual effort'. This accords with findings from our own research (see Martini and Robertson 2022; Robertson and Martini 2023) where we trace out discursive transformations over two decades of higher education policies in the UK aimed at developing globally competitive knowledge economies, on the one hand, and the inclusion of higher education into the services economy, on the other. We show that Young's (1958) conception of 'meritocracy' (ability and effort) has now been replaced with 'neoliberal meritocracy' (effort) as a legitimating ideology. In doing so it erases visibility of the structural inequalities that account for the highly unequal outcomes in UK higher education. Fourth, treating higher education as a 'variable' (the holder of a higher education qualifications, or not), along with income, makes invisible the dynamics that Luxemburg (1951) pointed to in The Accumulation of Capital: capitalism is dependent on expanding into new spheres of social life whose dynamics include commodification (education as consumption), differentiation (stratification/value/worth), imperialism (international markets/brain drain), precarity (zero hours contracts/indebtedness), and militarism (securitisation/policing of free speech/knowledge espionage). Using UK higher education as a case, I show its progressive incorporation into processes of capital accumulation. In doing so, higher education as a sector, together with its workers and students, experience ongoing crises as it is caught in the tensions and contradictions of capitalist expansionary development." Professor Robertson concludes by arguing that "higher education itself needs to be cleaved from the jaws of what Fraser (2022) calls 'cannibal capitalism'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://rosalux.gr/en/event/9th-seminar-susan-robertson/ |
| Description | Seminar by Zahra Jafarova at the Research Network on Academic Freedom, University of Leiden |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project member Zahra Jafarova gave a seminar on "Authoritarianism and the Erosion of Academic Freedoms: Exploring the Global Dynamics in Higher Education between 1900-2022" for the Research Network on Academic Freedom, University of Leiden. The Research Network is originally established as part of the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom (GOAF). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Seminar on Academic Freedom and Palestine |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The event featured project member Jee Rubin (Cambridge), Chana Morgernstern (Cambridge), Mavish Ahmad (LSE) and Mai Abu Moghli (Centre for Lebanese Studies). The panel unpacked the persecution of Palestinian solidarity movements within education. The speakers discussed how and why anti-Zionism is distinct from antisemitism and terrorism. They have also addressed what is at stake when academic communities are silenced, not only as a matter of free speech but also as a tactic that plays into the deadly persecution of Palestinian people. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Seminar on Authorial power, authoritarianism, and exiled intellectuals: Syria and Turkey |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | As part of the project's seminar series, Dr Zeina Al Azmeh and Prof Jo Dillabough presented their work in progress titled 'Authorial power, authoritarianism, and exiled intellectuals: Syria and Turkey' for discussion at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge at the Work in Progress Session and to the Global Social Theory Network. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Seminar with guest speaker Dr Stefano Bellin |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Dr Stefano Bellin gave a seminar on "The Two Faces of Natality: On Responsibility, Affect, and Collective Action", which was followed by Q&A and a lively discussion among the undergraduate and graduate students. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Seminar with guest speaker Dr. Sharon Walker at University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Sharon Walker gave a seminar on "The 'Windrush generation' as a discursive construction: the representation of a migrant group in UK public discourse" in collaboration with the Knowlege, Power and Politics Research Cluster at University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education. In this talk, Dr. Walker discussed the representation of the 'Windrush generation'. Echoing Taylor's (2020) paper 'Representing the Windrush Generation', she is interested in the shifts in representation of this migrant group of around half a million people who moved to the UK from Caribbean countries between 1948 to 1971. Sharon Walker is a lecturer at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on the discursive and material processes which reproduce racist thinking and outcomes in education systems. She has explored this in UK higher education policy and in the field of comparative and international education. She also works with teachers and grassroots organisations on anti-racist educational approaches in school settings. While interested in issues of race more broadly, she is particularly interested in interrogating local and global understandings of 'Blackness'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Seminar with guest speaker Professor Alana Lentin |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Professor Alana Lentin gave an online seminar on attacks on Critical Race Theory and academic freedom in Australia. There was a lively discussion after the seminar about the attacks on critical race theory both in UK and Australia. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Seminar with guest speaker Zahra Jafarova at University of Cambridge |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Project member Zahra Jafarova gave a talk on "Academic Resistance in Turkey and Hungary: Online Public Spaces, Authoritarian Political Imaginaries and Novel 21st Century 'Culture Wars'" at University of Cambridge at the Faculty of Education in collaboration with the Knowledge, Power and Politics Research Cluster. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Solidarity Event with Academic Communities in Syria & Turkey after the Earthquake |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | After the earthquakes in Northern Syria & Turkey in February 2023, University of Cambridge cohosted a solidarity event with other universities from UK, where academicians from Syria and Turkey gave speeches about the impacts, effects of the earthquakes and discussed possible actions regarding how academicians can support the affected people across the region after this huge catastrophe. This event was a collaborative engagement activity with the LSE, the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge. It had an enrolment of over 400 participants. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aRsSoYfD4Vzh_OH5ce-imv2rJyaYYq5rdmKLDccfTmo/edit |
| Description | Symposium Organisation - CIES |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Professor Joanne Dillabough organised an expert panel presentation for CIES 2023 entitled 'Comparative Higher Education and the Populist Turn: Crises, Conflict, Coloniality and Capitalism in Turkey, the UK and Hungarian Universities'. An overview of this presentation in February 2023 in Washington DC is below. Aims: Drawing upon a large-scale ESRC funded research on HE and Crises cross-nationally, we present three case studies (Turkey, Hungary, UK) that examine these problem-spaces through analyses of the influence of populism and authoritarianism on HE governance, HE policy-making, pressure groups and scholar and student activism in three ways. First, we expose the ways in which populist imaginaries shape the political paradoxes and contradictions experienced by scholar and student activists in HE and shape the knowledge-power dynamics within modern HE institutions. Second, we demonstrate the role of contingent national and regional politics, alongside wider geopolitics, in influencing how HE actors and associated policy represent the influence of populism in HE. Third, in each case study we assess the ways in which varied forms of moral authority about nationhood and cultural identity are used to justify populist HE governing strategies and practices. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Symposium at the 36th CHER Conference, Higher Education and Science Future(s): Trends, Imaginaries, and Alternatives, explored Quo Vadis: Universities in Times of Increased Geopolitical Tensions, De-colonial Critique of Knowledge, and Authoritarianism |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | From September 2nd to 5th, 2024, the Symposium at the 36th CHER Conference, Higher Education and Science Future(s): Trends, Imaginaries, and Alternatives, explored Quo Vadis: Universities in Times of Increased Geopolitical Tensions, De-colonial Critique of Knowledge, and Authoritarianism. Convened by Jo Dillabough, Eva Hartmann, and Adam Woodage, the conference hosted 100 participants and disseminated research on academic freedom and populism across various national case studies. It featured new case studies from Germany, India, and France, alongside findings from Turkey, South Africa, and Hungary. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Symposium organized and chaired by Jo Anne Dillabough at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference 2023 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Project lead PI Professor Jo Anne Dillabough organized and chaired a symposium on "The politics of knowledge-making and knowledge-makers in times of political turmoil: lessons from Turkey, Syria, Hungary and The United Kingdom" at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Annual Conference 2023, at Charles University, Prague. In this panel the discussants seeked to explore the questions about the contextually driven motivations of nation-states and HE actors to shift the terms and conditions of their missions and mandates in relation to the past and in contexts of heightened authoritarianism and conflict through the study of HE and crises in four different contexts experiencing varying degrees of populist and activist political intervention simultaneously. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PaperDetails/77031 |
| Description | Talk at an Annual Meeting -Dissemination Event, CIES |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Professor Susan Robertson and Dr Martini Michele gave a panel presentation at CIES, with the following title: Meritocracy, privatisation, nation-building, and the colonised HE unconscious. This paper formed part of the UK case study and explores the entwined role of the language of meritocracy and its privatising functions in HE. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Talk at the summit on The Role of Higher Education in Responding to the Global Refugee Crisis Summit. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Elizabeth Buckner participated in the summit held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on November 19, 2021. The audience constituted about 75 participants from all over Canada. The talk which was entitled "Internationalization of Higher Education and the Global Refugee Crisis." addressed what conflict and other crises meant for refugees' access to university. Dr. Buckner spoke about what universities can do to address the global refugee crisis, and specifically, what role universities' internationalization projects and initiatives have to play in this response. She urged the audience to think more broadly than just provision - arguing that universities are powerful cultural institutions in society, meaning universities play an important role advocacy and research, and ways we can - support the digitalization of credentials, digital delivery of educational programs, as well as advocacy regarding rights and legal status. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Talk for the Canadian Bureau for International Education |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Elizabeth Buckner gave a talk on Future Directions of Internationalization for the Canadian Bureau for International Education - Ontario Regional Conference on June 10, 2021. This talk examined one of the crises of legitimacy that universities are currently facing - the call to grapple with their historic role in racial and class exclusions, and the simultaneous call to now become places committed to equity, diversity and inclusion. Dr. Buckner examined why the call to become more international, often based in neoliberal logics of revenue generation, and calls for equity and inclusion, based in social justice, are too often divided and siloed from one another as distinct institutional projects. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Talk on police, militarization, protest and universities in Peru |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The event reflected on the situation in Peru as well as the fate of universities during political crisis touching upon questions of university autonomy and the role of universities in politics. The event was organized on February 3rd at the faculty of education, University of Cambridge with the option to join online. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Talk on the Future Directions of Internationalization for the Canadian Bureau for International Education - Ontario Regional Conference. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Policymakers/politicians |
| Results and Impact | On June 7, 2021, Elizabeth Buckner gave a talk entitled "Redefining Internationalization" at the Future Directions of Internationalization organized by the Canadian Bureau for International Education - Ontario Regional Conference. Toronto, Ontario. The talk was attended by leaders and professionals in Ontario colleges and universities. This talk linked internationalization to the neoliberalization and austerity crisis in Canadian higher education, and argued that rather than conceptualizing internationalization as simply an organizational project, we needed to fundamentally rethink current practices to place people and relationships at the center. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | The Arendtian Archive as a Critical Spatial Project: Re-Reading the Imperial Blueprint and Authoritarianism in the 21st Century Academy Professor Jo-Anne Dillabough, University of Cambridge |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | See description below of event below: The Arendtian Archive as a Critical Spatial Project: Jo-Anne Dillabough, University of Cambridge In this paper, drawing upon images, letters and scholarly writings collected on the topic of nationalism from the Hannah Arendt Archives (Bard College) and the Arendt Project (Freie Universität, Berlin), I identify political figures and associated modalities of knowledge and power shaping Hannah Arendt's concept of the 'imperial blueprint' and its impact on the modern nation-building project (see Yaqoob, 2015, 2022). The analysis of this work is divided into three parts. First, I examine Arendt's writings on the role of the academy and the 'scholar' in the modern nation-building project, particularly in relation to her central intellectual interlocuters of the mid-twentieth century and their concerns with inter-war and post-war complicity in the face of atrocity (see also Dragos, 2020). Here I focus specifically upon an archival study of Arendt's lectures, scholarly correspondence and course syllabi between the years of 1935 and 1965. Second, this work is supplemented by an analysis of personal letters penned by Arendt to scholars and friends, alongside an examination of visual renderings of nationalism that Arendt reflected upon in this same time period. Third, I bridge this archival analysis with a constellation of contemporary writings on the relationship between the 'imperial blueprint' (see Gilroy, 2002; Risaldo, 1985), race and anti-colonial thought in the 21st century (see Amin, 2022; King, 2008; Mbembe, 2017; Wilson-Gilmore, 2023; Shilliam, 2022, Stoler, 2019). In so doing, I argue that not unlike Arendt's position in On the Origins of Totalitarianism, the academy and the intellectual can represent, as Felman (2001) argues, both 'a discipline of limits and of consciousness'. This argument is rendered particularly powerful in the case of the rise of populist political imaginaries, energised culture wars transnationally and their associated 'epistemic attachments' in the life-worlds of the 21st century university (Bacevic, 2019). My aim in comparing Arendt's 20th century musings on nation-building to contemporary global social theory and anti-colonial thought is to identify new idioms for comprehending the varied strains of populist authoritarianism and their governing rationales in the academy through diverse and conflicted figurations of the 'intellectual', the scholar-activist and/or the idealisations of the 'post' or 'anti'-colonial scholar (Al-Azmeh & Dillabough, under review). Nation, Race and Coloniality of Memory in Romania: Simina Dragos, University of Cambridge Drawing upon critical social theorists, I seek to identify the ways in which contemporary nation-building and racialisation in Romania rest upon disciplined based knowledge-making as a mechanism for consolidating forms of political forgetting about a heterogenous Romanian nation. I argue in particular that the contemporary Romanian national history curriculum (re)produces what Boatca (2021) refers to as coloniality of memory, leading to the racialisation of Roma people living in Romania or with ties to Romania. Boatca (2021) draws upon the coloniality of memory to make visible the unequal dynamics between states and regions resulting from European colonialism, particularly in relation to concepts of Europe and Europeanness. I expand this work, arguing that the same logic of coloniality, which produces hierarchies of human life and divisions of labour, can be identified between different groups in the same 'nation-space', unfolding in the domain of education. In such a context, coloniality of memory is sustained through processes of racialisation and techniques of systematic and systemic silencing, reproducing hierarchies of worth, importance and legitimacy (see also Mbembe, 2019). Given these theoretical considerations, I make two central arguments. First, the Romanian state could only ever be viewing itself as a Romanian - ethnic - nation-state through the coloniality of memory; that is, the erasure of the existence in, and contribution to, the Romanian state of minority groups, most notably Roma. Such racialised hierarchies are legitimised through hegemonic collective memory but are also enacted within the domain of collective memory - this is how the coloniality of memory reinforces the coloniality of being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Second, coloniality of memory is energised through state-sanctioned schooling and classroom practices as key sites for the formation of hegemonic collective memory (see Paulson, 2015; Paulson et al., 2020). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://hac.bard.edu/lunchtime-talk-jo-dillabough-and-simina-dragos |
| Description | The MCC model: how illiberal elite incubators take over the role of universities |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Az MCC-modell: így veszik át az egyetemek szerepét az illiberális elitkeltetok Translated title of the contribution: The MCC model: how the illiberal elitists are taking over the role of universities Authors: Jo-Anne Dillabough, Andrea Peto |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://qubit.hu/2024/06/04/az-mcc-modell-igy-veszik-at-az-egyetemek-szerepet-az-illiberalis-elitkel... |
| Description | The Scholar in Empire's Shadow: Arendt, Nation-Building, and Anti-Colonial Reckonings in the Academy |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Dillabough, J. (2025). The Scholar in Empire's Shadow: Arendt, Nation-Building, and Anti-Colonial Reckonings in the Academy. Invited Presentation to the UCT Faculty of Education Seminar Series, UCT, FOE, Cape town, South Africa. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |
| Description | The Settler Coloniality of Free Speech |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This event was sponsored by the ESRC project because a large number of the research team members at Cambridge are working on the wider question of academic freedom and Higher Education in the UK case study. It was organised by the team and the event took place at the University of Cambridge. A description of the event can be found below: Public and scholarly debates surrounding free speech often assume free speech is a public good and/or should be approached as a problem of "drawing the line" between free and regulated or benign and harmful speech. In contrast, Dr. Leigh provides a genealogy of free speech in which liberal freedom of expression has, since its inception, been integral to white supremacist settler colonialism in the United Kingdom and its former settler colonies, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Dr. Leigh's work argues that, far from a noble struggle against regulation, liberal politics around free speech establish oppositions between white "civilized" speech and its Indigenized racially darkened "others" as well as controlling or silencing Indigenous, Black, and/or otherwise racially othered speech across the Anglosphere. You can read the full published paper here https://academic.oup.com/ips/article/16/3/olac004/6628839 . The event was hybrid. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://universitiesandcrisis.org/events/ |
| Description | The crisis facing colleges and universities that no one is talking about |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | There is a crisis facing Canada's post-secondary education sector that no one is talking about. Now that the federal government has slashed the number of international student permits available in Canada, colleges and universities from coast to coast are facing huge budget shortfalls. Several of Canada's best schools are cutting programs and laying off staff just to stay afloat. These institutions have no choice but to take drastic measures, or risk going bankrupt. Host David Smith speaks with Elizabeth Buckner, Associate Professor of Higher Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, about what's at stake if things don't change. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |
| URL | https://open.spotify.com/episode/3tYXNPZO8eKtWf7fqEgcLL?si=1760e98f50c24042 |
| Description | Thesis Eleven Annual Lecture |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Professor Susan Robertson delivered a Thesis Eleven Annual Lecture about "Left-Right, or Left Right Out? Knowledge Economies, Social Inequalities, Education and Authoritarian Populism" hosted by Thesis Eleven Journal and Australian Catholic University's National School of Arts and Humanities. In this lecture Professor Robertson explores the relationship between social inequalities, the rise of authoritarian populism, levels of education, and knowledge societies? She argues that "a shift in the social structures of contemporary societies across Europe now underpins a new left-right political divide or cleavage between those that are well educated (left leaning, well off, open-minded, cosmopolitans) and those who are not (right leaning, low-income, narrow-minded, nationalists)." In conclusion, she points to a "need to bring into view the role of higher education in the making of global knowledge economies, competitive individualism, the intensification of social stratification, and social inequalities which are justified by ideologies of neoliberal meritocracy (Martini and Robertson 2022)". By do so, she argues, "we can see how higher education is deeply implicated in shaping a new politics of resentment (Cohen 2019) by those who have been left out of the social contract, despite buying into the education race. Seen in this way, many higher education systems are part of, rather than a solution to, the problem of social inequalities." |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://thesiseleven.com/2022/10/17/event-21st-thesis-eleven-annual-lecture-professor-susan-l-robert... |
| Description | Thinking Beyond Victim and Perpetrator in the Sociology of the Exilic Intellectual: Conflict, Memory and Wound |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Dillabough, J. & Al Azmeh, Z. (2024). Thinking Beyond Victim and Perpetrator in the Sociology of the Exilic Intellectual: Conflict, Memory and Wound. Invited Keynote talk given to the Exiled Scholars and 'Academic Humanitarianism': Conjunctures of Solidarity in Times of Global Crises" in May '24. Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences, Berlin. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Undergrad presentation at Ca' Foscari University |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Professor Dillabough held an informal focus group presentation on "Authoritarian populism in Turkish Higher Education" as part of an outreach event to Undergraduate students at Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Italy. This was an informal student community talk that was given as part of the research work conducted on the Turkish case study. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | University Exchange Dissemination Event: The University of Cambridge with the University of Verona, Hannah Arendt Centre for Political Studies |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | In May 2024, a University Exchange Dissemination Event was held between the University of Cambridge and the University of Verona's Hannah Arendt Centre for Political Studies (formal collaborative affiliation). Presenters: Simina Dragos, Jo-Anne Dillabough, Caroline Breeden, Mollie Etheridge, Daniele Bassi |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Website about UK Higher Education (in progress) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Lakshmi Bose, ESRC post-doctoral researcher, has launched a new website with the title "WWIT - What Would It Take", which is a public-facing investigation about the many contemporary crises facing UK Higher Education. WWIT has been championed by the project in order to give information about the latest analysis, works-in-progress and dissemination events, particularly in relation to key challenges facing UK Higher Education such as new managerialism and privatisation, new security regimes, political conflict and populism. With WWIT the researchers are currently interviewing key figures in this debate to enable the production of a media based discussion on what people desire for the future of HE in the UK. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://whatwouldittake.co.uk |
| Description | What is illiberal higher education? |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Dillabough, J. & Peto, A. (2024, July). The Future Trends Forum (US based). What is illiberal higher education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jMEQAIQ-j4 |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Why is Ontario's Post-Secondary Education Crisis Not a Bigger Election Issue? |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | A provincial tuition freeze and a federal cap on foreign student visas are squeezing the funding available for Ontario's post-secondary institutions, particularly colleges. Layoffs and program cuts have become common as a result, meaning less choice for students. So if higher education is in crisis, why is it not a bigger campaign issue for Ontario's political parties ahead of the election? |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |
| URL | https://www.tvo.org/video/why-is-ontarios-post-secondary-education-crisis-not-a-bigger-election-issu... |
| Description | Workshop and Autumn School on the State-University Relationship, a joint project between Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge & Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This workshop on "Exploring the State-University Relationship amid the rise of Populism, Authoritarianism, and Illiberal Politics" was organized as a joint project between the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge and the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University. The workshop and Autumn school provided a space for sharing works in progress on different aspects of the State-University relationship and to receive constructive feedback and suggestions from early career scholars on each team. Project team member Jee Rubin presented his dissertation work on "Sovereignty as a disciplinary device: higher education and the Turkish occupation of northwest Syria". Other presenters included Zahra Jafarova and Arrhus University doctoral students. Project lead PI Jo Anne Dillabough and Dr Katja Brogger served as discussants of the workshop. Tplanning of a Special issue was developed through the school and the students will serve as guest editors on the European Journal of Higher Education. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Workshop on Exile and Statelessness by the Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crisis and Political Transformation (forthcoming) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Forthcoming workshop on Exile and Statelessness by the Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crisis and Political Transformation scheduled for March 26, 2025 at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. This workshop aims to bridge disciplinary and methodological divides, fostering dialogue around exile, statelessness, and political belonging. At a time marked by deepening global insecurity, political mistrust, and a sense of placelessness, we seek to examine how notions of home, civility, state, and belonging are reshaped by populist imaginaries and shifting power dynamics. Through this exploration, we aim to generate fresh insights into the lived realities of exile and statelessness while also drawing on historical contexts and conceptual frameworks. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |
| Description | Workshop with guest speaker Dr Stefano Bellin |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Dr Stefano Bellin organized a workshop with early career scholars, the workshop was entitled "Expanding our Sense of the Possible: Memory and Political Imagination in the Age of Presentism". |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Workshop with guest speakers Dr. Sharon Walker, Simina Dragos and Lakshmi Bose at University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Guest speaker Dr. Sharon Walker and project team members Simina Dragos and Dr. Lakshmi Bose prepared and led a workshop on "The Politics of Representation - Race, Sanitisation and the Nation-State" at University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education. The workshop focused on the planned Identities Special Issue, The Politics of Representation - Race, Sanitisation and the Nation-State, which explores the racist logics of the nation-state and the ways these affect systems of representation and the pursuit of racial justice. Papers in the Special Issue draw on examples from different national contexts to argue for the role of state-sponsored biopolitical and necropolitical projects of 'cleansing' and 'sanitisation' in the name of a mythical purity and homogeneity of populations. In this workshop, in conversation with attendees, the speakers aimed to rethink the role of sanitisation practices within the nation-state and how to counter these. Dr. Sharon Walker is a lecturer at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on the discursive and material processes which reproduce racist thinking and outcomes in education systems. She has explored this in UK higher education policy and in the field of comparative and international education. Dr. Lakshmi Bose is a Research Associate at the Faculty of Education at University of Cambridge. She is currently researching the relationship between political conflict and securitisation in the higher education sector in the UK and Hungary. Simina Dragos is a PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research explores aspects of historical culture in post-1989 Romania: historiography, school history materials, film and public remembrance spaces. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Workshop: The 'research imagination' and futures of ethnography |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Central University of Odisha, Department of Sociology, 'The 'research imagination' and futures of ethnography' (workshop with undergraduate, postgraduate students and faculty from sociology and anthropology departments) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Workshop: The Political Economy of Research Cultures in the Social Sciences |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Ranchi University, Department of Sociology, 'The Political Economy of Research Cultures in the Social Sciences' (workshop with undergraduate, postgraduate students and faculty from sociology and anthropology departments) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Zoom webinar: The New Geopolitics of International Higher Education |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Jee Rubin and Lakshmi Bose discuss their work on 'Political Imaginaries of Higher Education in Syria, Turkey and their Borderlands' at the Aarhus Webinar Series. Their paper relates three seemingly disparate political 'moments' at universities across Syria, Turkey and their borderlands to ask how geopolitical shifts related to regional conflict and authoritarianism both shape and are shaped by higher education. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.researchcghe.org/events/cghe-seminar/the-new-geopolitics-of-international-higher-educati... |