Academic subjectivities at stake: different university contexts, different responses to reform

TY - CHAP

T1 - Academic subjectivities at stake

T2 - different university contexts, different responses to reform

AU - Krejsler, John Benedicto

N1 - John Benedicto Krejsler is Professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. His research on ‘New conditions for (pre-)school and teacher education – in a transnational perspective’ brings together education policy, new conditions for producing ’truths’ & social technologies. He is President of the Nordic Educational Research Association and council member of the European Educational Research Association (2009-2018). He was a Visiting Professor at Kristianstad University (Sweden) (2009-2010) and at UCLA (2015-2016).

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

N2 - Chapter 8 traced the change from a receding ‘democratic and Humboldtian university discourse’ to a rapidly emerging ‘knowledge economy university discourse’ and showed that different university contexts responded differently to the new dominant university discourse. As will be explored further in ethnographic detail in this chapter, this general discursive space points to varying room for manoeuvre when implemented by individual academic subjects. In between the general and the individual levels are the levels of the university, faculty and department, and, in some instances, also the research section within the department. Each of these intermediate levels has its own dominant discursive spaces in terms of differences in culture, tradition and formal and informal power networks. This has made it difficult to predict exactly how the centralised introduction of a given signifier or political technology would affect local practice.To complicate matters further, some academic subjects were embedded in departments and universities that were very centralised and centripetal (i.e. researchers were very orientated towards demands from heads of departments, rectors, etc.), whereas academic subjects in other departments were centrifugal and oriented towards the national and international research networks in which they found their identity. Some academic subjects, especially those from the research areas that had the attention of government priorities, expressed no fear of changes. On the other hand, academic subjects in the humanities seemed more worried that their fields would not fit as well into the knowledge-economy discourse. However, even this situation was complicated by the fact some humanities departments had – for local reasons – been operating on the market (external funding etc.) for decades and accumulated strategies for long-term survival that somehow resonated well with new demands.

AB - Chapter 8 traced the change from a receding ‘democratic and Humboldtian university discourse’ to a rapidly emerging ‘knowledge economy university discourse’ and showed that different university contexts responded differently to the new dominant university discourse. As will be explored further in ethnographic detail in this chapter, this general discursive space points to varying room for manoeuvre when implemented by individual academic subjects. In between the general and the individual levels are the levels of the university, faculty and department, and, in some instances, also the research section within the department. Each of these intermediate levels has its own dominant discursive spaces in terms of differences in culture, tradition and formal and informal power networks. This has made it difficult to predict exactly how the centralised introduction of a given signifier or political technology would affect local practice.To complicate matters further, some academic subjects were embedded in departments and universities that were very centralised and centripetal (i.e. researchers were very orientated towards demands from heads of departments, rectors, etc.), whereas academic subjects in other departments were centrifugal and oriented towards the national and international research networks in which they found their identity. Some academic subjects, especially those from the research areas that had the attention of government priorities, expressed no fear of changes. On the other hand, academic subjects in the humanities seemed more worried that their fields would not fit as well into the knowledge-economy discourse. However, even this situation was complicated by the fact some humanities departments had – for local reasons – been operating on the market (external funding etc.) for decades and accumulated strategies for long-term survival that somehow resonated well with new demands.

KW - Academic subjectivities

KW - Higher education reform

KW - Danish university reform

KW - Foucault

KW - Videregående uddannelse

KW - Uddannelsespolitik

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103990976&partnerID=8YFLogxK

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-94-024-1919-1

T3 - Higher Education Dynamics

SP - 239

EP - 257

BT - Higher Education Dynamics

A2 - Wright, Susan

A2 - Carney, Stephen

A2 - Krejsler, John Benedicto

A2 - Nielsen, Gritt B.

A2 - Ørberg, Jakob Williams

PB - Springer

CY - Dordrecht

ER -