Changing university discourses, changing spaces for academics: reconfiguring external conditions for being an academic subject

TY - CHAP

T1 - Changing university discourses, changing spaces for academics

T2 - reconfiguring external conditions for being an academic subject

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 - This chapter traces the emerging, new external context and conditions that provide the framework for thinking and talking about academic workers in legitimate ways. As the purpose of the university has changed, academic subjects and their identities and working conditions have been changing as well. A gradual transition is identified in discourses about the purpose and identity of academic subjects in a Danish context, moving from what I label a receding ‘democratic and Humboldtian university discourse’ to an emerging ‘knowledge economy university discourse’. Seen from the point of view of the academic subject, these processes have become visible through a host of floating signifiers and political technologies that have coded the meanings of the university and its academic subjects in new ways: universities have become organisations with ‘self-ownership’, which has allegedly increased their ‘freedom’ of operation in the research and education ‘market’. Academic subjects must now operate within the university’s ‘strategic priorities’, which are negotiated in ‘development contracts’ with the Ministry of Higher Education and Science. This has taken place as practices and procedures that referred to floating signifiers like ‘democracy’ and ‘participation’ have been dislodged. This process entailed closures as well as new openings for constructing academic subjectivities. It is stressed, however, that historically, academic subjectivities have always been plastic entities embedded in changing conceptions of the university.

AB - This chapter traces the emerging, new external context and conditions that provide the framework for thinking and talking about academic workers in legitimate ways. As the purpose of the university has changed, academic subjects and their identities and working conditions have been changing as well. A gradual transition is identified in discourses about the purpose and identity of academic subjects in a Danish context, moving from what I label a receding ‘democratic and Humboldtian university discourse’ to an emerging ‘knowledge economy university discourse’. Seen from the point of view of the academic subject, these processes have become visible through a host of floating signifiers and political technologies that have coded the meanings of the university and its academic subjects in new ways: universities have become organisations with ‘self-ownership’, which has allegedly increased their ‘freedom’ of operation in the research and education ‘market’. Academic subjects must now operate within the university’s ‘strategic priorities’, which are negotiated in ‘development contracts’ with the Ministry of Higher Education and Science. This has taken place as practices and procedures that referred to floating signifiers like ‘democracy’ and ‘participation’ have been dislodged. This process entailed closures as well as new openings for constructing academic subjectivities. It is stressed, however, that historically, academic subjectivities have always been plastic entities embedded in changing conceptions of the university.

KW - higher education reform

KW - academic subjectivities

KW - Danish university reform

KW - Foucault

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103941972&partnerID=8YFLogxK

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-94-024-1919-1

T3 - Higher Education Dynamics

SP - 215

EP - 238

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 -