VIRTUAL EVENT
Date: Wednesday 15 July 2020
Moderator: Professor Louise Morley, CHEER Director
Post-COVID Topography: What new land do we inhabit?
A critical exploration of the lines of inquiry generated as a consequence of the pandemic and its related 'snapping points'. Further, what we would wish to change to make the global academy more hospitable, humane, and hopeful.
_____________________________________________________________________
ONLINE EVENT
Date: Wednesday 24 June
Time: 12-1pm
Which Norms have been Reinforced/Disrupted in Higher Education by the Covid-19 Crisis?
Thanks to all of those who joined us on 27 May for such a rich discussion, which included:
- The Politics of Performative Productivity
- Vulnerabilities and the reinforcement of inequalities e.g. ageism; heteronormative constructions of the household;
- Domestication/ Homefication of work and learning- racialised, gender and class privilege and access to resources.
- Recasting the international in a post-mobility world.
- The Impact Agenda and the inclusion/abuse of academics in crisis policy.
- Leadership and the re-shaping of HE - whose agenda?
This event followed on, further addressing these important themes.
_____________________________________________________________________
VIRTUAL EVENT
Date: Wednesday 27 May 2020
Moderator: Professor Louise Morley, CHEER Director
Our Emerging Thoughts on the Impact of the Covid-19 Virus on Higher Education:
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly!
An online discussion which offered people the space to express ideas and feelings, and to start to identify a possible research agenda.
_____________________________________________________________________
TEACH-OUT SESSION
Date: Thursday 12 March 2020
Speaker: Professor Rebecca Boden, Research Director, New Social Research Programme, University of Tampere, Finland
Australian and UK vice-chancellors' pay, widely seen as excessive, has been a near constant source of public scandal for a number of years. In both countries, this is set in a context of worsening employment conditions for all but senior managers and, in the UK, a decade of fierce pay restraint.
This seminar explored this issue from a governance perspective, tracing how the commercialisation and marketisation of UK and Australian universities has led to the adoption of corporate-style governance mechanisms in which VCs have become akin to CEOs. However, existing literature suggests that there is little or no relationship between VC remuneration levels and organisational performance. This is a serious equity issue; excessive remuneration undermines principles of fairness and diverts financial resources from educational and research organisational objectives. Suggestions for reform were made in conclusion.
Professor Rebecca Boden is research director of the new Social Research Programme at Tampere University, Finland. A critical accountant with a background in STS and public management, her works explore the impact of regimes of financial and management control on sites of knowledge production, especially universities.
_____________________________________________________________________
OPEN RESEARCH SEMINAR IN CELEBRATION OF LGBTQIA+ MONTH
Date: Wednesday 12 February 2020
Rainbow Laces and Safe Spaces! Queer Eyes on Absences, Erasures and Distortions in Higher Education
This event was a panel presentation and discussion aimed at identifying a change agenda for universities and the University and College Union (UCU).
PRESENTATIONS
Rainbow Laces and Safe Spaces: Photo Gallery
_____________________________________________________________________
OPEN RESEARCH SEMINAR
Date: Wednesday 16 October 2019
Speaker: Professor Fazal Rizvi, Melbourne University, Australia
Higher Education as a Site of the Formation of Business Diaspora
A contemporary definition of diaspora points to communities that are transnationally dispersed but connected to their place of origin. Accordingly, diaspora do not have an objective existence but are forged through a variety of means, involving multiple agencies and sites of formation. One of these sites is higher education. Based on interviews conducted with Indian and Chinese students in Australia, Professor Rizvi argued that recent policies and practices of internationalisation of higher education, shaped by a market rationality, have steered international students towards particular forms of diaspora, aligned to a range of beliefs about the importance of their participation within the global economy and in particular their role in facilitating transnational regimes of business activities.
Fazal Rizvi is a Professor of Global Studies in Education at the University of Melbourne Australia, as well as an Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States. He has written extensively on issues of identity and culture in transnational contexts, globalization and education policy and Australia-Asia relations. A collection of his essays is published in: Encountering Education in the Global: Selected Writings of Fazal Rizvi (Routledge 2014). His most recent books include a co-authored volume, Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalization (Palgrave 2017) and a co-edited volume,Transnational Perspectives on Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education(Bloomsbury 2019). Professor Rizvi is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences and a former Editor of the journal, Discourse: Studies in Cultural Politics of Education, and past President of the Australian Association of Research in Education.