The book rejects the politics of power as inimical to the very becoming of the human and posits the politics of strength as a new possibility that breaks with the plantation system of organized violence and vampiric wealth production.

In light of the overwhelming presence of neoliberalism within academia, this book examines how academics resist and manage these changes. The first of two volumes, this diptych of critical academic work investigates generative spaces, or ‘cracks’ in neoliberal managerialism that can be exposed, negotiated, exploited and energised with renewed collegiality, subversion and creativity. The editors and contributors explore how academics continue to find space to work in collegial ways; defying the neoliberal logic of ‘brands’ and ‘cost centres’. Part I of this diptych illuminates the lived experiences of changing academic roles; portraying institutional life without the glossy filter of marketing campaigns and brochures, and revealing generative spaces through critical testimony, fiction, arts-based projects, feminist and Indigenous critical scholarship. It will be of interest and value to anyone concerned with neoliberalism in academia, as well as higher education more generally.

This book outlines the creative responses academics are using to subvert powerful market forces that restrict university work to a neoliberal, economic focus. The second volume in a diptych of critical academic work on the changing landscape of neoliberal universities, the editors and contributors examine how academics ‘prise open the cracks’ in neoliberal logic to find space for resistance, collegiality, democracy and hope. Adopting a distinctly postcolonial positioning, the volume interrogates the link between neoliberalism and the ongoing privileging of Euro-American theorising in universities. The contributors move from accounts of unmitigated managerialism and toxic workplaces, to the need to decolonise the academy to, finally, illustrating the various creative and counter-hegemonic practices academics use to resist, subvert and reinscribe dominant neoliberal discourses. This hopeful volume will appeal to students and scholars interested in the role of universities in advancing cultural democracy, as well as university staff, academics and students.

This book examines tensions and challenges in the professional lives and identities of contemporary academics. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted over seven years with academics in the United States and the United Kingdom, the authors analyze the experiences of four types of academics as they respond and adjust to the demands of neoliberalism: part-time faculty, full-time faculty, department heads and chairs, and deans. While critical of this phenomenon, University Management, the Academic Profession, and Neoliberalism also recognizes that neoliberalism cannot be driven out of academia easily or without serious consequences, such as a perilous loss of revenue and public support. Instead, it works to shed light on the complex—sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary—relationship between market values and academic values in the roles and behaviors of faculty and administrators. In providing an unprecedented in-depth, data-based look at the management of the academic profession, the book will be of interest not only to educational researchers but also to professionals throughout higher education.

This book offers new interdisciplinary analyses of borders and blockages in higher education and how they can be inhabited and reworked. Amidst stratified inequalities of race, gender, class and sexuality, across time and space, contributors explore what alternative academic futures can be claimed. While higher education institutions are increasingly concerned with ‘internationalization’, ‘diversity’, and ‘widening access and participation’, the sector remains complicit in reproducing entrenched inequalities of access and outcomes among both students and staff: boundaries of who does and does not belong are continually drawn, enacted, contested and redrawn. In the contemporary neoliberal, entrepreneurial and ‘post’-colonial educational context, contributors critically examine educational futures as these become more uncertain. This wide-ranging collection serves as a call to action for those concerned with the future of higher education, and how alternative futures can be reimagined.

The Handbook series provides a compendium of thorough and integrative literature reviews on a diverse array of topics of interest to the higher education scholarly and policy communities. Each chapter provides a comprehensive review of research findings on a selected topic, critiques the research literature in terms of its conceptual and methodological rigor, and sets forth an agenda for future research intended to advance knowledge on the chosen topic.

This book investigates origins, meanings, uses and effects of student engagement in higher education, and addresses three core questions: (1) Why is student engagement so visible in higher education today? (2) What are its dominant characteristics? (3) What is missing in the popular view of student engagement? These questions pave the way for a fresh approach to student engagement. The book argues that an elective affinity between student engagement and policies embedded in neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of the early 21st century, enables student engagement to transcend diverse intellectual and practice contexts. This affinity encourages quality learning and teaching that enables student to succeed in their studies and future careers. The book shows that focusing on neoliberal objectives for learning and teaching limits the potential of student engagement in higher education. This conclusion leads to a critical and practical social-ecological perspective that approaches engagement more as a pathway to social justice than as a list of techniques. This book is a work of critical scholarship backed by empirical research. It questions accepted theories and practices and offers fresh insights into student engagement in higher education, including how engagement could promote social justice.

This concise volume presents a series of conversations conducted by its editor with internationally renowned educators, scholars and social critics. The primary focus is on a set of important social and cultural issues and the complex nature of the global contemporary crises in higher education and economics, and the values and goals educational institutions pursue and produce. Contributors to this volume discuss why the present systems of higher education are ailing almost everywhere, and which remedies have turned out to be their poison. The contributions here investigate how and why universities and the knowledge they seek have become hostages to an ideology based on neoliberalism, economism and a fundamentalism of the market. These ideologies have reshaped higher education and contributed to its commodification and commercialization, transforming educational institutions according to a model that originated in the domains of global business enterprises. Bureaucratization and the growth of a managerial class in higher education have led to universities that focus on what is purportedly marketable, while neglecting the commitment to the pursuit of truth, the education of character and the cultivation of civic values that informed older educational models. The contributors to this book argue, from many different angles, for resistance to these recent developments within higher education.

Neoliberalism is having a detrimental impact on wider social and ethical goals in the field of education. Using an international range of contexts, this book provides practical examples that demonstrate how neoliberalism can be challenged and changed at the local, national and transnational level.