CHEER Symposium for the 2013 SRHE Conference

Performing Difference in the Global Academy

Proponent: Professor Louise Morley

Rationale

Globally, higher education is caught between the hypermodernism of the knowledge

economy and the archaism of elitism. Global convergence means that it is now

characterised by the development of international, entrepreneurial and corporate

universities and speeded up nomadic public intellectuals. There are new student

constituencies, literacies and modalities of communication. Borders are dissolving

and academic (hyper)mobility is promoted. However, the frenzy of liquified

globalisation is often underpinned by an indifference to social difference. The urgency

of austerity is reinvigorating poor quality employment and learning environments,

unequal employment regimes, elitist participation practices and globalised gender

inequalities and exclusions.

Global economic recession and ensuing austerity cultures mean that higher education

currently abounds with a sense of crisis and policy turbulence. It is rapidly being

repositioned as a private good and, as such, is increasingly being funded by

individuals and households, rather than by nation states. While higher education is

viewed as enhancing a nation’s competitive advantage, different countries are (dis)

investing differently in its future. Transformation has largely been driven by the

perceived needs of the economy rather than by academic imaginaries or social

movements. A potent political and moral economy has been shaped by the

performance driven international prestige economy. Positional values and

differentiation now drive the sector. In all the urgency of reform, there is a tendency

for higher education to focus on the data that will be used to address the powerful

regulatory technologies and aspirational frameworks of the global league tables. As

equity and diversity are not included as indicators of quality in global league tables,

they are being eclipsed.

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Survival of the sector, rather than development, has become a dominant concern in

many national locations. The construct of defence has been evoked as a form of

resistance to privatisation and marketisation of the global academy. However, social

difference is either overlooked or contradictorily conceptualised both in terms of

disparagement and desire. This symposium attempts to interrogate the gaps and

silences that are the result of the re-orientation of higher education to market values

and will question how difference is performed, overlooked, eclipsed or under-

theorised in the turbulent policy world of higher education. Diverse markers of

difference will be interrogated in relation to gender and leadership, the normative

assumptions in critical thinking discourses, performativities of the ideal student, the

affectively charged experiences of black and ethnic minority staff and the identity

projects of refugees in higher education.

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Paper One: Lost Leaders: Women in the Global Academy

Professor Louise Morley, Director, Centre for Higher Education and Equity

Research (CHEER), University of Sussex, UK.

Keywords: gender, leadership, international, absences, disqualifications

Abstract

Drawing on data gathered from British Council seminars Absent Talent: Women in

Research and Academic Leadership in Hong Kong (September, 2012), Tokyo

(January, 2013) and Dubai (March, 2013) this paper discusses diverse academic

women’s experiences and explanations for women’s under-representation as

knowledge leaders and producers in the global academy. Participants from East Asian

and Middle East and North African (MENA) regions shared experiences and

identified desires for future action in the form of a Manifesto for Change (Forestier,

2013). The paper combines empirical data on enablers, impediments and attractions

with consideration of debates on women’s exclusions and disqualifications from

academic leadership and knowledge production. Invoking Berlant’s (2012) construct

of cruel optimism, a key question is whether women are desiring, dismissing or being

disqualified from senior leadership positions in the global academy.

Paper

Career Progression: Cruel Optimism?

While the global academy is characterised by hypermodernism the archaism of male-

dominated leadership remains (Morley, 2011, 2012, 2013). Few countries have

achieved Sweden’s success of forty-three per cent female vice-chancellors (She

Figures, 2009). In most countries, gender escapes organisational logic in relation to

leadership, and the logic of reciprocity implied in meritocracy is disrupted when it

comes to identifying women as potential leaders. This could be evidence of

democratic deficit, distributive injustice, and structural prejudices. There are questions

about who self-identifies or is identified by existing power elites, as having leadership

legitimacy? One explanation is that women’s capital is devalued, misrecognised and

disqualified in current reward, recruitment and promotions practices (Rees, 2011).

The problem may also reside in wider cultural scripts for leaders that coalesce or

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collide with normative gender performances. If leadership is associated with

particular forms of masculinity, women leaders represent contextual discontinuity,

interruptive in their shock quality.

Women are also reflexively scanning leadership and dismissing it as a career option

(Morley, 2013a), not equating it with vertical career success, but more as restriction of

creativity inducing conventionality and conformity to norms and values that are alien

and alienating (Haake, 2009). Berlant (2011) described the relation in which one

depends on objects that block the very thriving that motivates our attachment in the

first place as ‘cruel optimism’. Women’s relationship with leadership can be a form of

cruel optimism in so far as desiring it seldom leads to its attainment. While some

women do enter and flourish, for others, aspirations to lead differently in today’s

managerialised global academy can also be a form of cruel optimism.

Speaking Out

In preparation for British Council seminars Absent Talent: Women in Research and

Academic Leadership in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Dubai, forty questionnaires were

circulated to academic women in Australia, China, Egypt, Hong Kong, Indonesia,

Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines,

Singapore, Thailand, and Turkey and twenty were returned. The sample included

vice-chancellors, deputy vice-chancellors, deans, research directors, mid and early

career academic women. Questions included what makes leadership attractive/

unattractive to women, and what enables/ impedes women to enter leadership

positions. This group is referred to as respondents.

Panel discussions and paper presentations were also analysed. In Hong Kong,

panelists comprised six senior women from Australia, China, Hong Kong, the

Philippines and Thailand. In Tokyo, panelists comprised three senior academic

women from Japan, Thailand and the UK and papers were presented from the

Philippines, Malaysia and Japan. In Dubai, papers were presented from senior women

from Egypt, Hong Kong, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, and

Turkey. This group is referred to as discussants. There were twenty-two seminar

participants in Hong Kong, twenty-five in Tokyo and twenty-five in Dubai. This

group is referred to as participants. A total of seventy-two respondents, discussants

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and participants in three seminars contributed to these data. From this small sample, a

range of insightful observations was collected.

What’s Going Wrong?

Gendered divisions of labour within and beyond the academy were frequently cited.

Leadership itself was hierarchicalised with women allowed entry into less prestigious,

inward-looking roles. A Chinese respondent suggested that women work in:

Low professional titles, low-level management and administrative positions,

most of them are responsible for student affairs.

A question was whether women’s under-representation was the result of

discrimination or whether women make affective and material calculations regarding

the costliness of attachment to leadership aspirations? Many women in this sample

discussed gaining influence. However, leadership was frequently constructed as loss -

loss of status and self-esteem in the case of unsuccessful applications, but loss of

independence, research time and well-being when applications were successful. A

Hong Kong respondent saw the neo-liberalised and male-dominated, managerialised

academy as an unattractive space:

The boys’ club issue, also massification and internationalisation of the sector

together with reduction in funding by government means roles have changed

and are more challenging in terms of time and skills - business management,

fund raising, marketing.

Some leadership values as well as the long hours’ culture were unattractive. Working

with resistance and recalcitrance, colonising colleagues’ subjectivities towards the

goals of the managerially inspired discourses in the competitive prestige economy

involve material and affective workloads that result in unliveable lives (Butler, 2004).

A cultural climate, or hidden curriculum, resulting in organisational and cultural

norms that depress women’s aspirations and career orientations was widely noted. A

structural observation related to the incompatibility of women’s caring responsibilities

with the temporalities and rhythms of academia (Cheung & Halpern, 2010). A

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Japanese respondent saw the gendered division of labour in wider society as a major

barrier:

A woman in Japan has to take care of her children, as well as both her parents,

and sometimes even her husband's parents, besides the domestic duties on daily

life. They do not have enough time to concentrate on doing research. And the

percentage female university teachers in Japan who do not marry is 47.5 per

cent.

A Turkish respondent highlighted availability of affordable domestic services in many

countries discussed, suggesting other explanations for women’s absences e.g. women

constructed as defective men, characterised by deficit and defined by lack. A

Moroccan respondent described how women’s potential is depressed because:

The state policy seems to favour a macho vision of society…This discourages

women and makes them have less ambition.

Women cited socio-cultural practices that impeded their progress in public domains.

A Chinese respondent reported:

A saying that ‘people can be classified into three categories: male, female,

and female PhD’.

The educated woman was the third sex because she was unclassifiable in cultural and

age-appropriate norms. The message that higher educated women are unmarriageable

was also reported by the Japanese discussant:

Young women don’t want to go to the University of Tokyo because their parents

say that if you go to the University of Tokyo you won’t be able to get married,

you won’t be able to be happy. So being conventional implies that OK there is

less risk. We have to encourage women to take the risk.

The equation of happiness with traditional choices and de-traditionalisation with

unhappiness is evocative of Ahmed’s arguments (2010) about regulatory functions of

happiness concepts. Leadership is transgression, with social and affective

consequences. It can be a sign of upward mobility, influence and power, but also a

normative fantasy about what constitutes success, and its current conditions and

limitations in the global academy mean that many women do not construct leadership

as an object of desire.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to the British Council for their support and

contributions to the Women in Higher Education Leadership initiative.

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References

Ahmed, S. (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC Duke University Press.

Berlant, L (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press

Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. London & New York, Routledge.

Cheung, F.M. & Halpern, D.F. (2010) “Women at the Top: Powerful Leaders Define

Success as Work+Family in a Culture of Gender.” American Psychologist 65(3): 182-

193.

Forestier, K. (2013) Manifesto for Change’ for women in higher education University

World News. 16 March Issue No:263.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20130313132344590.

Accessed 5 April, 2013.

Grove, J. (2013a) THE Global Gender Index. Times Higher 13 May.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/the-global-gender-index/

3/2003517.article#. Accessed 26 May, 2013.

Grove, J. (2013b) Gender Leadership Gap Tackled by Manifesto 9 March.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/gender-leadership-gap-tackled-by-

manifesto/2002419.article. Accessed 26 May 2013.

Grove, J. (2013c) Gender gap in number of female professors. 13 June 2013.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/gender-gap-in-number-of-female-

professors/2004766.article. Accessed 17 June 2013.

Haake, U. (2009). "Doing Leadership in Higher Education: The gendering process of

leader identity development." Tertiary Education and Management 15(4): 291–304.

Morley, L. (2011) Imagining the University of the Future. In, R. Barnett (ed) The

Future University: Ideas and Possibilities. London, Taylor and Francis: 26-35.

Morley, L. (2012). "The Rules of the Game: Women and the Leaderist Turn in Higher

Education " Gender and Education. 25(1): 116-131.

Morley, L. (2013). International Trends in Women’s Leadership in Higher Education

In, T. Gore, and Stiasny, M. (eds) Going Global. London, Emerald: 279-298

Rees, T. (2011) ‘The Gendered Construction of Scientific Excellence’

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 36 (2):133–45.

She Figures (2009) Statistics and Indicators on Gender Equality in Science. Brussels:

European Commission.

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Biography

Louise Morley AcSS is a Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/) at the University of Sussex, UK. Louise has an international profile in the field of the sociology of gender in higher education studies. Her research and publication interests focus on international higher education policy, gender, equity, micropolitics, quality, leadership and power. She is an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences, a Fellow of the Society for Research into Higher Education, a Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Gender Excellence, University of Örebro, Sweden and the Inaugural Chair of Women's Leadership, Women’s Leadership Centre, Universiti Kebangsaan. Malaysia.

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Paper Two: Dr Linda Morrice, Centre for Higher Education and Equity

Research (CHEER), University of Sussex, UK

Managing Social Differences in Higher Education: Hidden Distinctions 

Abstract

This paper will draw on research with refugee students: a group who are not

recognised in either widening participation or international discourses, policies or

practices. The absence of recognition means that students with a refugee background,

despite often having similar academic and support needs, are rendered invisible. This

cultural misrecognition impedes their participation as ‘full partners in social

interaction’ and they are included in what Fraser refers to as a marginalised or

subordinate way (Fraser 2007: 315). The observations presented illuminate how the

experience of higher education can be marked simultaneously by belonging and

recognition, deficit and exclusion. Complex differences and inequalities remain

hidden and unspoken, raising new questions and challenges for pedagogy and for

equal participation of students. The paper calls into question the binaries between

‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’, ‘home’ and ‘overseas’ students, exclusion and

inclusion.

Keywords: refugees, recognition, equality, widening participation, exclusion.

Introduction

Widening participation policy discourses across higher education (HE) include social

justice concerns about removing structural barriers to address the under-representation

of certain social groups (HEFCE 2006; 2008). At the same time, and driven by market

values, universities are competing to recruit high fee paying overseas students.

Refugee students are not recognised in either widening participation or international

discourses, policies or practices. As a consequence little is known about refugees’

presence in, or absence from HE, or their experiences once in HE. For refugees higher

education can provide a route out of poverty, it can also be one of the key ways that

they can re-establish their lives and begin to re-build their professional identities. On

the surface, the minority who gain entry to HE appear to have settled into the

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privileged and sought after position of UK student, however, the experience of being

a refugee continues to play a significant role in their lives. There is no convenient

single narrative of what it means to be a refugee in HE, rather it is a complex

experience producing multiple, sometimes conflicted subject positions. This paper

draws on observations from life history interviews with four refugee students, two

women and two men, who attended university between 2006 and 2010. It was part of

a larger, longitudinal study involving twelve refugees; participants have been selected

as their narratives highlight the differences and complexities of refugee identities in

higher education.

Establishing Learner Identities

The kinds of learner identity constructed and the ease with which educational success

can be achieved largely depends on the extent to which existing capital, whether

educational or professional knowledge and experience, is recognised as legitimate and

can be deployed (Bourdieu 2004; Morrice 2011). For Patricia, a teacher from

Zimbabwe, the formal learning in HE was marked by a sense of belonging. She was

brought up in an education system based on the English colonial system and the

language of instruction was English. Similarities in the learning cultures and

expectations, and the absence of a language barrier, smoothed her transition to

learning in the UK and she was able to confidently draw upon the knowledge,

experience and practices she had accumulated, and apply them to the UK. She

described herself as ‘an academic’, and viewed HE as an escape from the low

expectations and racism she experienced while working in UK care homes. In contrast

Farideh, who worked as a hospital dietician in Iran, had come from a very different

education system and had to negotiate different learning styles and expectations. She

struggled with what Lillis (2001) refers to an ‘institutional practice of mystery’ where

the established literacy practices are not made explicit. She did not question her tutors

and was reluctant to approach them for help, but she was critical of the expectations

the system placed on students and the lack of clarity and transparency about those

expectations:

Some lecturers give you a lot and you have to find a little. And some give you

a little and you have to find a lot, but I still don’t know which one is what. I

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have to learn how to pick up what I need. They don’t really help…Lecturers in

Iran work much harder.

Her story is narrated from a position of difference, exclusion and deficit. She was

constantly aware that she didn’t have the ‘right’ knowledge and this was experienced

as feeling out of place, and a constant doubt and insecurity about her ability to

succeed. Classified as a home student for fee purposes, she was unable to locate or

access the support services available to international students, who might be

experiencing similar difficulties.

Hidden Distinctions and Exclusion

Dominating all of the narratives was how the refugee identity generated hidden

distinctions and exclusion. The identity of refugee cast a deep shadow on their lives,

their decision-making and ability to engage with higher education. All of the

participants were negotiating complex, often painful transnational relationships with

family members left behind, and had to cope with significant family events: births,

deaths and marriages from the distance of exile. This was coupled with additional

financial concerns and responsibilities which included sending remittances to family

overseas. Savalan from Iran was the only son from a family of five daughters. It was

his role to support not only his elderly parents, but his five sisters as they went to

university and got married. He describes the different cultural understandings and

expectations between himself and some of his fellow students:

For them it is a different story. They phone daddy or mummy and

they give them money. In my turn my mummy or daddy phones me,

and they ask me for money, so it's slightly different!

Patricia was separated from her three young children and husband for almost three

years before they managed to join her in the UK. During this time she combined full

time study with 40 or 50 hour shift work in care homes in order to send remittances to

her family.

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Loneliness and varying degrees of poor mental health impacted on the lives of all of

the students at different times. Alan, an Iranian Kurd, had worked as a civil engineer

before coming to the UK. He gained a place on a Masters programme but his ongoing

struggle with mental health issues triggered by his sudden and traumatic flight to the

UK caused him to switch from full-time to part-time study mode while he sought

medical support. Fear of deportation creates an additional layer of anxiety for some:

refugees who arrived in the UK after 2005 are given only temporary status to remain

in the UK, rather than permanent residency (Home Office 2005). After five years they

have to apply to remain in the UK. For Savalan this meant that much of his second

year was taken up with the application process and seeking to demonstrate that he was

the ‘good citizen’ he believed the authorities would allow to remain in the UK.

Significantly, these differences were lived as private and hidden; the stigmatism and

disparagement associated with refugee identity meant that students were unwilling to

confide or make public their refugee backgrounds (Morrice 2013a; 2013b). Thus

refugee students are rendered doubly invisible: they are rendered invisible in terms of

the discourses, policies and practices in Higher Education and as a consequence of

keeping their identity ‘private’ the struggles and inequalities experienced are not

recognised.

References

Bourdieu, P. (2004) The forms of capital, in: S. Ball (Ed.) Reader in sociology of

education. (London: Routledge Falmer), pp.15-29.

Fraser, N. (2007) Identity, exclusion, and critique. A response to four critics.

European Journal of Political Theory, 6 (3), pp. 305-338

HEFCE (2006) Widening participation: a review. Report to the Minister of State for

Higher Education and Lifelong Learning by the Higher Education Funding

Council for England http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/wp/ (accessed

February 2013)

HEFCE (2008) HEFCE widening participation and fair access research strategy.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120118171947/http://www.hefce.

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ac.uk/widen/research/ (Accessed February 2013)

Home Office (2005a) Controlling our borders: Making migration work for Britain.

Five year strategy for asylum and immigration (London: Home Office).

Lillis, T. M. (2001) Student writing. Access, regulation, desire (London: Routledge).

Morrice, L. (2011) Being a refugee: Learning and identity. A longitudinal study of

refugees in the UK (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books Ltd).

Morrice, L. (2013a) Refugees in Higher Education: Boundaries of belonging and

recognition, stigma and exclusion, International Journal of Lifelong Education

(DOI: 10.1080/02601370.2012.761288)

Morrice, L. (2013b) Learning and refugees: Recognising the darker side of

transformative learning. Adult Education Quarterly, 63 (3). pp. 251-271.

Biography

Dr Linda Morrice is Senior Lecturer in Education at University of Sussex, UK. Her research interests focus on lifelong learning, equity, identity, migration and life history. Her most recent book, Being a refugee: learning and identity. A longitudinal study of refugees in the UK, was published by Trentham Books in 2011. Linda is a member of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research at the University of Sussex and a member of Council and Honorary Treasurer of SCUTREA (Standing Conference on University Teaching and Research in the Education of Adults). She is co-convener and co-founder of the ESREA (European Society for Research in the Education of Adults) Network on Migration, Ethnicity, Racism and Xenophobia.

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Paper Three: Making a Difference? Conducting an applied study on the

experience of BME staff in English Higher Education

Professor Valerie Hey & Professor Mairead Dunne , Centre for Higher

Education and Equity Research (CHEER), University of Sussex, UK

Abstract

In 2008, the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) and the

Centre for Higher Education Research & Information (CHERI) at the Open

University began a collaborative study for the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU)

examining, via survey and qualitative methods, experiences of BME staff in English

higher education institutions (HEIs).

This paper discusses the politics of representing this research by interrogating its

public account through a more reflexive and affectively charged commentary

confirming the intractable features of doing ‘policy-near’ and politically sensitive

research. The paper intercuts the official version of the study: the design,

‘challenges’, data findings and policy recommendations, as published by the ECU

with a more equivocal and personal narrative conveying the ethnographic texture of

working in and across ‘difference’. We aim to demonstrate the significance of the

affective dimensions as well as the politico-methodological location of all research.

Keywords: Affective, 'Race', Policy, Representation, Non-Performativity

Background –High Stakes and High Emotion The paper traces the formulation and conducting of the ECU funded study. The notion of ‘assumptive worlds’ – a concern with normative views of reality - informs our analysis, especially when combined with Butler’s notion of ‘unspeakability’ (Butler, 2005). We trace the ways in which we were challenged in multiple ways in undertaking the work. Our, bold, substantive concern was to see the extent, impact and reality of how English HEIs exercised their public equality duty in relation to BME staff, as ‘race’ is one of the ‘protected characteristics’. The research brief had been fiercely lobbied for by the main stakeholder assisting the ECU in shaping the research – the Race Forum – a diverse body of interested individuals and groups (union, employer, activists) rightly agitated by the lack of progress on the issue of Black and Minority Ethnic staff within HE, particularly staff from Black Caribbean backgrounds, born in England. The context was thus highly contested, both in respect to the agenda and our positioning with the ECU and the Race Forum, with our academic affiliations, our ‘race’ and our theoretical position being directly or indirectly challenged in the

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‘melting pot’ of defining the scope, coverage, sampling, methods and analysis of the data. There were many dimensions to the affective ecology surrounding and constituting the research as discussed below. Driving this righteous anger was a paradoxical recognition that research, rather than action, was being commissioned. Ideologically it was ‘needed’ to remind the sector of the inequalities it palpably and recursively evinces in respect to difference, especially ‘race’ see the prior scoping research literature review (Leathwood et al, 2009), but to imagine our contribution would rectify things was to place the work in a double bind of being seen as symbolically vital but potentially practically inconsequential, given how little success had been associated with the ‘non-performativity’ of diversity (Ahmed, 2012). Such loading acted to pre-define the research as inevitably ‘disappointing’ not least because the ECU could not structurally mandate universities to tackle the issue, nor allocate monies to promote ‘affirmative action’.

The Doing of the Study, design and its difficult data.The study took the shape best conveyed in the following diagram:

Research and development design

Survey all HEIs in England

Interviews with support framework coordinators plus a range of middle management staff in 10-12 HEIs

Fieldwork in 3 case study HEIs

Pilot initiatives in 3 case study

HEIs

The study design using multiple methods rendered a highly textured data set, enabling us to ‘read between the lines’ of official accounts. Given how Ahmed (2012) calls race a ’sticky subject’ – causing frissons in so-called liberal institutional spaces, thus methods allowing the truths to surface via in-depth interviews and focus groups, proved invaluable in showing how racist power worked, often within the banality of everyday ‘taken for granted’ modes of ordinary conduct. We negotiated competing and contradictory pressures throughout the study not, apart from the challenges posed by the Race Forum. ‘Assumptive worlds’ refers to the informal operation of power in social organisations, what Bourdieu (1990) calls ‘the rules of the game’. The idea of the assumptive world – how institutional and cultural forms produce exclusion - was generative in thinking about the banalities of ‘racism’ comprised of both unconscious and calculatedly racist practices. It was this culture that BME staff had to negotiate; contouring their positioning inside the assumptive white (male, middle class-elite, heterosexual) relation of ruling (Smith, 1987). This idea was also unexpectedly useful in thinking about our own positioning within the assumptive worlds of those commissioning and monitoring the research outcomes. This diagram reflects how we have theorised the antagonism between different ‘assumptive worlds’ which remain/ed at stake in presenting the research:

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An important marker of just how ‘hot’ this space was is reflected in the researchers’ feelings about presenting to the respective ‘stakeholders’. Such anxiety offers an ironic counterpoint to the visceral data (anger, disdain, bemusement, pain) collected as the lived realities of BME staff. It is not the intention to stake any claim to oppression as we could ‘walk away’ after antagonistic encounters. We were called upon to defend the emergent analysis, the extent of our data or our competence at securing access across all the staff grades. Yet we knew we could not guarantee inclusive coverage, given the voluntary nature of the study nor the resources at our disposal. Yet if ‘race’ is not fit for ‘polite company’, we as white researchers had ‘brought it up’ legitimated as research evidence rather than as our ‘identity’. The irony of this ‘objectification’ of, what for many was the reality of their daily subjection within racist orders, was not lost on us. We sought to honour their anger. Impolite Racism & Desiccated Data However, editing the final report was out of our hands so respondents vivid experiences of inequality required further justification, couched in concerns about ‘representativeness’. Qualitative research was rendered less legitimate than the quantitative contributions of our collaborating survey team. One of the paradoxes of the work, that the very forces of anger which drove it from inception and commissioning- what racism costs and how it works within the embodiment of institutional life - were all but expunged from the report; as if the BME subjects who spoke to us, of the vitality and vulgarity of racism as well as its everyday ‘disguise’ in the operation of highly discretionary departmental level power, had not spoken. What can then say about racism that makes a/ny difference of the right kind in a policy world and context when ‘race’ is almost made to disappear even within ostensible research into how it works as a power relation.ReferencesAhmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Bourdieu, P. (1990). In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (M. Adamson, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1982, 1987)Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself NY Fordham University Press Leathwood, C., Maylor, U. and Moreau, M. (2009) The experiences of black and minority ethnic staff working in higher education, London: Equality Challenge Unit. http://www.ecu.ac.uk/ publications/experience-of-bme-staff-in-he-lit-review Smith, D. E. (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Biography

Professor Valerie Hey is Professor of Education at the University of Sussex. She is co-director of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) located in the School of Education & Social Work. Her research interests have been inspired by her social and intellectual biography and are transdisciplinary in ambition working across the fields and approaches of: feminist theory; cultural studies and sociology. She has recently focussed on devising with colleagues in CHEER and beyond, a cultural sociology of higher education as a means to infuse our understanding of the Academy.

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Paper Four: Student Performativity: How Presenteesim, Learnerism and

Globalism are Eroding the Freedom to Learn

Professor Bruce Macfarlane, University of Hong Kong and Visiting Professor,

Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER), University of

Sussex, UK

Abstract

The paper sets out a conceptual analysis of student performativity as a mirror image

of teacher performativity. The former is defined as the way that students are evaluated

on the basis of how they perform at university in behavioural rather than cognitive

terms. Specifically, this includes rules on class attendance (presenteeism) and

increasing emphasis on class and peer participation as part of learning and assessment

regimes (learnerism). Students must also demonstrate their commitment to the

espoused values of the corporate university such as global citizenship and

sustainability (globalism) promoted via general education programmes and a

curriculum influenced by graduate attributes. Drawing on the work of Lasch (1979)

and Skeggs (2010), it is argued that student performativity represents the spread of the

‘performing self’ in wider society and is transforming learning at university from a

private space into a public performance with adverse consequences for student

academic freedom.

Keywords:  Performing self, Student academic freedom

Paper

The term ‘teacher performativity’ is well known and the subject of a growing

literature (eg Ball, 2012). This refers, inter alia, to targets, evaluations and

performance indicators connected with the measurement of teaching quality. In a

university context, individual academics encounter research quality assessments,

student evaluation questionnaires, and sometimes income generation targets for

professors. In this paper I will argue that student performativity is the mirror image of

teacher performativity. It is just that the targets and the performance indicators that

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differ. These typically include attending classes punctually; assessment-related

proxies for attendance such as in-class tests, presentations and class contribution

grading; participation in group work and peer evaluation exercises, posting comments

to online learning forums; and displaying or espousing values associated with

globalism. Student performativity amounts to a hidden curriculum in higher education

and marks a significant shift from learning at university as a private space to a public

performance.

Presenteeism, Learnerism and Globalism

Universities are increasingly creating a culture of presenteeism that reflects a

phenomenon previously associated with the workplace (Cooper, 1998). Under the

euphemistic banner of ‘student engagement’, students are subject to a range of

measures that monitor and punish them on the basis of their attendance record.

Measures include attendance registers, swipe cards, and assessments that are

effectively attendance proxies, such as online tracking of student contributions and in-

class tests timed at the beginning of classes. Presenteeism is the result of a crisis of

confidence about the value of a higher education and a concern to demonstrate its

‘value’ to governments and parents as part of a performative culture (Macfarlane,

2013).

Learnerism (Holmes, 2004) has become an ideological discourse which is

performative in nature by seeking to empirically analyse results of educational

achievement in terms of learning outcomes and the behavioural evaluation of

students. Students are expected to actively ‘engage’ and ‘manage’ their own learning

as ‘invested participants’ (Conrad and Haworth, 1997: 553). These demands are

justified on the basis of social constructivist learning theory (eg Biggs 1996). The

authoritative role of the teacher is undermined as the importance of students

constructing understanding of knowledge for themselves is confused with them

entering this process by themselves (Mascolo 2009:7). The censorious nature of the

phrase ‘teacher-centred’ means that it is unfashionable to question the assumptions of

learnerism.

Steger (2004) defines globalism as ‘a market ideology that endows current

globalization processes with neoliberal norms, values and meanings’ (2004:4). In a

higher education context, students are being inculcated with a normative political

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discourse centred on the values associated with globalism. This refers to the

privileging of the interests of a worldview over national, regional and local interests.

The mantras closely associated with globalism include global citizenship,

sustainability and multi-culturalism. Interdisciplinarity is seen as essential in getting

students to connect this agenda with ‘action’ and ‘democratic citizenship’ (Schneider,

2003). The mantras of globalism present a benign view of the effects of globalisation

and are found commonly within general education and elective programmes in

particular. Moreover, many universities in the UK and Australia have developed sets

of graduate attributes which contain explicit expectations that students will become

advocates of global mantras, notably global citizenship (Barrie, 2004).

The inauthenticity of performativity

In complying with the demands of performativity, academics and students need to do

so in word as well as deed. It requires a casting aside or suppression of personal views

and demands a ‘playing of the game’ (Ball, 2003). For academics this might imply,

among other things, publishing early and often in the research cycle even when this

might be at the expense of longer term goals and teaching responsibilities. Working in

a performative environment leads to inauthentic attitudes and behaviour as individuals

endeavour to conform to such expectations.

Students learn to conform, or at least simulate agreement with presenteeism,

learnerism and globalism. This is an integral part of what it now means to be a

university student now and involves students (and their professors, to some extent) in

a ritual of inauthenticity. Lip service is paid to certain elements of the teaching

regime, such as the espousal of learning ‘outcomes’, but, in practice, there is limited

belief in their veracity. There is also considerable evidence that student concerns

about fairness (eg group work assessment) and privacy (eg loss of anonymity through

forced participation in large classes, Machemer & Crawford, 2007; sharing opinions

in class, Graham et al, 2007) are routinely overridden by learnerist dogma. Those who

try to resist by refusing to ‘play the game’ by adjusting their behaviour toward the

goals and targets set are more subtly disadvantaged. Academics fail to gain promotion

or are punished in other ways, such as being excluded from research quality

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assessment. Students who attend seminars but remain silent or fail to participate in

online learning communities are derided as ‘lurkers’ (Nonnecke and Preece, 2000).

Conclusion

There are striking parallels between the emotional, dispositional and bodily

performance of reality television show contestants (Skeggs, 2010) and student

performativity in higher education. Students must demonstrate bodily performance:

through attendance at class or virtually in online forums, dispositional performance in

terms of a willingness to comply with learnerism, and emotional performance through

espousing compliance with values central to globalism. Learning at university has

been converted from a private space into a public performance. It is, to use the words

of Lasch (1979), about the ‘performing self’.

Presenteesim, learnerism and globalism pose a threat to student academic freedom

understood in terms of both positive and negative rights. Presenteeism infantalises

students and in the process retards their capacity to exercise choice as adults

undermining a student’s right to be treated as an adult engaged in a voluntary activity.

Learnerism largely ignores the rights of students to learn in different ways as

individuals, in silence (Jin, 2012) and with a ‘right to reticence’ (Chanock, 2010) in

class. Globalism domesticates rather than empowers students as critical thinkers

through general education, elective and common core programmes that sanctify a

normative discourse reifying the mantras of globalism.

References

Ball, S. (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity, Journal of

Education Policy, 18 (2), 215-228.

Ball, S. (2012) The making of a neoliberal academic, Research in Secondary

Education, 2(1), 29-31.

Barrie, S.C. (2004) A research-based approach to generic graduate attributes policy,

Higher Education Research and Development, 23(3), 261-275.

Biggs, J. (1996) Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment, Higher

Education, 32(2), 347–64.

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Chanock, K. (2010) The right to reticence, Teaching in Higher Education, 15(5), 543-

552.

Conrad C.F. and Haworth J.G. (1997) Emblems of Quality in Higher Education:

Developing and Sustaining High-quality Programs. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Cooper, C.L. (1998) The changing nature of work, Community, Work and Family, 1

(3), 313–317.

Graham, C .R ., Tripp, T .R ., Seawright, L . and Joeckel, G .L . (2007) Empowering

or Compelling Reluctant Participators Using Audience Response Systems . Active

Learning in Higher Education, 8 (3), 233–258

Holmes, L. (2004) Challenging the learning turn in education and training, Journal of

European Industrial Training, 28(8/9), 625-638.

Jin, J. (2012) Sounds of silence: Examining silence in problem-based learning (PBL)

in Asia. In S. Bridges, C. McGrath & T. Whitehill (Eds.), Problem-based learning in

clinical education: The next generation. Springer.

Macfarlane, B. (2013) The surveillance of learning: a critical analysis of university

attendance policies, Higher Education Quarterly, forthcoming.

Machemer, P.L. & Crawford, P. (2007) Student perceptions of active learning in a

large cross-disciplinary classroom, Active Learning in Higher Education, 8(1), 9-30.

Mascolo, M F. (2009) Beyond teacher- and learner-centered pedagogy: Learning as

guided participation, Pedagogy and the Human Sciences, 1, 4-27.

Lasch, C. (1979), The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in the Age of Diminishing

Expectations, London/New York, Norton Press.

Nonnecke, B., & Preece, J. (2000). Lurker demographics: Counting the silent.

Proceedings of CHI 2000. The Hague: ACM.

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Schneider, C.G. (2003) Liberal Education and Integrative Learning, Issues in

Integrative Studies, 21, 1-8.

Skeggs, B. (2010) The Moral Economy of Person Production: the Class Relations of

Self-Performance on “Reality” Television, Sociologia: Revista do Departamento de

Sociologia da FLUP, 20, 67-84.

Steger, M.B. (ed.) (2004) Rethinking Globalism. Lanham, MD & Oxford: Rowman &

Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Biography

Bruce Macfarlane is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Hong Kong

and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research

(CHEER), University of Sussex. He is a Fellow and former Vice Chair of the Society

for Research into Higher Education. His previous books with Routledge include

Intellectual Leadership in Higher Education (2012), Researching with Integrity

(2009), The Academic Citizen (2007), and Teaching with Integrity (2004).

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Paper Five: Troubling the concept: an exploration of difference within students’

experiences of critical thinking in higher education

Emily Danvers, Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER),

University of Sussex, UK

Abstract

This symposium paper intends to trouble the concept of critical thinking against a shifting higher education landscape of increased participation, globalisation and marketisation. The paper will socially contextualise normative understandings of what it means to be a critical student and explore how criticality is conceptualised, enacted and regulated in the 21st century global academy. It will use theories of power and difference from feminist and critical realist frameworks to reflect on interview data conducted with 14 first-year students at a small research intensive university in the UK. Archer’s (2000; 2007) concept of the internal conversation will inform discussion of how critical thinking can be theorised as both a personal and social act. Ahmed’s (2010; 2012) work on the affective tensions of occupying a counter-hegemonic space will explore the extent to which critical thinking can be understood as an emotional and embodied experience, as well as an intellectual and pedagogical one.

Keywords - undergraduates, criticality, affect, identities, diversity

PaperCritical thinking is closely aligned with the higher in higher education; it is both a core element of ‘graduateness’ and a cornerstone of the mission of higher education institutions. However, although the discourse of critical thinking it is ubiquitous in higher education, it is often misunderstood as tangible, transferrable and measurable whereas in practice it is is complex and contextualised. In this paper I will argue that critical thinking is a tacit social practice that is not ideologically neutral and that this has implications for understanding and accounting for difference in the academy. The intention of this paper is to interrogate and trouble the practice of critical thinking across three thematic possibilities– firstly, relating neo-liberalism to the technologisation of critical thinking; secondly, unpacking the social context of criticality; and finally, exploring the affective consequences of embodying criticality. Although this is primarily a theoretical paper, each thematic possibility will be illustrated with preliminary data analysis of interviews with 14 first-year students at the small research intensive university in the UK, to be collected in October 2013.

Evans (2004) argues that higher education has shifted from a world where critical thought was prized to a world where universities are instead expected to fulfil the roles of the marketplace and act as training grounds for employment, leading to the ‘death’ of critical thinking. Reflecting back on the undergraduate students I have worked with previously, they often sought a quick fix within written assessment; seeing critical thinking as something as easy to judge its presence in writing as it is to check for correct spelling. Similarly, academic staff appeared to pigeonhole critical thinking as a measurable learning outcome but struggled to conceptualise, recognise

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and assess it. This seemed at odds with notions of critical thinking as a counter hegemonic; a form of individual and social transformation (Foucault, 1998; hooks, 2009). While critical thinking may not be ‘dead’, potentially these vignettes relate to the performance of a technicised, neutralised form of criticality. This has interesting parallels with Ball’s (1995) warning about a lack of theory in educational research working to ‘tame’ the academy. I argue that re-configuring the power within criticality is increasingly important at a time when, for example, work on student ‘lad culture’ in higher education (Phipps & Young, 2012) demonstrates that the academy remains a discriminatory space.

Addressing whether critical thinking as an intellectual standard accounts for diversity is also important at a time when the relationship between higher education and financial reward is being problematised (Morley, 2007). If notions of intellectual gain remain, what is the relative value of critical thinking as a positional good in a social world that differentiates opportunity on the lines of class, gender, race and culture? Bailin et al. (2000) discuss how the concept of critical thinking acts as a normative enterprise to regulate standards of writing and behaviour in higher education. Furthermore, Burke, (2012) outlines how critical thinking, like academic writing, acts as a form of exclusive practice that privileges particular gendered forms of knowledge and knowledge making. If critical thinking is an intellectual value that makes education ‘higher’; to what extent is the performance of critical thinking reliant on knowledge and language practices that are accessible only to the few? This paper, and the interview research, will explore normative models of critical student identity and student’s perceived understandings of how they relate to and potentially reshape these identities. This critical identity formation will be explored in relation to Archer’s (2000; 2007) work on the internal conversation, a process by which agents shape and reshape their internal, reflexive dialogue in order to move through the structures of an increasingly morphogenetic social world. I will argue that students necessarily negotiate their critical identities in relation to this privileged discourse and that, consequently, the enactment of critical thinking needs to be understood as socially contextualised rather than reduced to a set of cognitive competencies.

Finally, this paper will explore the affective and embodied aspects of criticality. Barnett (1997) argues that we should abandon notions of critical thinking for a more social, embodied understanding of critical being. I will argue firstly that this notion of ‘being’ needs to be further interrogated as critical behaviours are enacted through classed, raced and gendered beings. Secondly, I will explore the emotional consequences of critical behaviour using Ahmed’s (2010; 2012) theorisation of the affective aspects involved in occupying a counter-hegemonic, critical space. In particular, Ahmed talks about how human happiness is defined through our ability to be sociable, where those who do not share our ideas about goodness are read as ‘killjoy’s. This is similarly echoed by Ehrenreich (2010) who discusses how critical thinking presents an uncomfortable challenge in our increasingly ‘positive thinking’ society. Criticality may then potentially be at odds with the need for undergraduate students to develop positive social relationships with fellow students.

By ‘troubling’ the concept of critical thinking from these different angles, this paper will emphasise the importance of asking questions about power, privilege and difference in order to understand the complex social context and affective

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consequences operating within the seemingly transparent intellectual values of higher education.

ReferencesAhmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press.Archer, M. (2000). Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Archer, M. (2007). Making our Way Through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Bailin, S., Case, R., Coombs, J. & Daniels, L. (1999). Conceptualising Critical Thinking. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 31(3), 285-302. Ball, S.J. (1995). Intellectuals or Technicians? The Urgent Role of Theory in Educational Studies. British Journal of Educational Studies, 43(3), 255-271. Barnett, Ronald. (1997). Higher Education: A Critical Business. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education.Burke, P. (2012). The Right to Higher Education: Beyond Widening Participation. London: Routledge. Ehrenreich, B. (2010). Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. New York: Picador.Foucault, M. (1998) The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. London, Penguin.hooks, b. (2009). Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom . New York and London: Routledge.Morley, L. (2007). The X factor: Employability, Elitism and Equity in Graduate Recruitment. Twenty-First Century Society, 2(2), 191-207. Phipps, Alison and Young, Isabel (2012) That's what she said: women students' experience of 'lad culture' in higher education. London: National Union of Students.

Biography

Emily Danvers is a second-year doctoral student at the Centre for Higher Education

and Equity Research at the University of Sussex. After working in learning

development and widening participation, her research is interested in gender, diversity

and the student experience with her doctoral research is looking at the social context

and affective consequences of student critical thinking in higher education

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