scholarly journals Charting a course to an emerging field of 'research engagement studies': A conceptual meta-synthesis

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jude Fransman
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
International Development ◽  
Higher Education Policy ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Research Engagement ◽  
The Past ◽  
Narrow Definition ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Education Science

The past decades in the UK have witnessed renewed interest by policymakers, research funders and research institutions in the engagement of non-academic individuals, groups and organizations with research processes and products. There has been a broad consensus that better engagement leads to better impact, as well as significant learning around understanding engagement and improving practice. However, this sits in tension to a parallel trend in British higher education policy that reduces the field to a narrow definition of quantitatively measured impacts attributed to individual researchers, projects and institutions. In response, this article argues for the mobilization of an emerging field of 'research engagement studies' that brings together an extensive and diverse existing literature around understandings and experiences of engagement, and has the potential to contribute both strategically and conceptually to the broader impact debate. However, to inform this, some stocktaking is needed to trace the different traditions back to their conceptual roots and chart out a common set of themes, approaches and framings across the literature. In response, this article maps the literature by developing a genealogy of understandings of research engagement within five UK-based domains of policy and practice: higher education; science and technology; public policy (health, social care and education); international development; and community development. After identifying patterns and trends within and across these clusters, the article concludes by proposing a framework for comparing understandings of engagement, and uses this framework to highlight trends, gaps and ways forward for the emerging field.

MONARCHS, TRAVELLERS AND EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC'S AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Global History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Uk ◽  
A Site

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.

Gender Inequality and Intersectional Disadvantage among Students in South African Universities

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-172
Author(s):  
Oliver Tafadzwa Gore ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
South African ◽  
Higher Education Policy ◽  
Capabilities Approach ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
Higher Education Policies ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
South African Higher Education

Although policies to widen participation have been implemented in South African higher education since 1994, inequality of achievements persists in universities. The failure of the higher education policy to clearly define ‘disadvantage’ in various interventions seems to have contributed to the continuing inequalities. This study theorises disadvantage using the capabilities approach pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and argues for a more nuanced definition of disadvantage by exploring the opportunities, agency and achievements available to students in universities. The theorisation is based on findings from a qualitative case study of 26 semi-structured interviews conducted with students from one South African university. Using empirical findings, the theorisation in this study shows how the conversion factors intersect, resulting in some students achieving fewer functionings, which put them at a disadvantage. While gender equality seemingly has been achieved through enrolment figures that show parity levels, some female students are still disadvantaged through subtle forms of discrimination and sexual harassment in universities. This study therefore recommends that higher education policies should consider an expansive definition of disadvantage that encompasses the various dimensions of student wellbeing for all students to have flourishing lives.

Learning from Experience

1991 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-158
Author(s):  
Norman Evans
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Credit Rating ◽  
Learning From Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Academic Qualifications

The integration of in-house professional training with academic awards systems has developed rapidly in the UK over the past few years. The author sets out the basic rationale for credit rating of in-house company training for academic qualifications, maps the development of the trend in the UK, and argues that the benefits of this kind of collaboration between business and higher education can be substantial and wide-ranging for both parties.

scholarly journals Young People’s Services in an Age of Neoliberalism

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-206
Author(s):  
Graham Brotherton ◽  
Christina Hyland ◽  
Iain Jones ◽  
Terry Potter
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Young People ◽  
Higher Education Policy ◽  
Coalition Government ◽  
Youth Services ◽  
Policy Initiatives ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article brings together four different perspectives which explore the way in which various policy initiatives in recent years have sought to construct young people resident in the United Kingdom within particular policy discourses shaped by neoliberalism. In order to do this it firstly considers the way in which the assumptions of neoliberalism have increasingly been applied by the new Coalition Government to young people and the services provided for them; it then considers the particular role of New Labour in the UK in applying these ideas in practice. Specific examples from the areas of young people’s participation in youth services and higher education policy are then considered.

scholarly journals “Bologna Digital”—Actively Shaping the Digital Transformation in European Higher Education

2020 ◽  
pp. 583-596
Author(s):  
Dominic Orr ◽  
Florian Rampelt ◽  
Alexander Knoth
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Higher Education Policy ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Bologna Process ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Strategic Integration ◽  
Strategic Impact ◽  
European Higher Education ◽  
New Vision

Abstract Digital transformation will impact the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and could contribute to developing a new vision for the Bologna Process and for higher education in Europe and beyond. In recent years, research on European and national levels has shown increasing attention being paid to digitalisation and digital transformation by higher education leadership. The 2015 and 2018 Ministerial Communiqués also clearly emphasised the importance of the topic for the EHEA. Yet, a strategic integration of digitalisation into higher education policy and practice remains hard to find. This is for two main reasons: (1) because although digitalisation is often seen as a technical innovation, it must, in fact, be a social innovation for it to have any impact and (2) because higher education as a field of practice, especially in Europe, is a multi-layered system where strategic impact is only possible if all layers are broadly following the same objectives. With reference to policy theory, the authors conjectured that reducing goal conflict and practice ambiguity would help to facilitate a more integrative digital policy and practice. With this aim, the authors launched a White Paper in 2019 to facilitate broad agreement on the potential of digitalisation within the Bologna framework. This contribution provides an interim evaluation of the initiative and its next steps. In this, it provides a reflexive review of how practitioners and researchers in the field might hope to influence policymaking and practice in the area of digitalisation.

The contradictions of policy and practice: creativity in higher education

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain MacLaren
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Workplace Stress ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Policy Context ◽  
Collaborative Exploration ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Creativity And Innovation

Whilst much of the rhetoric of current educational policy champions creativity and innovation, structural reforms and new management practices in higher education run counter to the known conditions under which creativity flourishes. As a review of recent literature suggests, surveillance, performativity, the end of tenure and rising levels of workplace stress are all closing off the space for real creative endeavour, characterised as it is by risk-taking, collaborative exploration and autonomy. Innovation, as conceived in this policy context (i.e., that of the UK and Ireland), is narrow in scope and leaves little room for critical re-examination of the nature of education itself or radical reconceptions of curriculum, raising the question as to whether such are more likely to arise extra mural , from new forms of organisation.

Cultures of breastfeeding: reflections for policy and practice

2018 ◽  
pp. 163-168
Author(s):  
Sally Tedstone ◽  
Geraldine Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Student Learning ◽  
Infant Feeding ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Clinical Placements ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Two Sectors

As an infant feeding specialist in midwifery practice and a university senior lecturer in midwifery, we have had some very interesting discussions about the work presented in this group of chapters. It has become clear to us that what midwifery students learn is heavily influenced by the practice they observe while on clinical placements. This may seem obvious, but from our perspective the pressures that higher education and the NHS face in the current climate of austerity in the UK have resulted in a squeeze on opportunities for dialogue, feedback and reflection between the two sectors, and we feel that this has a potential impact on the quality of student learning....

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