The Temporal Disciplining of Doctoral Research in the Neoliberal Academy

2022 ◽  
pp. 238-258
Author(s):  
Deanna Grant-Smith ◽  
Abbe Winter

The neoliberal agenda in higher education has led to expectations and targets of market-likeness in student enrolment and completion demographics through the widening participation agenda. However, the reality is that disadvantaged groups such as students with a disability and Indigenous students are still underrepresented, particularly in advanced research degrees. This disadvantage is compounded by the temporal disciplining imposed by bureaucratically-defined completion deadlines. Taking Australia as a paradigmatic case, this chapter explores the temporal disciplining of doctoral research in the broader context of neoTaylorism and the projectification of research. It argues that a care-inspired slowness is needed to counterbalance the harms created by the managerialist push for ‘timely' completion.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Taylor ◽  
Paula Gleeson ◽  
Tania Teague ◽  
Michelle DiGiacomo

The role of unpaid and informal care is a crucial part of the health and social care system in Australia and internationally. As carers in Australia have received statutory recognition, concerted efforts to foster engagement in carer participation in work and education has followed. However, little is known about the strategies and policies that higher education institutions have implemented to support the inclusion of carers. This study has three components: first, it employs a review of evidence for interventions to support to support carers; second, it reviews existing higher education institutions’ policies to gauge the extent of inclusive support made available to student carers, and; third it conducts interviews with staff from five higher education institutions with concerted carer policies in Australia were held to discuss their institutions’ policies, and experiences as practitioners of carer inclusion and support. Results indicate difficulty in identifying carers to offer support services, the relatively recent measures taken to accommodate carers in higher education, extending similar measures which are in place for students with a disability, and difficulties accommodating flexibility in rigid institutional settings. A synthesis of these findings were used to produce a framework of strategies, policies and procedures of inclusion to support carers in higher education.


Author(s):  
Stacey Kim Coates ◽  
Michelle Trudgett ◽  
Susan Page

Abstract There is clear evidence that Indigenous education has changed considerably over time. Indigenous Australians' early experiences of ‘colonialised education’ included missionary schools, segregated and mixed public schooling, total exclusion and ‘modified curriculum’ specifically for Indigenous students which focused on teaching manual labour skills (as opposed to literacy and numeracy skills). The historical inequalities left a legacy of educational disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Following activist movements in the 1960s, the Commonwealth Government initiated a number of reviews and forged new policy directions with the aim of achieving parity of participation and outcomes in higher education between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Further reviews in the 1980s through to the new millennium produced recommendations specifically calling for Indigenous Australians to be given equality of access to higher education; for Indigenous Australians to be employed in higher education settings; and to be included in decisions regarding higher education. This paper aims to examine the evolution of Indigenous leaders in higher education from the period when we entered the space through to now. In doing so, it will examine the key documents to explore how the landscape has changed over time, eventually leading to a number of formal reviews, culminating in the Universities Australia 2017–2020 Indigenous Strategy (Universities Australia, 2017).


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-70
Author(s):  
Vanessa Van Bewer ◽  
Roberta L Woodgate ◽  
Donna Martin ◽  
Frank Deer

Learning about the historical and current context of Indigenous peoples’ lives and building campus communities that value cultural safety remains at the heart of the Canadian educational agenda and have been enacted as priorities in the Manitoba Collaborative Indigenous Education Blueprint. A participatory approach informed by forum theater and Indigenous sharing circles involving collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous health care professionals ( n = 8) was employed to explore the above priorities. Through the workshop activities, vignettes were created and performed to an audience of students and educators ( n = 7). The findings emerging from the workshop illuminated that Indigenous people in nursing and higher education face challenges with negotiating their identity, lateral violence and struggle to find safe spaces and people due to tokenism and a paucity of physical spaces dedicated to Indigenous students. This study contributed to provoking a greater understanding of Indigenous experiences in higher education and advancing reconciliation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-128
Author(s):  
Martin Nakata ◽  
Vicky Nakata ◽  
Andrew Day ◽  
Gregory Martin ◽  
Michael Peachey

This article presents an analysis of statements from Indigenous students in an Australian university that describe how they use supplementary tutors. The analysis provides some evidence that students use tutors for much more than the prescribed remedial purpose to assist with gaps in assumed academic knowledge and skills to prevent subject failures. Students also use tutors to access hidden knowledge and develop capabilities that assist their progress from dependence on assistance to independence in learning. Our analysis has implications for the conceptualisation and management of supplementary tutoring for Indigenous students.


2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Ainley ◽  
Martin Allen

Whilst widening participation to higher education was approaching New Labour's target of 50% of 18-30s (for women at least), it was presented as a professionalisation of the proletariat but in reality and in hindsight it can be seen to have disguised a proletarianisation of the professions - for which HE supposedly prepares its graduates - with many reduced to para-professions at best. It is argued therefore that education as a whole faces a credibility crunch. However, many have nowhere else to go since without qualifications they face falling into the so-called ‘underclass’ which was widely seen to have manifested itself in the riots of summer 2011. Like other commentators, we point out that the majority of youth did not riot and focus instead upon the children of the new working-middle class who are running up a down-escalator of devalued qualifications. This only intensifies national hysteria about education as the Coalition's reception of Browne's Review restricts competitive academic HE entry to those who can afford tripled fees, while relegating those who cannot to ‘Apprenticeships Without Jobs’ (cf. Finn 1987 ) in FE and private providers. With reference to Allen and Ainley (2011) , this paper speculates as to the likely outcome of this generational crisis.


2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Byrom

Whilst there has been growing attention paid to the imbalance of Higher Education (HE) applications according to social class, insufficient attention has been paid to the successful minority of working-class young people who do secure places in some of the UK’s leading HE institutions. In particular, the influence and nature of pre-university interventions on such students’ choice of institution has been under-explored. Data from an ESRC-funded PhD study of 16 young people who participated in a Sutton Trust Summer School are used to illustrate how the effects of a school-based institutional habitus and directed intervention programmes can be instrumental in guiding student choices and decisions relating to participation in Higher Education.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 110-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheryl Clark ◽  
Anna Mountford-Zimdars ◽  
Becky Francis

Rising tuition fees in England have been accompanied by a policy mandate for universities to widen participation by attracting students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This article focuses on one such group of high achieving students and their responses to rising tuition fees within the context of their participation in an outreach scheme at a research-intensive university in the UK. Our findings suggest that rather than being deterred from attending university as a result of fee increases, these young people demonstrated a detailed and fairly sophisticated understanding of higher education provision as a stratified and marketised system and justified fees within a discourse of ‘private good.’ Our analysis situates their ‘risk’ responses within the discursive tensions of the fees/widening participation mandate. We suggest that this tension highlights an intensified commodification of the relationship between higher education institutions and potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds in which widening participation agendas have shifted towards recruitment exercises. We argue that an ongoing effect of this shift has resulted in increased instrumentalism and a narrowing of choices for young people faced with the task of seeking out ‘value for money’ in their degrees whilst concurrently engaging in a number of personalised strategies aimed at compensating for social disadvantage in a system beset by structural inequalities.


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