Brett Kavanaugh, Anger and the Purpose of Higher Education

As confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh‘s Supreme Court seat came through I picked up and re-read Audre Lorde’s “The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”.  My attention was drawn to the women protesting, and their anger.  It was as if I was seeing Lorde’s words on the political potency of anger wrought large on the screen. I underlined the following passage:

But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening action of clarification,  for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine allies.

Simultaneously, I see how the new Australian Prime Minister and the extreme right wing Presidential candidate in Brazil (and no doubt many others) respond to the imminent collapse of the human ecosystem with muscular defences of coal mining and stripping the rain forests.

I see the triumph of injustice and mysogeny, I hear the terrible toxic calls for environmental death and wonder what is the point of my concerns about university teaching and the degradation of knowledge work.  I ask if there is a place for Lorde’s anger in the small worlds we inhabit in our colleges and schools?  Of course, this sense of uselessness goes directly to the always present question: what is the purpose of higher education?  What is the purpose of higher education when faced with the triumph of mysogeny and racism?  What is the purpose of higher education when faced with the muscular rush to devastation (like the fetishisation of death by some of the Futurists)? Can anger, the translation of anger into action in the service of new visions of higher education, be the basis of concern about teaching and learning?

I ask this as I prepare for a teaching and learning conference in Norway.  The paper and workshop my colleagues and I are preparing appears relevant to our times “How Do We Support Diversity in Higher Education through Decoding the Disciplines?”.  We are concerned with how we work with students, in the normal curriculum, to develop positive dispositions towards diversity and difference.  Though not explicit in our current articulation of this, this is about an idea of education that concerns opening students to the world, of education as concerned with an orientation to the world and not so much the interior concerns of the disciplines.  It is about the idea that higher education should be focused on the existential issues that face us.

One possible implication of this is that we need to enact a different kind of university, one that is premised on the idea that higher education is concerned with developing amongst our students a desire to ‘be in the world’, as Gert Biesta names it.  This being in the world requires, argues Biesta, a sense of being responsible in relation to ourselves, to others, and the world we inhabit.  This requires an education that is disruptive – to ask the question “Is what I desire, desirable?”.  This is not about forming strong ideological identities.  We are, of course, all free to desire things that might not be desirable (to escalate coal production even as we are told of the imminent collapse of our ecosystem).  But, the form of education advocated by Biesta, and links with Lord’s creative anger, is that we have to be responsible for our desires and choices and options.

This idea of education, of enacting the university, is quite distinct from seeing it as in the business of human capital production for competitive economies (though this might be a by-product) or improving institutional status competion through increasing high impact publications (though this might be a by-product).

The anger expressed in response to the Kavanaugh hearing and the dismissal of the abuse of women arises from a being in the world, of a sense of responsbility in and to the world and to others that contrasts with the desire for power and revenge (hatred not anger) of those wishing to appoint Kavanaugh.  He will vote for weaker environmental protections at a time when our existance is perilous, who will not vote to curb the concentration of power at a time when fascist tendencies are working through elected office, who will vote to make the theocratic state responsbile for women’s bodies.  A higher education that sees employability as a greater value than a responsibility to the world and others, or a higher education that sees university rankings as of greater value than the questioning of desire, is not an education worth having and will not challenge the tendencies that endanger democracy and sustainability.

Perhaps we need a higher education that works with anger and transforms it to enact a new kind of university premised upon an orientation and responsibility to the world.

The Tyranny of Metrics in Higher Education Racialisation of Critique

Book Review

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller (2018) Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 320 pages.

‘Metric Fixation’ is the organising concept of Jerry Z. Muller’s critique of the contemporary audit culture in public institutions.  This concept captures well the way many working in public sector institutions see the obsessions and caprices of managers and leaders, and the growth of reporting that appears to dominate professional life.  The book is centred on a series of case studies through which metric fixation is explained and explicated – Colleges and Universities, Schools, Medicine, Policing, The Military, Business and Financing, Philanthropy and Foreign Aid.  It is this personal experience of being made ‘accountable’ through various systems of performance management that led this Professor of History to write a critique of a substantial area of public policy and governance.  In part, being a non-specialist enables him to traverse across different disciplinary fields.  The weakness of this, I feel, is that the scope of the enterprise is too broad.  There are too many professional fields that he seeks to explore through the prism of metric fixation resulting in a very uneven book.  Some fields, such as higher education and medicine, receive a fulsome review, whilst others, such as policing and philanthropy attract much less attention.  The primary geographical focus of the book, and hence the case studies is America, though there are references to the UK as a leading proponent of metric fixation as a tool of public policy and governance.  The book is a review rather than a new piece of empirical inquiry.  However, it serves the purpose of clarifying how metric fixation has been deployed as an aspect of neoliberal politics across a wide range of professional fields.  Although the review is critical in that the author highlights the way metric fixation distorts professional practice and priorities, often at the expense of professional authenticity and the detriment, sometimes harm, to the public, it is not a critique in the sense of questioning the very idea of the university as a public institution involved in the constitution of subjectivities (citizens for instance) and public goods.  In this sense, the review and perspective are conservative in that it seeks to conserve certain ways of being and practising.  For me, there was a troubling tone to some of the commentary.  When reviewing Colleges and Universities and Schools the author deployed a cultural conservative interpretation of the position of African American students and communities.  Again, this reveals the underlying conservative nature of the analysis and intent.

The central organising concept of the book is that of ‘metric fixation’, the political and organisational focus on systems and processes of performance measurement that is assumed to lead to improvements in public sector bodies.  This enables Muller to investigate systems and discourses of accountability in interesting ways.  It allows him to open discourses of accountability and shift our understanding away from the political rhetoric of making public bodies democratically accountable to the government and the population at large, to an appreciation that this translates into accountability as making one´s professional practice amenable to systems of accountancy.  Of course, this insight and its epistemological and ontological consequences have been examined elsewhere.  Notably, such accounting or auditing undermines the whole idea of professional judgement, replacing it with output indices that are more easily counted and comparable.  Additionally, metrics are linked to rewards and punishments of different kinds (performance related pay, productivity targets, performance reviews, etc.).  Of note is that metrics rely on outputs of particular kinds, those that can be measured, and definitely not inputs that might require qualitative judgement.  Important to Muller’s argument is that while methods of measuring performance might well be beneficial to improved service (he draws on service improvements in health care for this mostly) he highlights how auditing systems encourage those who are measured to game the system.  A particularly troubling example he provides is of surgeons who select low-risk cases in order to meet the performance metrics, a practice that can lead to more high-risk patients not being attended to and potentially dying.   These metrics then, become a proxy for ‘quality’ without ever really explicating what that means. Technical issues (which variable or metric to use) disguise the value systems at play.  Metrics, in this regard, become systems of moral regulation.

The main body of the book consists of a series of case studies: Colleges and Universities; Schools; Medicine; Policing; The Military; Business and Finance; Philanthropy and Foreign Aid.  I will concentrate on Colleges and Universities.

Higher education systems globally have been under pressure to increase participation and completion rates on the one hand and to increase prestige through research funding and research outputs.  I have discussed this dual rationality elsewhere.  Muller refers to the ways higher education has been subject to processes and discourses of marketisation and commercialisation.  He draws attention to how this is related to the hegemony of human capital formation theory in higher education policy, the presumption that increased participation and completion will lead to an increase in the national stock of human capital, and thereby increase a country’s economic capacity and competitiveness.  Despite plenty of research to counter this theory and assumption, the policy endures. This, Muller argues, results in various forms of expansion of administration, cheating or gaming the system.  Governments, keen to achieve ‘value for money’ establish bureaucracies (auditing and accountability agencies of different kinds). The prestige economy of higher education is organised in relation to global university rankings.  Faced by this bureaucracy institutions invest in marketing and quality assurance functions, which can often be at the expense of the university’s core educational role.  It is as if the primary purpose of institutions becomes that of meeting the requirements of auditing.  Those of us in higher education and who study it are familiar with this evidence and these arguments.  Muller does not add substantively to the current knowledge base, other than linking these particular processes to similar ones across the public sector.

Muller’s argument, I propose, is a conservative one in that the implicit narrative is for a conserving of the status quo.  For instance, he points to the issue of grade inflation.  This is something that Pierre Bourdieu analysed.  Although Muller rightly points out that increasing participation and completion rates in higher education actually undermines this measurement as a proxy for human capital, he reverts to a more conservative understanding of this problem.   In the absence of a concept such as homology, as deployed by Bourdieu, Muller does not see how the restructuring of the economy, and therefore nuanced changes in class formation, is reflected in the restructuring of higher education.  Formal qualifications, such as the BA, act as proxies for skill and knowledge in order to facilitate the passage of what would formerly have been manual labour into white collar jobs.  This is not because we have all become middle class but that the structures of class and education have been re-worked.  Education continues to function as a system of social reproduction.  Muller misses this point when he refers to the problem of students entering higher education ill-prepared for higher studies.  There is an apparent assumption that there is something in the individuals themselves that means they require what Muller calls remedial education.  There is nothing in his analysis that suggests that because of the socially reproductive nature of education and the homologous structures across economy and education, the business of elite schools has always been to ‘prepare’ their students for entry to college, to learn the cultural performances required for successful participation.  There is silence in his analysis of the social and cultural strangeness of higher education (and pedagogy) to many young people now, which is why he uses the language of ‘remedial’.

Muller’s cultural conservative analysis continues in the chapter on schools where it becomes highly racialised.  He spends much of the chapter considering the failure of measures to close the attainment gap in American schools, especially in relation to black and Hispanic pupils.  He does refer to the classic argument that schools by themselves cannot compensate for society.  However, he smuggles in the culturalist idea that there is something in the culture of the working class, or blacks, or Hispanics that means that they do not achieve educationally.

“Good schools” tend to be those populated by pupils who are brighter, more curious, and more self-controlled; and tend to be the offspring of people who are themselves relatively bright, curious, and self-disciplined. (98)

Social and racial reproduction through education, therefore, has no connection to class or white privilege according to Muller.  While he seeks to counter and question the paradigm of metric fixation, he does so to preserve and conserve the social order.  But, this should not lead us to think that Muller’s conservative argument against metrics is in some way an outlier in the crisis of higher education discourse.  Far from it.  There is much in the pushback against metric fixation that is blind to the normatively discriminatory practices of higher education.  If we want to think higher education otherwise we need more radical critiques.

 

 

The Darker Side of Higher Education: The Atlantic Economy, Epistemic Imperialism, and the Decolonial Option (a research project)

This blog has been dormant for a while, waiting for me to re-imagine my social media profile.  But I have been encouraged by a range of new readers to revive the blog, even if only temporarily.  I am in process of moving to Roskilde University to work with Eva Bendix Petersen.  This is an exciting opportunity for me.  Roskilde will be my academic domicile and it is because of this imminent move that I have been lax in keeping up with social media. For this post, I have chosen to share a substantial intellectual project that I am beginning.  This project builds on previous explorations presented at the Sociological Association of Ireland conference in 2017.  The broad project is to imagine higher education otherwise. The text below will be developed further over the coming months.

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The Darker Side of Higher Education – a project

Everywhere around us we hear of the ‘crisis’ of higher education.  The fact that the ‘crisis’ is articulated through a generalised object: higher education and global university rankings are tabulated in terms of atomised institutions rather than national systems, provides a glimpse into an underlying logic of higher education.  The underlying logic is that the global system of higher education which, in its heartlands of Europe and America, is experiencing a crisis of purpose, is typical of the long history of higher education rather than a contemporary aberration. The underlying logic of the current moment of heightened competition and accelerated academic labour is an imperial and colonial one.  The ‘crisis’ discourse is a crisis of purpose within this logic rather than against it.  If we seek to resolve the contemporary crisis without critiquing it through a transnational history that demonstrates the intimate relationship between empire, colonisation, epistemic dominance, and institutions of higher education then we are in grave danger of re-inscribing an imperial and colonising logic.

What kind of crisis is the ‘crisis’ of higher education?

The core features of the emerging political economy of a global higher education system can be defined by the tension between two political rationalities – economic competition (demands that higher education produce discernible economic benefits for national economies ) and status competition (global university rankings and publication metrics ) and how these are translated into models of governance and funding priorities (systemic level); performance management, recruitment and progression systems (institutional level); and individual strategies to negotiate between personal and institutional objectives and work-life balance (subjective level).  A number of key critiques of this political economy have been mounted by various scholars such as Stefan Collini, drawing out what makes it a ‘crisis’, particularly in relation to various articulations of higher education and the outcomes of scientific endeavour as ‘public goods’.  This ‘crisis’ discourse, however, can be interrogated from the perspective of the global south, specifically the trenchant critiques offered by scholars/activists working with the coloniality of power perspectives such as Maria Lugones, Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Anibal Quijano. This perspective makes it possible to highlight the a-historical nature of the ‘crisis’ discourse and how it fails to engage with the conterminous history of empire, colonial expansion, violence, expropriation, and slavery and that of the emergence of the modern university, and that colonial structures of power infuse both the ‘crisis’ and its alternatives.  A transnational history of modern (Westernised) higher education is therefore required.  My work is arguing that an empirical focus on Britain, Ireland and the USA is justified in relation to the thesis put forward by Walter Mignolo that the Enlightenment, upon which the idea of the modern university is founded, is an integral part of European colonial expansion westwards into the Caribbean and Americas.  This analysis argues that in a similar fashion to the Iberian expansion west in the sixteenth century, Britain’s colonial expansion west and later eastwards has imprinted itself on contemporary higher education.  Two illustrative examples of how the emergence of higher education in Britain was co-constitutive of colonialism can be used here:  an account of how the rise of a mercantile class based on wealth from slavery in the Atlantic economy financed the growth of some of England’s leading universities and provides the economic basis for their position as leading global institutions; the second example focuses on the relationship between Scottish universities and development of medical education in the American colonies, referring to the use of the bodies of slaves to build medical knowledge and aid the establishment of modern medical education.

Britain’s western empire, specifically Ireland and America constitute a necessary empirical locus for a transnational history of the ‘crisis’ of higher education.  Ireland is examined in terms of how it was constituted as a semi-peripheral zone in the expanding British Empire and how higher education was constitutive of imperial knowledge entwined with domination and subjection domestically and across the Empire. It is proposed that the semi-peripheral nature of Ireland in the Empire continues to frame the development of higher education in the Republic of Ireland.  American hegemony of higher education is examined in terms of how the dominant imaginaries of higher education are based on slavery, racial science, and violence against Native Americans.

Thinking through the darker side of higher education

The Decolonial Option: Coloniality of power and its challenge to dominant studies of higher education

The main elements of the thesis are that the Atlantic economy is the foundation of capitalism; that the Atlantic economy, particularly the expropriation of resources and enslavement, generated the wealth that enabled the Renaissance and Enlightenment and thus the development of European universities; the intellectual elites in the dominant European powers represented certain strands of European thought as the pinnacle of human achievement; these ways of conceiving the world, organising knowledge, and evaluating knowledge became instruments of colonialism, that it is the close relation between modernity and colonialism that transformed local knowledge (Renaissance and Enlightenment) into universal knowledge, and that these ways of knowing and the associated global power relations persist in the modern world.  The terms of the debates in higher education studies and the ‘crisis’ of higher education present themselves as not being rooted geopolitically (in modernity/coloniality) or bio-graphically (the gender and racial structure of this knowledge).  Consequently, responses to the ‘crisis’ of higher education maintain the global hierarchy of knowledge.  The decolonial option is presented as advocating not an alternative universality but an ecology of knowledge or pluriversity.

Ireland: Settler Colonialism, Imperial Knowledge, and Platform Economy

Ireland’s integration into Britain’s Atlantic economy from the sixteenth century onwards transformed Ireland’s economic and social structures.  The Irish economy became dominated by and subjugated to the demands of the Atlantic economy – the restructuring of agriculture to feed Britain’s colonial expansion west; the organisation of Ireland’s key ports to service the westward expansion; the organisation of industry a) to service British colonial expansion and b) not compete with British industries.  Ireland’s social structure was transformed in relation to these economic and cultural processes.

The long emergence of higher education in Ireland, from the founding of Trinity College Dublin (1592) to the Queen’s Colleges (1845).  Two perspectives can be used to explain how a higher education system emerged in Ireland from the sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century.  The establishment of Trinity College Dublin (1592) can be interpreted through the perspective of settler colonialism and the role of TCD in the establishment of a colonial elite.  The move towards establishing the Queen’s Colleges (1845) in Belfast, Cork, Dublin, and Galway is explained in terms of incorporating two denominational classes into Britain’s Imperial project, particularly as Britain sought to develop its eastern Empire.  It can be argued that the founding of the Queen’s Colleges aimed to incorporate a dissenting Protestant tradition in the North East of Ireland who had been attracted to republican ideologies, particularly in the United Irishmen movement in 1789. An emerging Catholic Middle class that had been mobilised around demands for Catholic Emancipation were also a focus for incorporation within the British Imperial project.  The non-denominational basis of the Queen’s Colleges was a deliberate strategy to attract support from these denominational groups.

The Irish universities came to play a central role in the development and dissemination of Imperial knowledge.  The Geological Surveys of Ireland and then India demonstrate how scientific knowledge related to the mapping of Ireland and India were instrumental in normalising Imperial control, as cartographies of power and legitimation. The surveys also provided an infrastructure for military and mercantile control.

Human capital theory and models of inward foreign investment came to frame the development of Irish higher education policy in the 20th and into the 21st centuries.  Participation in American policy discussions led senior Irish civil servants to advance an economic and education strategy of human capital development from the 1950s onwards. The concept of the ’platform economy’ sheds light on the contemporary economic rationale for Irish higher education policy.  The economic subordination of Ireland to the USA post-1945 mirrors its subordination to British interests in the Atlantic economy.  Post-1945 is seen as the recreation of the Atlantic economy for American interests.

United States: American exceptionalism, slavery and genocide 

America’s Ivy League colleges demonstrate the intimate connection between settler colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, and the establishment of institutions of higher education.  Burgeoning contemporary research into the relationship between higher education and slavery describe how the early colonial period established this relationship, with the emergent colleges being financed by slavery and providing a professional class for the British colonies in the Caribbean and the slave economy in the south of the American colonies.  This relationship continued into the post-independence period.  The elite nature of the Ivy League colleges and their vast endowments, premised in large part on the slave trade, have provided the material basis upon which these institutions have established their world reputation, and status in global rankings.

The historic expansion of American higher education is based on the expropriation of Native American lands and their violent expulsion from those lands.  The systematic violence against Native Americans was an aspect of the early colonial period, with the eastern seaboard being colonised through consecutive wars.  The expansion west of the United States following the Civil War also relied upon slavery.  However, the westward expansion that created the conditions for the Land Grant universities relied upon the systematic expulsion of Native Americans from their lands, leading to a catastrophic destruction of their social order.  The founding of the Land Grant universities, therefore, constitutes an act of aggression, further underlining the intimate relationship between enslavement, violence and American higher education.  America’s higher education system would provide a necessary basis for the emergence of the United States as the dominant economic force in the new Atlantic economy.

Post-1945 American academia came to dominate intellectual thought globally.  At least two case studies could be used to illustrate this: the impact of American anthropology on South America, on how South America was represented to the world through this, and how it was represented back to South American intellectuals; and how American sociology came to dominate the emerging discipline.  These cases provide the means to demonstrate how epistemological imperialism (and so the coloniality of power) operates in the modern period.

Global Rankings and Human Capital as Continuities in the Coloniality of Power

This project puts forward the argument that the contemporary transformation of global higher education through the two political rationalities of economic and status competition are strategic moves to secure economic and political domination of North America and Britain against the rise of emerging economies and higher education systems, for instance in China.  Global rankings, publication metrics, research finance, and control of academic publishing concentrates epistemological power in a few countries and élite institutions.  I argue that what we see here is not the diminishing of coloniality but what Mignolo and others term the imperial divide – the contestation over domination between competing empires.  Discourses of the ‘crisis’ of higher education are insufficient if they operate within the logic of the coloniality of power and that they inadvertently reinforce epistemological hierarchies. The ‘crisis’ of higher education discourses may, indeed, be acts of epistemic violence.

Sociology of Irish Higher Education or An Irish Sociology of Higher Education? The Challenge of Southern Theory. #SAIConf2017

The second paper I gave at the Sociological Association of Ireland conference in Belfast recently is an offshoot of my work on the impact of research performance measure on academic practice and identity.  The abstract is as below:

What would happen if we viewed Irish higher education through the lens of southern theory. Southern theory argues that dominant epistemologies appear as if from no particular geohistorical location, so pertaining to be universal. Yet, these epistemologies are reflections of and inherent in the imperialism and colonialism of the metropolitan centres of Western Europe and North America. Universal knowledge is, in fact, the imperialism of Europe’s parochialism^1&2 and universities have been implicit in epistemic violence as a basis for colonial power³. We need to ask whether, in interpreting Irish higher education, we have simply imported the thematic concerns of the metropole, accepted a subaltern position, and so neglected to develop a unique perspective that takes seriously Ireland as a post-colony⁴.

What might an Irish sociology of Higher Education look like?

• This sociology would acknowledge that it speaks from somewhere, emerges from a particular geohistorical experience of colonialism, settler colonialism, nationalist nation-building, and globalization;
• It would seek to re-story the history and dynamics of higher education in Ireland from that perspective, working with, beyond, and against the dominant concepts of the metropole;
• It would speak between epistemologies⁵, critiquing both the continuing coloniality of power and nationalist ideology – an ecology of knowledge⁶.

¹Mignolo, D. (2000) The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, South Atlantic Quarterly 101(1): 57–96.

²Quijano, A. (2007) Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Cultural Studies 21(2): 168–78.

³Grosfoguel, R. (2013) The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11(1): 73-90.

⁴Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.

⁵Khatibi, A. (1990) Love in Two Languages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

⁶Santos, S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide. London: Paradigm.

The paper was presented as a sociological story,

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1. A BOOK

I open the newly arrived book, running my hand across its cover. I am conscious about how opportune its publication is, arriving when my mind is turned again to considering the political economy of higher education. I am working on a research proposal – how research performance management impacts on academic practice and identity in the more peripheral zones of Europe. Poland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Iceland, Slovenia, Croatia…Ireland, all buffeted by similar forces of the knowledge economy and globalisation, pushing us to reconsider the purposes and practices of knowledge production and dissemination, of knowledge work itself. These are well-worn tropes, and Simon Marginson is a well-known articulator of how higher education is becoming globalised, how it is being wrenched from its national moorings.  As a scholar, I am committed to a notion of knowledge work as a common good. So, the title of Marginson’s new book “Higher Education and the Common Good” is obviously attractive. I know his work, have followed its development over time, informed by his key concepts I have been able to look beyond the immediate actions of managers, beyond the demands I place upon myself to be productive in specific ways, and can see the more general dynamic forces at play in the intimate lifeworlds of my colleagues and friends.

But my reading is disrupted. My assuredness in my epistemological position has ben challenged, has been questioned. I have always been uncertain about the way these texts, these sociologies of higher education, are empty of life, empty of the passions and pain endured by flesh and blood people. I have never been properly able to connect the misery, the excited anticipation of my own heartfelt life as an academic in their people-less words. But this is a different disruption. I read Marginson’s book as if two people. One scans the words, the familiarity of the conceptual framing, and familiarity of the argumentative flow. It describes my world as I have come to experience it. But the other reader focuses in on core words and raises a hand, telling me to pause and consider, consider what perhaps is also being said here, something fundamental.

Although he seeks to provide a long historical and broad geographical view of higher education and its relation to the common good, he admits that the animating model of a globalised higher education is that of the United States. Here he proposes that the idea of mass higher education itself is specifically given by the American history of higher education expansion, noting its beginning in the ‘land grant’ colleges initiated under Lincoln and the subsequent expansion following WW2, and the institutionalisation of America as a global power in part through its universities and colleges.

Although this is the kind of historical narrative I am familiar with, and have been comfortable with, it now disturbs and upsets. In this narrative of America’s internal expansion of higher education there is a complete absence of how America itself and so its system of higher education was founded upon processes of appropriation, dispossession, enslavement and violence.

 

2. SEMIOTICS

Each morning I pass the original buildings of the university – the quadrangle. Everyone here knows its image, used in all marketing materials, often alongside the newest biotechnology labs. Old and modern in equal measure.

The front cover of the university’s strategic report, Vision 2020, depicts the ‘quadrangle’, a semiotic reminder of Galway’s origins as one of the “Queen’s Colleges”. Without any sense of reflexive pause Vision 2020 notes that the institution was established in the context of the Irish Famine. The running of this statement alongside its corporate text of excellence and achievements should, I feel, cause a pause, a moment of reflection.

In 1845 the foundation stones of Queen’s College Galway were being laid at the edge of the city. From the new Quadrangle building, in 1849, the first intake of 68 students looked out across empty fields and a city ravaged by fear. But, the text reads, the University founders did not allow those challenges to limit their ambitions. Continuing with this heroic narrative the document proclaims that their work began a tradition of scholarship and discovery that would confront the problems of the day, and empower their city and region to prosper. Prosperity on top of misery.

The historic tragedy of the famine becomes, in this institutional document, no more than a marker of heritage. It hides the way imperial epistemologies work. The famine was unique in 19th century Europe and occurred in the centre of the largest empire on earth, amongst those, following the Act of Union, who were UK subjects like those in London, Birmingham, Cardiff or Glasgow. The historical development of Ireland, integrated as it was in the Imperial economy, made it a net exporter of goods, specifically foodstuffs. Consequently, the famine happened in the midst of an expansion of Irish food exports.

 

3. INTERLUDE

Voices cluster around my ears – Mignolo, Bhambra, Grosfoguel, Anzaldua, Santos, Quijano. These are not the names I am used to in reading and thinking a sociology of higher education.

They plant troubling questions in my mind, make my reading treacherous, unsettling. Their arguments are unfamiliar but potent, persuasive, touching.

Once familiar concepts and frameworks are reworked, rendered fresh by conversation with the liberating vocabulary of my new interlocutors – coloniality of power, empires of the mind, epistemic fundamentalism, border thinking. It is dizzying, fundamental, exciting.

 

4. ANOTHER BOOK

A different book cover, but a similar set of omissions. Patrick Clancy’s comparative study of Irish higher education is certainly ambitious in its attempt to map the development and expansion of contemporary Irish higher education. He notes how the sector has become a focus for sustained attention following the economic and financial crises. The thesis is now predictable – higher education is being reformed in face of the knowledge economy and globalisation, both economic globalisation and the integration of national economies into global markets, including that of higher education.

Clancy’s narrative is curiously ahistorical. Admitting to a form of methodological nationalism, Irish higher education begins in 1921. The idea of universities being constitutive elements of empire and colonialism, let alone settler colonialism, is absent from the account:

“While universities and other higher education institutions are creatures of the nation state, increasingly analysts feel that a single-country perspective fails to provide an adequate frame of reference for understanding the dynamic of higher education in contemporary societies”

Was it ever the case that higher education in Ireland was not coterminous with a globalisation of power and economy?

Was it ever the case that what might be considered Irish higher education was primarily a construct of the nation state?

ANSWERS?

A) IRELAND AS PART OF A GLOBALISED ECONOMY

There is a specific history of empire that makes sense of the awful condition of famine when a university was founded in Galway, when rampant want and death coexisted with the export of foodstuffs, and the legislated neglect of imperial subjects. It is a history of Ireland’s integration into a British imperial economy as England expanded west, Ireland incorporated into England’s Atlantic Economy that would include the trade in human souls whose surplus value would make possible the American dream of mass higher education. The transformation of a potential independent Irish economy into the producer of foodstuffs specifically to feed imperial expansion, dispossession, and terror. By 1845 the Irish economy could not feed its own people and feed imperial expansion.

 

B) IRELAND AND IMPERIAL KNOWLEDGE

As well as foodstuffs for Empire, Ireland became the locale for the production of imperial epistemologies, Ireland as part of what Andrew Porter calls EMPIRES OF THE MIND.

– Ireland, simultaneously a partner in the Union and subject nation, supplied large numbers of imperial administrators.

– Between 1855-1863 24% of all Indian civil service recruits were from Ireland because the Queen’s Colleges of Belfast, Cork and Galway had a particular role in supplying administrators to the Indian Civil Service.

Archives can be wonderful places, revealing treasures. One such treasure, presaging the current obsession with performativity, was the 1901 Royal Commission on University Education in Ireland. We see the President of University College Galway defending the performance of the college against sever criticism on the basis of its contribution to the Indian Civil Service

“Galway graduates, for example, were prominent in the Indian medical and engineering services as well as filling various imperial and quasi-imperial positions…”

We can hear these words echoing through the centuries, repeated now in university league tables and parliamentary committees.

 

5. A PROPOSAL

The construction of an Irish sociology of higher education, as distinct from a sociology of Irish higher education, is not the articulation of a new national(ist) history. While I argue that it is important to understand contemporary political economy of higher education through the lens of Ireland as a post-colony, I do so in order to locate it in broader global networks, and thus not to reify and homogenise the idea of Ireland.

In proposing that we ‘speak from somewhere’, from the condition of Ireland, I speak from the particularity of the West of Ireland. This is not a purely geographical location. The West is a creation of the coloniality of power, a first colony in European Atlantic expansion, caught up in the hegemonic contestation between ascendant Spanish and Portuguese empires. The West is a consequence of Elizabethan and especially Cromwellian dispossession, expulsion and violence that subalternised Ireland and particularly the West – a process continued in numerous ways in the context of a post-colony.

Ramon Grosfoguel notes that,

“The Western/masculinist idea that we can produce knowledges that are unpositioned, unlocated, neutral, and universalistic is one of the most pervasive mythologies in the modern/colonial world”

Instead, we need to account for the geopolitics of our knowledge production. Inherent in this proposition is the suggestion that thinking Irish higher education otherwise is a project of epistemic decolonisation.

Bibliography

Ballantyne, T. (2005) ‘The Sinews of Empire: Ireland, India and the construction of British colonial knowledge’, in Terence McDonagh (Ed) Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, politics and culture in nineteenth-century Ireland. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.

Clancy, P. (2015) Irish Higher Education: A Comparative Perspective. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration.

Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Grosfoguel, R. (2013) The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11(1): 73-90.

Khatibi, A. (1990) Love in Two Languages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Marginson, S. (2016) Higher Education and the Common Good. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Mignolo, D. (2000) The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, South Atlantic Quarterly 101(1): 57–96.

Mignolo, W., D. and Tlostanova, V. (2006) Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting the geo-and body politics of knowledge. European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2): 205-221.

O’Hearn, D. (2005) ‘Ireland in the Atlantic Economy’, in Terence McDonagh (Ed) Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, politics and culture in nineteenth-century Ireland. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.

Quijano, A. (2007) Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Cultural Studies 21(2): 168–78.

Santos, S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide. London: Paradigm.

 

ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE INTERNATIONALISATION AGENDA IN HIGHER EDUCATION #SAIConf2017

I had the pleasure to attend the Sociological Association of Ireland conference in Belfast last week.  One paper I presented was based on work I have done with my colleague Lisa Moran, and her critical inquiry into the experience of being an ‘international student’.  Lisa presented on this research at the SAI last year, and I presented some of the work at the European Conference on Educational Research at UCD last summer.  That presentation was part of a symposium related to a large project examining ethical internationalisation in higher education.  On the basis of that Lisa and myself were invited to work up our paper for submission to a special issue of the European Educational Research Journal, on ethical internationalisation.  The presentation in Belfast was based on that paper.

Below, I summarise the Belfast presentation.

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The presentation explored how the Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) makes it possible to re-story internationalisation in ways that recognise the agency of international students, produces narratives where international students themselves speak to, around, about, and of internationalisation, and enables us to trouble dominant discourses on higher education internationalisation. While the BNIM approach is comparable to other narrative interviewing approaches, it is the iterative method of BNIM that enables the production of powerful narratives.  Lisa is the expert on BNIM so my presentation focused on mostly on other aspects of the research, particularly the ethical dimension.

I presented some highly selective extracts from the extended interviews conducted with those individuals who participated in the research, compared these to the way students are narrated in policy discourse, then discussed how BNIM made it possible to produce these narratives, and finally to argue such narratives enable us to trouble dominant policy discourses.

THE STUDY

A key argument made in the presentation was that individuals are constituted as international students by being caught up in networks of texts (such as national or institutional strategies), local organisational practices, interpersonal interactions, and improvisations in living.

‘I don’t see why the college thinks we are different although it treats us as different…. I had to pay 2 years of fees for 1 year in first year and get a reimbursement in the future and that’s because I’m international’ (Amy 24)

This extract refers to the way students are constituted as ‘international’ and thus different through administrative systems.

While Amy recounted her own ideas of being international that were very much to do with expanding her social, cultural and intellectual horizons, particularly as a woman, this contrasted with how she was constituted by the institution as an international student.

IT IS BY BEING CAUGHT UP IN ADMINISTRATIVE PROCESSES THAT A PERSON IS CONSTITUTED AS DIFFERENT.

‘Irish are just like onions… you have to peel back the layers to know what they are saying…. Like what you’re all really saying…’ (laughs) (Louisa 37)

‘We say everything really directly but here there is a subtext… an agenda. People will cancel at the last minute…. Now I’ve adopted that too…. I’ll just do as the Irish do and when I go back to Germany, I’m German again’ (Katherine 26)

Policy discourse stresses intercultural competence as a positive aspect of mobility as a central feature of internationalisation.

Intercultural competence certainly featured in the narratives of the students.  However, it took on a different quality to that found in policy discourse.  Intercultural competence for the students was emplaced, lived, often anxious, and positioned them as other.

Interestingly, most of the women did not speak about internationalisation in terms of their studies but in terms of their sense of self and difference and new possibilities for being in the world.

But they also talked about danger, of the vulnerability of being a young woman in a different place where the cultural scripts may be different, where being friendly and open can easily be conceived as sexual availability, and so make them objects of the male gaze.

‘I was walking on the terrain, renegotiating what the terrain means of localness, otherness and international and what this means for the self and for others……’ (Rachel 34)

Belonging is a performative and negotiated act. These individuals spoke about how they were positioned through policy, through interpersonal interaction, mediated through cultural scripts and norms – how this positioning as international student or foreigner was troubling for them and for others, could often be ambiguous, and how it was always embodied, in specific bodies that were gendered and racialised – and how this is absent from the disembodied, unplaced discourses of policy.

POLICY

In a world of increasing globalisation and interconnectedness, with the emergence of new powerhouse economies and the reorientation of the world economy, Ireland needs to take a strategic approach to developing relationships that will be of national importance in the coming years (Investing in Global Relationships DES 2010)

(1)recruiting the best international students to undergraduate and postgraduate programmes; (2) encouraging all staff to engage internationally; (3) promoting global citizenship and (4) fostering a culturally enriched and respectful university campus (Based on the fieldwork institution strategic vision)

Although the institutional strategy is closely aligned with the national strategy, and it is aligned with the European strategy which in turn is strongly aligned to the OECD position, these strategies are not identical, though they carry similar social imaginaries of higher education and internationalisation.

These two strategy documents present ways of conceiving or imagining higher education in the context of internationalisation.

Mobility, in these two documents, is framed by economic rationales through the close alignment of knowledge work with discourses of the knowledge economy.

Investment in internationalisation is fundamentally concerned with the exchange-value benefits to the national economy through enhancing global higher education networks. Indeed, the national internationalisation strategy represents part of the ‘branding’ of Irish higher education as a tradable commodity as ‘Education Ireland’. The national strategy explicitly discusses how Irish higher education should be conceived as a ‘brand’ in similar terms to that of tourism or the attraction of inward foreign investment

Framed by a corporate imaginary, national policy documents portray a ‘transactional’ understanding of internationalisation whereby international students are perceived as investments in future business and research opportunities.

ETHICAL INTERNATIONALISATION?

Dominant discourses, institutional strategies, and practices purport to ‘know’ international students without speaking to them.

A transactional approach requires little in terms of institutional response. If the international student is already known, either in terms of them being bearers of ‘recruitment targets’ or future ‘returns on investment’, then there is no need for an ethical response, or to know them in their full humanity.

Drawing on Levinas, we argue that such discourses, strategies, and practices constitute acts of violence in denying the humanity and personhood of international students.

…SPEAKING BACK TO POLICY

We argued that BNIM, because of its iterative method, makes it possible for international students to re-story, and re-embed experiences of internationalisation that escapes dominant storylines.

The BNIM method allows for participants to construct storylines that are troubled by dominant discourses, but can also ‘trouble’ policy. These discourses ‘trouble’ or ‘disconcert’ policy narratives by emphasising the agency of international students themselves (e.g. how international students ‘transcend’ how they are portrayed as mere ‘categories of policy’ and ‘income generators’ for universities).

However, these storylines also underline the ‘dark’ side of internationalisation. In this case the highly gendered and racialised experience of being ‘other’ and ‘othered’ in diverse, ‘everyday’ spaces and places (e.g. policy realms, the home, recreational spaces).

The BNIM narratives revealed here act as an ethical demand to radical hospitality. Being open to the ‘other’, in this way, means being open to change as a consequence. This ethical demand to openness contributes, we argue, to rethinking and re-scripting higher education ‘otherwise’.

The university may well gain from ‘recruiting’ international students in domains like university rankings, and future research and investment in the Irish economy. But the ethical relations between international students and institutions must be re-ordered or ‘thought otherwise’.

Institutions can also gain from speaking to international students rather than just about them. This invites a shift from learning about the international student to learning from them, and in so doing, thinking the university differently.

Building on the student narratives about their experience of difference, becoming, and ‘gendered danger’ invite an ethical response. We argue that this requires going beyond received notions of intercultural understanding or abstract ideas of how the international experience expands individual’s personal horizons.

Taking the experience of ‘gendered danger’ we argue that the ethical invitation necessitates a transcendence of institutional responses to internationalisation that are usually framed through the lens of the provision of services (e.g. sexual consent training), as vital as these are.

Instead, it invites institutional leaders to examine the degree to which cultural scripts and knowledge that is embedded in higher education institutions ignore or denies the embodied and gendered nature of student and faculty experience, of how higher education institutions can be ‘careless’ places for women and many men.

In being ethically open in this way the university can become, in its interaction with international students, more than itself, more than it was before its encounter with these students. This implies a dialogical ethics as a basis for internationalisation strategy and practice where the possibility for what the university can be is constituted in the spaces where university and international student encounter each other.

BNIM enabled us to construct narratives that have the potential to trouble dominant discourses of internationalisation through outlining some of the boundaries of this dialogical encounter and responsibility.

 

The Ethical Emptiness of Higher Education Emptiness and #Brexit

License: Creative Commons 3 – CC BY-SA 3.0 Creator attribution: Nick Youngson – link to – http://nyphotographic.com/  http://www.thebluediamondgallery.com/highlighted/e/ethics.html

There have been a number of commentaries arguing that Irish higher education is well positioned to take advantage of #Brexit.  They have been notable for one thing – THE ABSENCE OF ANY SENSE OF ETHICS.

A recent example of this comes from one of Ireland’s leading economists, Brian Lucey from Trinity College Dublin.  In a blog post entitled “How to strangle an export industry” he advocates that,

Exports of  educational services from Ireland represent a potentially enormous market…This is a large body of exports.  It is responsible for approx. 1.75b in value added per annum

…that is, Education.ie can capture segments of the international student market from Britain.  He mentions, in particular, the English language teaching (whose standard in Ireland is appalling).  He notes that under pressure of reduced state funding of higher education HEIs increasingly look to other revenue streams – including international student fees.

BUT – where is the ethical content of this debate?  Are these human bodies to be reduced to columns in an accounting ledger?

In a paper my colleague Lisa Moran and I are presenting at the forthcoming Sociological Association of Ireland conference, we explore the ethical relationship between institutions and the ‘international’ students they seek to recruit*.  While there are many benefits to internationalisation, we also point to the ‘gendered danger’ that many women face when living and studying abroad and the micro-aggressions of racism.  We argue that HEIs are careless, if not reckless, in their relations with international students.

We argue that internationalisation demands an ethical response.  It means that we have to stop conceiving of international students as hosts that the higher education parasite feeds off.  We begin by recognising them first and foremost as persons and not ‘exports’.

* The paper is based on Lisa’s research as part of undertaking the MA in Academic Practice at NUIG

DECONSTRUCTING THE LAB PRACTICAL

Sinclair Refining laboratory… at Corpus Christi Texas, by Robert Yarnall Richie via DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University https://www.flickr.com/photos/smu_cul_digitalcollections/8409510090 (no copyright restrictions)

Enhancing learning in lab-based science education through re-designing assessment practices

Yesterday we had a really successful seminar with @seerym (Michael Seery) and @Breebio (Ronan Bree) opening up the lab practical for critical and practical inquiry.  The event attracted attracted over 40 colleagues from @NUIG including technical officers, post-doctoral students, educational technologists and academic developers, as well as lecturers.

In this post I will focus on the challenges offered by Michael’s contribution.

Michael was asked to problematise the lab practical as it normally appears in the science curriculum in higher education.  Those who know Michael’s work will be aware that unpacking the role of the lab practical has been a central focus of his work, so much so that he is endeavouring to write a book on the subject. An interesting resource on the ideas covered in the seminar is a post by Michael last year.  I will make some reference to it here.  The seminar offered Michael an opportunity to rehearse the central argument of his book.  I will try to outline some of the central issues and questions below.

• Lab practicals, contrary to the professional discourse, do not warrant the effort expended on them
• Despite the claims made that practical classes reinforce the theory and develop core skills there is no evidence to support this
• The usual model for organising practicals result in negligible learning gains, over assess students without resulting in incremental improvements in either theoretical understanding or scientific skills, and have no demonstrable link with lecture series.

Practical classes can often be epitomised by the rush for the door where students correctly read the deep structure of the classes as being to get the experiment done as quickly as possible, write the lab report, and leave.  An average undergraduate can produce at least 125 lab reports without there being any substantial improvement in their scientific knowledge over that period related to the lab practicals.

Instead of making the false assumption that practical classes are locations for teaching theory, Michael, along with others, propose a different presumption

• Organise lab practicals and lectures separately, each having a distinct function
• Lectures become the means by which students are invited to engage with disciplinary knowledge, core concepts, troublesome knowledge, threshold concepts, etc.
• Lab practicals then become the vehicles for developing and practicing disciplinary ways of doing, of practicing the scientific method. [I hope I have this distinction right…I’m sure Michael will correct me]

A number of practical ideas were offered to illustrate what a lab curriculum could look like.  I will focus on just a few.

• Keep the traditional deductive approach but include decision points
  • Michael argued that there was nothing particularly wrong with the traditional deductive approach of practical classes.  Lab work should operate within a knowledge framework but should free itself from a ‘cook book’ approach.  The experiment would be organised around a series of decision points, where students would need to make informed choices about possible routes (having compared entity 1 with entity 2) what method would I use to test (hypothesis x)…I think.
• Fewer but more powerful assessment points
  • There is no logical or necessary reason why students should have to produce a report for every lab.  Rather than producing 12 reports for a series of 12 labs why not 3 more substantive and focused assessment points which require students to go deeper into the topic/skill and educators to provide useful formative assessment.  In addition why not organise the assessment points so that each point build a basis for the next set of labs and assessment?
  • Based on the theory of cognitive load Michael suggested that assessment could focus on specific skill sets rather than being assessed on every dimension of the experiment.
• Lab reports can simulate the research article
  • Michael suggested that lab reports should support the rationale that lab practicals develop disciplinary ways of doing and being by emulating the research article.
• Diversify the modes of reporting
  • While lab reports might be perfect for some forms of assessment we should consider other modes of reporting learning.  One example provided was that of students using mobile devices to video each other practicing certain lab skills and then peer assessing this (with the added advantage that the videos can go into students’ portfolios and be used in securing internships or even jobs).

Certainly a lot of food for thought and I will certainly be back to discuss this again.

 

Táim ag dul go Béal Feirste – I’m off to Belfast

The library of El Escorial Photo by Xauxa Håkan Svensson  CC BY-SA 3.0     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Escorial

I am off to Belfast/Béal Feirste soon for the Sociological Association of Ireland Annual Conference.  I will write more about the papers and the conference later.

I will be giving two papers this year:

‘Biographies of Internationalisation’: Methodological reflections on using the Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) to capture international student’s discourses and policy narratives – Speaking to Policy Speaking to Institutions (written with my colleague Lisa Moran)

How, as sociologists, do we speak to policy makers, and in this case to institutional leaders in higher education? And how do we do this in a way that troubles dominant discourses? This paper focuses upon a qualitative, Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) study of ‘knowledge cultures’ (Tsouvalis et al. 2000), and narratives of internationalisation that are embedded within international students’ biographies. Drawing upon qualitative materials from a biographical research study of 6 students categorised as ‘international’ in one Irish university, the paper illustrates areas of confluence and convergence in international student narratives about internationalisation and ‘storylines’ that appear in Irish policy on internationalisation. The argument in this paper is threefold; firstly, that the BNIM approach (Wengraf 2001) which elicits participants’ memories, knowledge and everyday ‘life worlds’ goes farther than some ‘conventional’ approaches to interviewing in capturing how international students recreate international identities, ‘negotiate’ insider/outsider distinctions and processes of stereotyping and labelling. Secondly, it is argued that how international students interpret internationalisation as a ‘lived experience’ and express these understandings through narrative is intricately bound to how they negotiate international identities. Thirdly, we argue that the kinds of narrative generated by the BNIM approach enables us to ‘trouble’ dominant discourses of internationalisation by inviting an ethic of openness to the ‘other’ and learn from rather than just learn about the experience of internationalisation students. Such an approach helps us to think higher education ‘otherwise’.

Tsouvalis, J., Seymour, S. and Watkins, C. (2000) ‘Exploring knowledge cultures: Precision Farming, Yield Mapping, and the Expert/Farmer Interface’ Environment and Planning A 32(5): 909-924

Wengraf, T. (2001) Qualitative Research Interviewing Biographic, Narrative and Semi-Structured Approaches London: Sage

 

Sociology of Irish Higher Education or An Irish Sociology of Higher Education? The Challenge of Southern Theory.

What would happen if we viewed Irish higher education through the lens of southern theory? Southern theory argues that dominant epistemologies appear as if from no particular geohistorical location, so pertaining to be universal. Yet, these epistemologies are reflections of and inherent in the imperialism and colonialism of the metropolitan centres of Western Europe and North America. Universal knowledge is, in fact, the imperialism of Europe’s parochialism^1&2 and universities have been implicit in epistemic violence as a basis for colonial power³. We need to ask whether, in interpreting Irish higher education, we have simply imported the thematic concerns of the metropole, accepted a subaltern position, and so neglected to develop a unique perspective that takes seriously Ireland as a post-colony⁴.

What might an Irish sociology of Higher Education look like?

• This sociology would acknowledge that it speaks from somewhere, emerges from a particular geohistorical experience of colonialism, settler colonialism, nationalist nation-building, and globalization;
• It would seek to re-story the history and dynamics of higher education in Ireland from that perspective, working with, beyond, and against the dominant concepts of the metropole;
• It would speak between epistemologies⁵, critiquing both the continuing coloniality of power and nationalist ideology – an ecology of knowledge⁶.

¹Mignolo, D. (2000) The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, South Atlantic Quarterly 101(1): 57–96.

²Quijano, A. (2007) Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Cultural Studies 21(2): 168–78.

³Grosfoguel, R. (2013) The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11(1): 73-90.

⁴Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.

⁵Khatibi, A. (1990) Love in Two Languages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

⁶Santos, S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide. London: Paradigm.

 

 

TAKING CONTROL OF ONES SCHOLARLY IDENTITY?

Beautiful Landscape With Bridge, by George Hodan License: CC0 Public Domain

Can students take a lead on managing and promoting their own learning?

Does this have to happen in the confines of institutional virtual learning environments?

Can academics and students take back control of their digital presence?

These were all questions explored yesterday in a workshop facilitated by Jim Groom at the National University of Ireland Galway title: Student As Partner: Enhancing Student Engagement Through a Focus on Assessment As Learning in Digital Spaces.

Let me quote from the advertising text to give you a flavour of what this event sought to deal with

The Student as Producer model advocates a pedagogic approach foregrounding student voice, choice and creativity so that students can recognise themselves in a world of their own design and take responsibility for their own learning. This has broad ramifications across the institution with respect to digital technology, learning spaces, and assessment (Healy et al., 2014; Neary et al., 2015). The Domain of One’s Own initiative emphasises a partnership approach to teaching and learning, and reworks the relationships between research and teaching; producing and consuming; and educators and students (Groom & Lamb, 2014). Partnership with students, not only as learners but as teachers and assessors, can contribute to developing graduate attributes and personal learning networks that can sustain students/graduates well beyond their time in higher education.

References:

Groom, J., & Lamb, B. 2014. Reclaiming innovation. Educause Review (June 2014).

Healey, M., Flint, A., & Harrington, K. 2014. Engagement through partnership: Students as partners in learning and teaching in Higher Education. York: Higher Education Academy.

Neary, M., Saunders, G., Hagyard, A. & Derricott, D. (2015). Student as Producer: Research-engaged teaching, an institutional strategy. York: Higher Education Academy.

 

It is time for me to own up to the fact that I was co-responsible for this event along with my colleague Catherine Cronin.  I am not an educational technology person so the event was conceived as an exploration of the space between different sets of ideas, specifically those of ‘student as producer’ and ‘open educational practices‘ (OEP), using Domain of Ones Own (DoOO).  Catherine has already written about her hopes for the workshop and will write refections on it shortly.   I want to focus on the elements I was mostly interested in and the thoughts I have had following working with Jim.

I was particularly interested in how ideas of students as producers (SaP) could articulate with technologies associated with open educational practices.  In the workshop I outlined SaP as covering at least three dimensions;

• Students as researchers: students engaged in different kinds of research like activity, and presenting the outcome of their inquiries.
• Students devising learning materials: students involved in the development of curricular materials.  For instance a project at the University of Lincoln UK involved undergraduate students producing a range of learning materials for an Introduction to Chemistry course.
• Students as assessors: biology students at Vanderbilt University USA were engaged in devising laboratory based experiments and the assessment of these as an alternative to the traditional lab practical.

From my perspective students are engaged in assessment as learning in all of these examples.  Students not only need to know what to learn, but why  that knowledge is important (compared to alternatives), and to determine how they can learn.  When further developed students also engage in generating new knowledge and meaning.

But how does this dovetail with OEP?

One way of understanding how approaches such as DoOO align with SaP is articulated by Audrey Waters recently as concerning,

• Students have lost control of their personal data

• By working in digital silos specially designed for the classroom (versus those tools that they will encounter in their personal and professional lives) students are not asked to consider how digital technologies work and/or how these technologies impact their lives

• Education technologies, particularly those that enable “algorithmic decision-making,” need transparency and understanding

(You can substitute the word “scholar” for “student” in all cases above, too, I think.)

 

Whether it is VLEs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Academia or other platforms, we exchange our personal data and learning outcomes and teaching materials (in the case of VLEs) in exchange for use of these proprietorial services.  DoOO offers the opportunity to control how our personal data is used and to control our digital presence.  Jim shared examples of how academics were able to fashion strong digital identities that were not confined to the institution they happened to work in at any particular moment.  This meant they could construct digital identities that were not confined to corporate priorities and branding.  The same can be done by students.  This relates to an issue raised both by Audrey Waters in her blog post and Catherine Cronin at the workshop – that the nature of VLEs and proprietorial platforms means that students and academics do not really engage with digital literacies such as protection of personal data, privacy, copyright, etc.

DoOO, for me, is attractive because it can be supportive of public and open scholarship.  Similarly, it can support students to be producers of knowledge and meaning rather than consumers.

 

HOW RESEARCH PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT KILLS EPISTEMIC DIVERSITY

Primera página de la Biblia del oso, traducción al castellano de Casiodoro de Reyna, basilea, 1569.

Silenced societies are, of course, societies in which talking and writing take place but which are not heard in the planetary production of knowledge managed from the local histories and local languages of the ‘silencing’ [the dominant powers] Walter Mignolo referring to Abdelkebir Khatibi’s “Love in Two Languages”

 

Recently I gave a presentation on “Research Selectivity and the Destruction of Authentic Scholarship”.  An earlier iteration of this was presented at a conference in Dublin and posted here.  Below I present the text of this presentation.  It deals with the way contemporary research performance management practices result in what I and my colleagues call ‘epistemic closure’.  That is we are concerned that these management practices, related as they are to the growing dominance of English as the primary means of scientific communication, and to the determining influence of global higher education rankings and the power of the major academic publishing companies, are closing down what can be considered legitimate knowledge.

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My presentation is based on early stage conceptualization for a cross European research project looking at the impact of research performance management on academic practice and identity.

In this sense it approaches the broad theme of mobility in terms of the mobility of academics, and the mobility of knowledge. That is, instead of academics looking at ‘others’ mobilities and migrations, it looks at the observers; it turns the critical gaze upon systems of higher education and academic practice in the context of dominant narratives of internationalisation of higher education.

Specifically, it began life at a conference in Poland where my colleagues Marcin Starnawski and Marcin Gołębniak presented a paper discussing the increasing pressure on Polish academics to publish in ‘international’ academic journals, where international translates as English language. They raised questions about a) the transactional costs of this national and institutional pressure (e.g. the capacity to become proficient in high status academic English – who does this, and who does not, and what are the consequences of this), and b) what impact this might have on internal academic discourse, and the issue of the possible un-translatability of key terms of debate.

This has led to cooperation around developing a research project that has now involved:

• Exploratory empirical research in Ireland, Poland and Portugal
• Seminars and conference presentations in Ireland and Poland
• Work on a number of journal articles
• Development of a COST Action proposal

Although this presentation draws largely on the Irish material, it resonates closely with that found in both Poland and Portugal.

Because of where I am giving this presentation (Galway, Ireland), it takes academics working largely through the medium of Irish in the humanities as a critical case of the phenomenon of research performance management. While it is not an exploration of the position of Irish in wider Irish society, it does touch on the contested nature of Irish as a public rather than private good.

Fundamentally we are arguing that research performance management as we often experience it is to do with more than workload, but also with knowledge work itself.

So, where to start?

Reading these two documents recently I was struck by what now appears as their naivity.

The first report, “Advancing Humanities and Social Sciences Research in Ireland”, published in 2007, sought to make the case for the humanities and social sciences in the context of dominant discourses of the knowledge economy. There was a kind of strategic accommodation here, of accepting the terms of political debate – that is the very idea of the knowledge based economy, and argue the positive case for the humanities and social sciences within the logic of this discourse.

6 years later, the Higher Education Authority produced a report that seems to have come from a more innocent time, particularly when looked at from post-2008. It argued that there was no need for Irish higher education to emulate the UK and tie performance management to crude indicators of research output. Indeed, it argued that it was and should be possible for the arts and humanities to be judged on the basis of the wide array of outputs and not merely those amenable to simple statistical capture or the algorithms of the major publishing companies.

Yet, what we see is our own institutions, in the absence of clear guidance otherwise, reproducing all the known negative effects of the Research Excellence Framework.

It is as if our institutional leaders are ignorant of, or simply ignore the findings from reviews such as this.

We can view this as a local manifestation of an increasingly globalised model of higher education – of a global political economy of higher education.

Looking across Europe, as with much of the world, we see certain regular systemic features of this political economy:

• Government support for increased participation in higher education as part of an economic strategy to maximize the stock of human capital in aid of securing economic competitive advantage in a global economy
• Reduction in direct funding from governments whilst promoting a process of mass higher education in conjunction with competitive funding streams and diversified income streams (e.g student fees)
• Government steering of research priorities to meet economic needs, specifically prioritising certain STEM areas that are perceived to be close to the market, and using ideas of market readiness to evaluate all research.

 

We are all fairly familiar with key features of the global higher education landscape as it relates to research selectivity.  We can conceive of research selectivity as a site for struggles over external and internal visibility, particularly for semi-peripheral higher education systems and for more peripheral disciplines.

EXTERNAL VISIBILITY

• A defining characteristic of the political economy of higher education is that of STATUS COMPETITION – how well are we all doing in the global league tables
• In other words institutional managers are concerned with visibility within the status economy of higher education. Politicians are concerned about this and gear funding priorities around securing greater visibility in the status economy as well as aligning research to economic requirements.

INTERNAL VISIBILITY

This largely takes the form of research performance management:

• Management practices that increasingly seek to align individual CVs and research concerns with institutional objectives, objectives aimed at increasing the institution’s external visibility – this introduces a degree of moral coercion: if I don’t improve my visibility will this impact negatively on my institution and therefore on my colleagues
• Alignment is enacted through various performance management practices: PMDS – annual reviews – institutional research audits – etc.

 

I want to present some of our initial reflections through Niamh’s Story. Niamh is a condensation of academics who work predominantly through the medium of Irish and who participated in our pilot study. However, while here I focus on Irish language scholarship, they mirror almost exactly the views expressed by the scholars from academics we have spoken to in Poland and Portugal, in a range of disciplines. It also resonates with evidence found in scholarship in critical translation studies, critical linguistics, and global English.   What I share with you here is obviously tentative, and emergent.

Initial inductive analysis of the pilot project interviews indicates a number of themes/motifs that animate academics’ experiences and concerns:

• Although the time periods associated with the production process of academic publishing may be stretched out, with delays between submission and final publication, this sits within a context of time-pressure
• Institutions and individual scholars are increasingly conscious of the desire to improve their relative position in annual university rankings
• This can be exacerbated by national and institutional systems of research performance management. Improvement in research performance are evaluated over short time frames, generating demands to produce measurable outputs quickly
• Because the bibliometrics privilege English language publications, and privilege journal articles, this can lead to increase in outputs in English as the PRIMARY language of academic output
• This may also transform disciplinary ways of producing and disseminating knowledge.
• Within the intensified environment of academia, scholars largely experience this systemic phenomenon as private troubles rather than public issues.

This is not about language itself, but about how a scholar relates to epistemic communities, including linguistic communities. It is about the link between the generation of knowledge and the people you commune with in order to do that, to push the boundaries of knowledge. In this way of thinking and being decisions about form of output, vehicle for communication, and language of communication are determined by this relationship to epistemic communities. This is posed as potentially different to the institutionally determined way of being, which is driven by publishing companies bibliometrics, and university rankings.

She sought personal, individual strategies to negotiate her way through the tensions of an institutionally managed CV on the one hand and being true to herself on the other. There were no collective or solidaristic spaces where these concerns could be mobilised as public issues. She spoke about how the various systems of performance management and audit undermined the capacity of academics to work collectively, and so either rely on individual strategies, or appear supine,

 

…the system keeps everybody in a constant state of anxiety,

trying to meet sometimes reasonable, but often

undreasonable targets across so many different

arenas of academic activity…

 As my colleague Marcin Starnawski put it, we are so busy complying with the Regime of Compliance that we don’t pause for critical reflection and so create the conditions for discussing this as a public issue rather than a personal problem.

There was a very real sense that research performance management, and feeling herself under the gaze of performance metrics Niamh managed her efforts so that she was increasing her English language publications. To make herself more visible to the institution meant making herself less visible to the epistemic communities that gave meaning to her work. This is a zero-sum game. To write more in English means to write less in another language; to create “balance” is subtractive. 

If I was to look at the ratio over the last ten years

in my own academic writing life,

the balance between writing in Irish and writing in English,

writing in English for international academic publishers,

and writing and producing material for local publishers,

it’s definitiely the direction of English,

definitely the pull is towards international publishers rather than Irish publishes;

and the presumption there is that it is superior.

This alludes to linguistic hierarchies of knowledge, even of which languages can convey knowledge, be knowledgeable. In a sense, under the dominance of English, all other languages become minor languages

Fundamentally, Niamh felt that research performance management undermined her relationship with epistemic communities, and therefore with both the nature of knowledge and knowledge production. The pressure to publish in certain kinds of English language journals broke the connection between her, meaningful exchange of knowledge, knowledge production, and authentic scholarship.

 

Clearly, what we are presenting here relates to wider concerns about:

• The intensification of academic labour
• About forms of management practice that devalue and undermine ideas of academic freedom
• And the privatisation of knowledge that are very closely associated with the dominance of major academic publishers in determining what ‘counts’ as valued knowledge. Lets remember that the various ranking systems and metrics are controlled by profit seeking private companies.

 In the guise of technical issues of how best to measure research performance I believe we are actually seeing a transformation in what counts as knowledge and knowledge production. However, this is not being done as a result of public debate, not articulated in the public sphere. Maybe this doesn’t matter, but I believe it does, as it concerns what the role of academic scholarship is in relation to human flourishing, and concerns the values by which we think life should or could be lived. 

But I want to touch on something in my conclusion that relates specifically to academics working with what are often called minority languages, but also makes sense in relation to large language communities that are made peripheral by a zero sum approach to research performance management as it articulates with the dominance of English.

EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE/EPISTEMICIDE

I want to briefly discuss this in relation to concepts used by the Portuguese academic Boaventura de Sousa Santos, specifically the idea that current systems of research performance management act as forms of epistemic dominance and violence, even that the imperialism of certain ideas of what counts as knowledge constitute epistemicide, the death of what Niamh referred to as an ecology of research and Santos calls an ecology of knowledge.

 

• Research selectivity, as I have discussed it here, can be seen to be re-ordering Europe (and I will keep my remarks to Europe) in relation to hierarchies of knowledge
• Clearly certain domains of knowledge, those deemed applied or close to the market, are privileged over more speculative knowledge practices. This is very much why the humanities is under such pressure, but also areas of epistemic practice.
• The linguistic dimension of this new terrain is illuminating
• We can see from Niamh’s account that her practice is indeed one of an ecology of research or an ecology of knowledge. She regularly speaks from between Irish and English, both seen as capable of articulating knowledge
• However, the intense pressure she and her colleagues experience to render their research amenable to only certain audiences and certain forms of publication (where the mode of publication appears to be more important than the rigour of scholarship) works to make invisible Irish as a legitimate language of knowledge, in deed as not being a knowledgeable language in its own right. To different degrees the same can be said of Polish, or Finnish, or Latvian, or Hungarian, or Russian, or possibly French and German.
• So, the Irish language, literature, artefacts can be objects of scientific inquiry, but Irish cannot be a legitimate medium for thinking.
• The increasing requirement to produce or reproduce work in English, carries with it the inequality of languages, the suggestion that English has a unique capacity to articulate all meaning adequately. English is presumed to have the robustness to convey meaning originally conceived in a different linguistic and cultural frame.
• This attitude leads, I believe, to epistemic closure.

This is not an argument against English as a shared language of scientific exchange, but it is an argument against a diminished ecology of research, and a call to think higher education otherwise, and not to collude in epistemicide.