What should universities be?
The Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton is hosting a series of talks about what universities should be. These talks form the David Watson Memorial Lecture Series, 2015-2016.
All talks take place in the Old Courtroom Lecture Theatre , Church Street, Brighton, 6-30 – 8.00 pm.
24 November 2015
Elizabeth Nixon, Deconstructing the Sovereign Student
John Scullion
Intensifying marketization across Higher Education in the UK continues to generate critical commentary on the potentially devastating consequences of market logic for pedagogy.
In this lecture, we consider the student-consumer prominent in these debates as a discursive construction that, loaded with power relations and internal tensions, may marginalise or silence alternative roles and identities for students (and their tutors). We will discuss some of the various mechanisms through which the student and their satisfaction is constructed as sovereign, and how this further entrenches a seemingly natural state of fit between HE and wider consumer capitalism. We will also share empirical material from two phenomenological studies of undergraduates’ educational experiences to identify a range of discursive positions students are adopting, and reveal some of the student ‘satisfaction’ and ‘dissatisfaction’ created by the consequences of marketization itself.
Elizabeth Nixon is Assistant Professor in Marketing, Nottingham University,
John Scullion is Senior Lecturer in Marketing Communications and Political Communications, Bournemouth University
Future lectures:
8 December 2015
David Salomon The Politicization of the Universities?
Associate Professor, Political Science, Universität Siegen
5 January 2016
Jo Williams Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge
Director, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Kent
19 January 2016
John Holmwood The University, Democracy and the Public Interest
Professor of Sociology, Nottingham University
Co-Founder, Campaign for the Public University
2 February 2016
Howard Hotson Educating homo sapiens
Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History, University of Oxford.
16 February 2016
David Eastwood Question Time
Vice-Chancellor, Birmingham University
Member, Browne Review
CEO Higher Education Funding Council, 2006-9
1 March 2016
Stefan Collini Reading the Ruins; imagining the future of Universities
Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge
8 March 2016
Julia Goodfellow Universities as Shapeshifters
Vice-Chancellor, University of Kent
Chair, Universities UK