Suchergebnisse

After traditional academics mobilized university autonomy against government intervention and supported the coup d'état against Hugo Chávez, his government created a parallel system of public universities. María Egilda Castellano headed the effort to extend university access to poor Venezuelans. The events of her terms as vice minister of education (1999–2002) and rector of the Bolivarian University (2003–2004) and her subsequent career show the difficulty the Bolivarian government has had in creating sustainable institutions and challenge the applicability of the concept of permanent revolution to the Bolivarian process.Después de que los académicos tradicionales usaron la autonomía universitaria en contra de la intervención del gobierno y apoyaron el golpe de estado contra Hugo Chávez, su gobierno creó un sistema paralelo de universidades públicas. María Egilda Castellano dirigió el esfuerzo por extender el acceso a las universidades a los venezolanos pobres. Los resultados de su trabajo como vice ministra de educación (1999–2002) y rectora de la Universidad Bolivariana (2003–2004) y su subsiguiente carrera profesional demuestran la dificultad que el gobierno bolivariano ha tenido para crear instituciones sostenibles y pone en duda la aplicabilidad del concepto de revolución permanente al proceso bolivariano.

The recent history of Venezuela's student movements illustrates the paradox of academic autonomy. The student left used autonomy to resist repression during Venezuela's liberal democracy (1958). Yet, after 1998, the former supporters of the parties which had violated that autonomy started to capitalise on it in order to block the progressive reforms. The Bolivarian government's decision not to interfere with autonomous universities, but to create a parallel Bolivarian university system instead replicated one of the reform patterns of previous governments. Despite the government's intention to fight inequality, the reform contributed to further stratification of higher education and polarisation among the student movements.

This article examines the rise in precarious academic employment in Ireland as an outcome of the higher education restructuring following OECD (Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development), government initiatives and post‐crisis austerity. Presenting the narratives of academic women at different career stages, we claim that a focus on care sheds new light on the debate on precarity. A more complete understanding of precarity should take account not only of the contractual security but also affective relational security in the lives of employees. The intersectionality of paid work and care work lives was a dominant theme in our interviews among academic women. In a globalized academic market, premised on the care‐free masculinized ideals of competitive performance, 24/7 work and geographical mobility, women who opt out of these norms, suffer labour‐led contractual precarity and are over‐represented in part‐time and fixed‐term positions. Women who comply with these organizational commands need to peripheralize their relational lives and experience care‐led affective precarity. ; Irish Research Council

The present interview organized by the Greek researcher Natalia-Rozalia Avlona and the Brazilian researcher Felipe Ziotti Narita has been reworked and updated from its first publication in a special issue of Brazilian journal CIMEAC, devoted to the experiences of popular education in Latin America in the 2010s. Ivancheva was invited by the authors to discuss the contemporary higher education scenario and radical popular experiments in Latin America in light of her political and research experiences in Eastern and Western Europe. In the interview she touches upon her own trajectory as Eastern European academic and activist working on topics and geographies which remain siloed into different 'area studies' domains; in which scholars finding themselves – by birth or location – associated with specific peripheral area are only justified in their interest in their own region, whereas those located in the core hubs of knowledge production are in charge of comparisons made and lessons learned. Transcending the firm givens of such a core-periphery dynamics in academic knowledge – a key intention and message of the interview and Ivancheva's work – is crucial to overcoming this centrifugal dynamic, decolonializing universities and political practice and learning from the past. As the interview took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, few questions also touch upon Ivancheva's ongoing academic and activist work on precarious labour in academia and on some technologically enhanced capitalist developments in Europe and the Global South.

This paper examines the idea of 'core business' in contemporary South African public universities. South Africa's public higher education system has global ambitions, but is also highly internally stratified. Drawing on new data from interviews with higher education leaders and government policymakers across a number of South African institutions, we show that while the rhetoric of 'core business' of the university has been adopted by higher education leaders, the question of what constitutes the purpose of the university, in South Africa and arguably beyond, is subject to ongoing debate and negotiation. The multiplicity of conflicting but coexisting narratives about what universities should do in South African society—producing excellent research, preparing a labour force, or addressing societal inequalities—exposes a persisting tension surrounding the purpose of a public university. And while this tension has historical origins, we show that responses to addressing these various roles of the institution are not developed organically and in a neutral context. They emerge under conflicts over limited state funding and attendant and opportune market pressure put on public universities in times of crisis, that shape profoundly their framing and outcomes, and the future of the universities.

Abstract
Universities are facing growing internal and external pressures to generate income, educate a widening continuum of learners, and make effective use of digital technologies. One response has been growth of online education, catalysed by Massive Open Online Courses, availability of digital devices and technologies, and notions of borderless global education. In growing online education, learning and teaching provision has become increasingly disaggregated, and universities are partnering with a range of private companies to reach new learners, and commercialise educational provision. In this paper, we explore the competing drivers which impact decision making within English universities and their strategies to grow online education provision, through interviews with senior managers, and interrogation of their views through the lens of a range of internal, external and organisational drivers. We show that pressures facing universities may be alleviated by growth of online education provision, but that negotiating an appropriate route to realise this ambition involves attempts to resolve these underlying tensions deriving from competing drivers. We use a modified form of the PEST model to demonstrate the complexities, inter-dependencies and processes associated with these drivers when negotiating delivery of unbundled online education through use of private company services, or in partnership with private companies.

This edited collection critically explores the funding arrangements governing contemporary community development and how they shape its theory and practice. International contributions from activists, practitioners and academics consider the evolution of funding in community development and how changes in policy and practice can be understood in relation to the politics of neoliberalism and contemporary efforts to build global democracy from the 'bottom up'. Thematically, the collection explores matters such as popular democracy, the shifting contours of the state-market relationship, prospects for democratising the state, the feasibility of community autonomy, the effects of managerialism and hybrid modes of funding such as social finance. The collection is thus uniquely positioned to stimulate critical debate on both policy and practice within the broad field of community development