Suchergebnisse

Socialism, Social Ownership and Social Justice is concerned with the emergence in Europe over the centuries of dreams and aspirations amongst the poor and weak for new societies of justice and equality based on common ownership and common sharing. It ranges from the Greek legendary ideal of a simple communal golden age of equals and the dark reality of Spartan perverted communalism, to the collapse of Soviet communism and the abandonment by West European socialist parties of their commitment to transform ruling-class dominated capitalist societies into democratic, egalitarian socialist societies

Purpose Academics are at the forefront of criticisms about so-called "fake news" considered to undermine evidence-based approaches to the understanding of complex social, political, and economic issues. However, universities contribute to the production of fake news through the legitimization of measures that promote student performativity rewarding their nonacademic non-achievements. This conceptual article will seek to illustrate how this can occur via the writing of methodology chapters by postgraduate students. Design/Approach/Methods This article provides a critical analysis of the writing of methodology chapters in dissertations and theses in postgraduate education in the social sciences. In so doing, it applies the concept of performativity to student learning. Findings It is argued that the pressures on students to comply with the requirements of emotional performativity in respect to ideology and method in close-up, qualitative research can lead to fake learning. This phenomenon may be exemplified by reference to a number of practices, namely, phony positionality, methodolatry, ethical cleansing, participatory posturing, and symbolic citation. Originality/Value This article provides an illustration of the concept of student performativity. It demonstrates that emotional performativity plays a significant role in the way in which students are required to comply with expectations that give rise to inauthenticity in learning

The popular image of activism in the university involves students and academics campaigning for social justice and resisting the neo-liberalisation of the university. Yet activism has been subtly corporatised through the migration of corporate social responsibility from the private sector into the university, a trend that may be illustrated by reference to the growing influence of research 'grand challenges' (GCs). Attracting both government and philanthro-capitalist funding, GCs adopt a socio-political stance based on justice globalism and represent a responsibilisation of academic research interests. Compliance with the rhetoric of GCs and the virtues of inter-disciplinarity have become an article of faith for academics compelled to meet the expectations of research-intensive universities in chasing the prestige and resources associated with large grant capture. The responsibilisation of the efforts of researchers, via GCs, erodes academic ownership of the research agenda and weakens the purpose of the university as an independent think tank: the essence of the Humboldtian ideal. The conceit of corporate activism is that in seeking to solve the world's problems, the university will inevitably create new ones. Instead, as Flexner argued, it is only by preserving the independence and positive 'irresponsibility' of researchers that universities can best serve the world.

The changing role and interpretation of values within higher education and its curriculum needs to be understood by reference to a series of (re)appropriations connected with the successive influences of the church, the state and, more latterly, the market. This essay explores the role played by religious, democratic, performative and transformative values and argues that the university has become increasingly self-conscious in endorsing values of positionality that have largely displaced values for learning. This shifting meta-nar- rative poses a threat to academic freedom on campus by validating contemporary normative values, such as global citizenship, social justice and sustainable development, as opposed to providing students with the learning environment they need to scrutinise knowledge claims critically. The future university needs to reclaim the centrality of democratic values as a means of nurturing and protecting student academic freedom and maintaining a gen- uinely 'higher' education in which students can learn in peace.

THE DENIAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOCIALIST STATES CAN BE seen as the natural outcome of Marxist praxis: Marxist teaching about the nature of the class struggle and the conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat from bourgeois values is not only theoretically alien to the concept of universal human rights, but its implementation by Marxist revolutionaries in the circumstances expected to prevail is likely to require the denial of such rights to ever-widening sections of the society if political power is to be secured and retained.

HISTORICALLY AND CONCEPTUALLY CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT IS presented as the antithesis of absolute sovereignty and the prophylactic to tyrannical oppression. The paradigm form for absolute sovereignty is rule by one man and, since everything turns on the character of that man, such rule is inherently liable to collapse through incapacity, or to degenerate into tyranny. Tyranny is an ill against which necessarily there can be no protection under conditions of absolute sovereignty. Constitutional government may, therefore, be conceived as an attempt to provide built-in safeguards to prevent, or at least reduce the chances of, absolute sovereignty assuming the corrupt and perverted form of tyranny. Such safeguards inevitably restrict the absolute nature of sovereign rule.