Collective action has always been the heartbeat of social justice movements. However, existing systems pressure people to focus on hyper-competition and eradicate the ability to collectively resist systemic oppression. Unfortunately, education scholars rarely critically and theoretically analyze how they can and do collectively refuse neoliberal…

In this qualitative study, Samuel D. Museus analyzes how relative racialization processes and their dynamics shape Asian American college students' racial justice activism. The findings from his qualitative interviews with activist Asian American undergraduates reveal how these students perceived relative racialization processes as raising…

One of the many lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the nature of it: it has been, and still is, an evolving situation in which there are many questions, but not always immediate or easy answers. Some of the pandemic experience has been shared, as almost 1.6 billion learners' educations have been disrupted and teachers have reported…

This article examines the national and European policy contexts that shaped the Swedish internationalisation agenda in higher education since 2000, the policy ideas that were mobilised to promote it, and the national priorities that steered higher education debates. The analysis highlights how domestic and European policy priorities, as well as…

In this article, I describe the process and importance of branding a graduate public administration program. Written from the perspective of a participant-observer, I describe how with the assistance of my department we have given our program a more distinctive identity and therefore a more identifiable brand. That brand is one that focuses on…

In the modern society of the twenty-first century, the values of tolerance, respect and openness are the basis for the successful development of the individual, so it is important to properly shape the attitude towards them among students during their university studies. This study is aimed to identify the values of tolerance of university…

Applying the concept of ruling relations--everyday norms, assumptions, logics, and social interactions that structure people's everyday lives (Smith, 1999)--to STEM underrepresented minority (URM) graduate student experiences provides a unique and important way to understand how inequality can be integrated into the graduate student socialization…

The paper critically discusses how the notion of autonomy is textually constructed in the neo-liberal discourses of a corporatised public South African higher education system. By employing the methods of critical discourse analysis (CDA), I analyse two selected texts written by various leaders connected to the University of Johannesburg between…

University mergers have become a common strategy for increasing global competitiveness. In this chapter, the authors analyze the implementation of mergers in Finnish universities from the perspective of social justice as conceived within Finland and other Nordic countries.

In this chapter, the issue editors set the stage for the chapters that follow by delineating recent developments in higher education and common strategies for creating globally competitive higher education institutions. The editors consider social justice concerns that arise with global competition and contend that contextualized priorities can…

Branding of higher education institutions (HEIs) is an expanding area of research. The existing literature mainly draws on the strategic management perspective that argues that HEIs are pressured to develop brands which differentiate them from their competitors. Past studies, however, do insufficiently take into account that most HEIs are…

This paper discusses the emergence of aspiration as a keyword linked to higher education equity policy in England and Australia since 1997. Aspiration serves multiple purposes when constructed as a problematic site in which policy must intervene. For example, it can be understood as a vector for new technologies of governance that operate through…

The politics of the airwaves should be of vital concern to critical democracy, given the expanding realm of neoliberalism and its deeply homogenizing impact on social, political and economic relations everywhere. In light of the privatizing forces that control the media today, the article considers the manner in which community radio can provide…

Background: The paper compares and contrasts the policy context of teacher training for vocational educators (VETT) in Scotland and England and locates this in its European setting. It explores the wider socio-economic context, one that emphasises lifelong learning, competitiveness and social justice. Purpose: In particular, it addresses the UK…

This article offers an extended treatment of two social justice efforts in a rural university town as historical examples of civic engagement with contemporary implications for Writing Democracy and similar projects. The article begins with an analysis of local activism initiated by John Carlos in 1967 while he was still a student at our…