This paper describes how language, juridical epistemology and power is re-shaping mainstream UK universities, and how these changes create a default cultural floor that makes it difficult for alternative models to operate. It will make its argument via reflections on the second branch of Social Science Centre (SSC) in the country, in Manchester,…

This paper outlines clear signs of market-led instrumentalisation for HE cultures in Britain, before critiquing the "ontological turn" in HE theory and its intrinsic political abdication from those signs. It focuses on a paper by Ronald Barnett to both diagnose the problem, which is a "precarité" that is ghosted in his work,…