This article describes how a political assemblage currently at work in higher education is re-articulating academic subjectivities. This assemblage draws together entrepreneurial and humanist concepts of creativity into an intellectual resource that can change national economies. Academics are urged to use their creativity to counteract the…

A body of literature on students as partners (SaP) in higher education has emerged over the last decade that documents, shares, and evaluates SaP approaches. As is typical in emerging fields of inquiry, scholars differ regarding how they see the relationship between the developments in SaP practices and the theoretical explanations that guide,…

In this article we depart from a conceptualisation of foreign language teaching as intercultural citizenship in schools and universities. We extend this conceptualisation by suggesting that foreign language teaching can and should also sensitise students about issues of human suffering and cultivate empathy, solidarity, hospitality and inclusion.…

Contemporary college student activism has been particularly visible and effective in the past few years at US institutions of higher education and is projected only to grow in future years. Almost all of these protests and demands, while explicitly linked to social and racial justice, are sites of resistance to the neoliberalization of the…

This essay investigates the challenges involved with enacting bell hook's vision of education as the "practice of freedom" in the midst of the current growth of societal inequality for immigrants. Based on their scholarly analysis of the current political and educational setting, and on their experiences, the authors organized the essay…

In response to the so-called crisis in contemporary education in the institutions of higher learning (USA)--the encroachment of corporatism and pervasion of standardization--there is a move to offset this dominance by reconceiving the university in terms of an intimate space of dwelling in learning and education. In light of this moribund…

This article explores how educating lives for Christian wisdom might serve as an antidote to the vice of "acedia," a prominent feature of the culture of contemporary higher education. After suggesting that the capital vice of "acedia" seems to capture well various facets of our present age and how the pursuit of wisdom serves…

This paper examines the purpose of higher education (HE) for students in Ireland in the context of the dominant narrative of the knowledge-based economy (KBE). It argues that the KBE is one of the most recent of economic imaginaries devised by governments to manage the population [Hay, S., & Kaptizke, C. (2009). "Smart" state for a…

A geographical education offers more than skills, subject knowledge and generic attributes. It also develops a set of discipline-specific capabilities that contribute to a graduate's future learning and experience, granting them special ways of thinking for lifelong development and for contributing to the welfare of themselves, their community and…

Reforms surrounding the teacher's role in fostering students' social competences, especially those associated with empathy, have moved to the forefront of global higher education policy discourse. In this context, reform in higher education teaching has been focused on shifting teachers' practices away from traditional lecture-style…

As part of recent complex transformations, it seems that higher educational organisations are being forced to reorganise, standardise and streamline in order to survive in the new political and economic context. How are ethnographers in general going to approach these contemporary phenomena? By drawing on the conceptual history of anthropology,…

In the future, what role will the academic research library play in achieving the mission of higher education? This essay describes seven strategies that academic research libraries can adopt to become future-present libraries--libraries that foster what Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown have called "a new culture of learning." Written…

Few subjects have suffered as much as the liberal arts from the power of stale rhetoric, hollow appeals to tradition, and journalistic misrepresentation. Leon Botstein, begins this article by saying that together, these three factors have generated and legitimated public skepticism about the liberal arts. A liberal arts education (which is rarely…

In physical education (PE) and sports there is little theoretical and empirical knowledge about transgender people, and particularly, on how they are and can be imagined within this context. In this paper, we present and analyze a pedagogical activity based on the reading and discussion of a fictional representation of a transgender person within…

The rationale for retaining the humanities in universities in the 21st century is not self-evident. A case for the humanities can only be fully made against a sense of their loss or their absence. Some say that we are already in a post-human society, but what role might the humanities play in such a society? Presumably, the fate of the humanities…