Abstract In 2022, several prestigious Chinese universities – often referred to as ‘key-point’ institutions in Chinese national policy documents – announced their departure from the global university ranking systems (GURS), and these announcements generated heated public discussions on the Chinese cyberspace. This article analyses the discussions on university rankings in the Chinese public media forums. By unpacking the diverse meanings that Chinese commentators attach to GURS and their deep ambivalence towards the value and use of GURS in Chinese universities, this article shows how GURS extend the Party-State framework of education vis-à-vis national pride in the Chinese public forums. In addition, this article shows how policy travels beyond the domain it originally targets and functions as sites where people engage in political commentaries.
Abstract This article mines the perspectives of inclusive educators-in-training as both subjects and agents of policy negotiations for inclusion. It investigates how the tensions between the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and Austria's traditional legislation on segregated schooling impact teacher education on the ground. Drawing on ethnographic field research, I highlight teacher-students’ personal perspectives which reveal some of the barriers to overhauling an education system that human rights advocate Marianne Schulze calls a ‘fossilized policy construct’ (2022). I also show how peopling the UNCRPD brings forward new subjectivities of teacher-students. Two aspects about how teacher-students understood their own profession as inclusive educators stood out. First, they sought out professional collaboration to build on each other's experiences with disability in everyday life. Second, they interpreted inclusive education as an intersectional concept which provided a lens to view some of their own experiences with exclusion and (in)equity.
Abstract While debates about internationalisation of higher education in the United States have traditionally been shaped by domestic political and economic interests (Hovey 2004; Reilly and Senders 2009), this article focuses on the peripheries of these domestically driven conversations, the terrains where study abroad takes place. We bring in voices of students whose publicly engaged work while abroad addresses critical sociopolitical issues from a transnational perspective. We use the concept of performative democracy (Matynia 2009) to frame these democratic interventions of students. Through speaking and acting in the public realm, they transcend individually and domestically oriented learning paths and engage with civic matters through a deterritorialised global imagination (Appadurai 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1992). The students’ work, we suggest, challenges the continued pervasiveness of the homeland perspective in internationalisation policies and asks for their more expansive geopolitical framing.
Abstract This article is a discourse analysis of a corpus of refugee ‘success stories’, produced and circulated in the United States by resettlement policy actors. I document and analyse the visual and discourse strategies employed in these narratives to represent an idealised conception of refugee experience, which narrates the efficiency and moral goodness of the United States and its resettlement policy regime. I argue that this process entails a ‘null curriculum’ (Eisner 1985), which are the refugee experiences and contexts that are systematically elided from the stories that policy actors produce and circulate about refugees success – in particular, the role of US geopolitics in refugee displacement, the role of resettlement policy in directing refugees to precarious labour, and the role of higher education and career development in refugee flourishing.
Abstract Shared governance (SG), the joint responsibility of administration, faculty and trustees to govern, is one of the most distinctive features of US universities. However, in recent years, neoliberal reform efforts have undermined its practice. This article examines how the faculty senate of a university resisted neoliberal changes to reassert SG. Drawing on an autoethnographic account from the faculty senate floor over four years, supplemented by other data sources, the authors examine how senate resistance evolved in response to control mechanisms employed by the administration and the trustees. This article's primary contribution is presenting ‘tempered resistance’ as a viable ‘middle’ way – between acquiescence and radicalism – to confront the neoliberalisation of universities. This article underscores the importance of collective faculty voice in safeguarding the University's mission and uplifting campus morale.
