March 2, 2018 HERG Seminar

Please join us for the next HERG seminar:

Friday, March 2, 2018 Noon-2:00
Ponderosa Oak House, room 1003

Dr. Rebecca D. Cox, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education
Simon Fraser University, Canada
(Faculty profile: http://www.sfu.ca/education/faculty-profiles/rcox.html

Community Colleges and Student-Parents: Insights from a Cross-Country Comparative Study

Community colleges across the US and Canada offer a critical point of access to a range of neotraditional students, including students with dependent children. Yet colleges’ capacity to serve their students is complicated by the ongoing restructuring enabled by neoliberal policymaking. Not only does neoliberal ideology discount the effect of structural inequality on students’ postsecondary pathways, but it renders family relationships and caregiving responsibilities irrelevant to its emphasis on individual responsibility and market-based exchanges. In this presentation, I share insights from a comparative case study of two urban-serving community colleges, one in the US, and one in Canada. Designed to explore the colleges’ capacity to support student-parents, the study revealed the extent to which each college’s position vis-à-vis postsecondary competitors shaped its approach to supporting students with children.

Related Publication:

Cox, R.D., & Sallee, M. W. (2018). Neoliberalism across borders: A comparative case study of community colleges’ capacity to serve student-parents. The Journal of Higher Education 89(1), 54-80.

Ashenafi Alemu, PhD Candidate, Department of Educational Studies, UBC
(Student profile: http://edst.educ.ubc.ca/ashenafi-alemu/ )

“We are not born by choice”: Stories of Academic Public Intellectuals from the Global South

This paper reports the outcomes of life story interviews conducted to grasp the stories of academic public intellectuals from Global South. The interviews were conducted with three public intellectuals from the Global South, specifically from East Africa, who reside in the United States and Canada. Before conducting the interviews, the writer established the notion of public intellectual and symmetric criticality framework as a conceptual framework of this study. Participants were selected based on criteria established to identify them as public intellectuals which included their experiences in speaking to public, challenging the status-quo, engaging in critical reflexivity towards higher education, as well as being an accomplished, tenured academic in universities in the Global North. Their stories suggest that they developed the identity of public intellectual due to influences from their families and the compelling circumstances that forced them to speak to people and to power.

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