Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) Call for papers 2016

From the SRHE website: http://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2016/

Exploring Freedom and Control in Global Higher Education
SRHE International Research Conference: December 7th-9th 2016

SRHE Newer & Early Career Researchers Conference: December 6th

Reminder: Submission Deadline: Friday 24th June

The Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) is now inviting research contributions to the 2016 SRHE International conferences.

The theme for SRHE Conference 2016 is an exploration of issues around freedom and control in global higher education.  The conference theme seeks to investigate some of the tensions between freedom and control which have emerged as higher education has expanded and internationalised within a competitive market environment. What are the implications of this tension between freedom and control for those studying, working, managing and leading in higher education?  What are the key points of challenge, and what new possibilities are created?

This leading international conference is highly participative, and promotes the dissemination and exchange of ideas in a variety of formats, across a range of research domains and drawing from a multi-disciplinary research base.

You are invited to contribute to this debate on any aspect of your research interests by:

– presenting a paper
– forming or participating in a symposium or ‘round table’
– submitting a poster on any aspect of your research interests
– participating as a delegate

The linked SRHE Newer & Early Career Researchers Conference on Tuesday 6th December is aimed at postgraduate and early career/newer researchers, and provides an opportunity to share and discuss work within the higher education research community in a supportive and developmental environment.

New Report on Federal Spending on Postsecondary Education

The  Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) of Canada today released a much anticipated report on postsecondary funding. The report, Federal Spending on Postsecondary Education, is available for download on the PBO website. Included on the site is a link to the data as a downloadable Excel file, and an interactive chart. A brief summary of the report, from the website: “This report analyzes federal spending on postsecondary education in Canada over the past 10 years; and, where possible, analyzes the distributional impacts of federal programs.  It also provides forward projections to 2020-21 taking into account recent Budget 2016 announcements.”

What is the PBO’s audience and mandate? The PBO’s What We Do page says, “The PBO’s mandate is to provide independent analysis to Parliament on the state of the nation’s finances, the government’s estimates and trends in the Canadian economy; and upon request from a committee or parliamentarian, to estimate the financial cost of any proposal for matters over which Parliament has jurisdiction.”

May 13 HERG Seminar

The HERG seminar on May 13, 2016 will feature two speakers: Bernard Chan (MA student in Educational Studies, concentration in Higher Education) and Dr. Amy Scott Metcalfe, Department of Educational Studies. Titles and abstracts of their presentations appear below. Please join us at UBC in Ponderosa Commons Oak House (PCOH), Multipurpose room 2012 from noon to 3:00. Feel free to bring your lunch!

Bernard Chan
Re-imagining Borderlands: Towards the Plurinationalisation of Higher Education
Abstract: In recent decades, internationalisation has become a “buzz word” in higher education settings around the world. The notion of “internationalisation”, by itself, is not precisely defined; how it is understood and enacted depends on (trans)national, local, and/or institutional and individual contexts. Yet, the “international imperative” (Altbach, 2013) has evolved into a core concern in higher education, and it has contributed to the emergence of dynamic and ever-shifting education landscapes hereby conceived to be theoretical “borderlands” (Anzaldúa’s, 1999). Such spaces, by their inherent nature and composition, are diverse in a variety of ways (Metcalfe, 2009). In the dominant discourse on higher education internationalisation however, ideas of “diversity” often privilege organisational (e.g. institutional structures and processes) and recognition aspects (e.g. student headcounts and phenotypical features) of difference that are immediately “visible” (Hakkola, 2015; Haring-Smith, 2012). This is apparent in the arena of international student recruitment, whereby the contributions of cultural and intellectual diversities of students from across nation-state boundaries are particularly emphasised (Lobnibe, 2009; Mayuzumi, Motobayashi, Nagayama, & Takeuchi, 2007; Peterson, Briggs, Dreasher, Horner, & Nelson, 1999). The anchoring of international students to notions of “cultural” and “intellectual” diversities, and the transactional nature of their relationships to host nation-states, education institutions, and communities are reflected in policy and strategic documents, media reports, and other forms of discourse on higher education internationalisation. This anchoring process, however, may promote the inclusion of certain students, yet perpetuate the exclusion of many others from higher education borderlands. In this study, I employ multimodal discourse analysis to examine diversity discourses in international student recruitment practices in British Columbia, and consider their potential contributions to the systematic exclusion of certain bodies, minds, and spirits from higher education landscapes in the province. In particular, I focus on policy documents on three authority levels: the provincial government, quasi-government, and institutional. Based on my analysis, I contemplate the possibility of a plurinational future of higher education borderlands, one that creates the conditions for a politics of difference that is committed to forms of heterogeneity and multiplicity embracing the “contingent, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing” (West, 1990, p. 93) bodies, minds, and spirits, and to the emergence of new, democratised spaces in higher education.

Dr. Amy Scott Metcalfe
Visualizing the future of educational research: Photography as contested witness and apocalyptic flâneur
Abstract: The journal Research in Education has undergone a transition, with a new editorial team: Matthew ClarkeJane Randand Kalervo N. Gulson. As a member of the new editorial board, Dr. Metcalfe will introduce the changes to the journal, including the new editorial team’s “aim to edit a journal imbued with an ethos of reflexivity and criticality, an attendance to questions of power and politics, and a scope that embraces diversity, complexity, contestation and liminality, in order to continually challenge, unsettle and problematise easy or received understandings of research in education” (Introduction to the New EditorsResearch in Education 0034523716630894first published on April 11, 2016 as doi:10.1177/0034523716630894). Dr. Metcalfe will discuss her invited contribution to the first volume in the newly configured journal, focusing on the promise and pitfalls of photography in educational research.

Reading List

The “Reading List” is a new feature of the HERG blog, where new articles and books on the topic of higher education are mentioned.

The first is an article by E. Lisa Panayotidis and Paul Stortz, from the University of Calgary:

Panayotidis, L., & Stortz, P. (2016). The imagined space of academic life: Leacock, Callaghan, and English-Canadian campus fiction in Canada, 1914-1948. Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation28(1).
http://historicalstudiesineducation.ca/index.php/edu_hse-rhe/article/view/4461/4695

You can sign up for new issue alerts from the journal Historical Studies in Education.
http://historicalstudiesineducation.ca/index.php/edu_hse-rhe/notification/subscribeMailList

 

2016 HERG seminar schedule

Our HERG seminars for 2016 will be held on the following dates:

April 22
May 13
June 10
July 15
[no meeting in August]
September 23
October 21
November 18
[no meeting in December]

The HERG seminars will be held in the Multipurpose Room of Ponderosa Commons from noon to 3:00 unless otherwise noted.

A schedule of speakers for upcoming sessions will be forthcoming soon.

See you there!

April HERG lunchtime seminar

HERG_April_2016

On April 22, 2016, we held our first HERG seminar in Ponderosa Commons at UBC. Two speakers shared their recent conference presentations, Gang Li and Sharon Stein. Abstracts and citations of the presentations are listed below.

Gang Li, PhD Candidate in Educational Studies
Abstract
Since the late 1990s citizens from the People’s Republic of China have become the largest single group of international students in all major English-speaking countries. However, relatively little has been done to understand the political dimension of Chinese students’ experience in their host societies. Taking Canada as a case country with democracy as a point of reference, this paper explores Chinese international students’ political interactions with Canadian society. Delving into six social-science graduate students’ lived experience with democracy in Metro Vancouver, this paper highlights the fact that some Chinese students tend to become highly sensitive to the political significance and implications of their overseas experience in and through their engagement with democratic discourses and practices in Canada. Furthermore, those students who have obtained Canadian permanent residency or citizenship are even inclined to become fairly active in political life in Canada.

Gang’s paper will be published soon:
Li, G. (2016, forthcoming). Politically sensitive Chinese students’ engagement with democracy in Canada: A case study. Journal of Chinese Overseas, 12(1), 96-121.

Sharon Stein, PhD Candidate in Educational Studies
Abstract: Although efforts to emphasize higher education’s role in global development have grown in recent years, important questions remain about the resulting initiatives. In this study, drawing on theories of social imaginaries and the insights of decolonial and
postcolonial scholars, we employ our concept of the ‘modern/colonial global imaginary’ in order to consider the impact of enduring colonial power relations and modes of knowledge production on the Association of Commonwealth Universities’ “Beyond 2015” campaign.

Sharon’s co-authored paper was presented at the 2016 AERA meeting:
Stein, S., Andreotti, V.D.O., & Susa, R. (2016, April 12). “Beyond 2015,” within the modern/colonial global imaginary? Global development and higher education. Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC.