This book offers new interdisciplinary analyses of borders and blockages in higher education and how they can be inhabited and reworked. Amidst stratified inequalities of race, gender, class and sexuality, across time and space, contributors explore what alternative academic futures can be claimed. While higher education institutions are increasingly concerned with ‘internationalization’, ‘diversity’, and ‘widening access and participation’, the sector remains complicit in reproducing entrenched inequalities of access and outcomes among both students and staff: boundaries of who does and does not belong are continually drawn, enacted, contested and redrawn. In the contemporary neoliberal, entrepreneurial and ‘post’-colonial educational context, contributors critically examine educational futures as these become more uncertain. This wide-ranging collection serves as a call to action for those concerned with the future of higher education, and how alternative futures can be reimagined.

This book examines how teaching and learning and teacher and student identities are being reframed in higher education by neoliberal policies and practices. It shares how teachers perform teaching and learning duties in relation to prescribed institutional policies and how teachers insert dissonant pedagogies as a critical practice. The book explores narrative pedagogy as a disruptive presence and a space for critique. It interrogates personal/professional experience of educational systems that present educators juggling complexity and meeting competing demands to make learning meaningful for students. Each contribution will act as a counterpoint and provide a synoptic method for comparison. The book re-constructs meaning from the generic narrative of the public face of education, which homogenizes and diminishes collective understandings of teachers and teaching. This book provides a contemporary account of the social realities experienced within the higher education classroom across the globe.

This book broadens the idea of a safe space that is traditionally discussed in feminist studies, to include gendered identities intersecting with class, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability within multiple aspects of education. This collection showcases work supporting access to education of persistently marginalized individuals.

This book investigates the gendered dimensions of academic life in the contemporary Australian university. It examines key discourses – most notably academic performativity and identity – through a feminist lens, and scrutinises how discourses of neoliberalism and feminism are entangled in the structure, systems, operations and cultures of the university. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with academic women in Australia, the author uses a mix of experimental methods to emphasise the performative and discursive decisions women make with regard to their academic careers. In doing so, this book reveals how women themselves generate neoliberal and feminist shifts, how they manage the contradictions they produce, and how they carve spaces of influence and authority. Moving towards a re-evaluation of existing discourses, this book offers new insights into gender inequality in the Australian university in neoliberal times.

Exploring how educators and institutions might embrace the STEAM turn to ensure that theatre and performance can be instrumental to the neoliberal university, without being instrumentalized by it, this volume showcases alternative models for teaching and learning in theatre and performance in a neoliberal age. Originally a special issue of Research in Drama Education, this volume foregrounds the above ideas in six principal articles, and provides a range of potential models for change in twelve case study discussions. Detailing a variety of ‘best practices’ in theatre and performance education, contributors demonstrate how postsecondary educators around the world have recentred drama and performance by collaborating with STEM-side faculty, using theatre principles to frame and support interdisciplinary learning, and working toward important applications beyond the classroom. Arguing that the neoliberal university needs theatre and performance more than ever, this valuable collection emphasizes the critical contribution which these subjects continue to make to the development of students, staff, and institutions. This book will be of particular interest to students, researchers, and librarians in the fields of Theatre Studies, Performance Studies, Applied Theatre, Drama in Education, and Holistic Education.

Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, individually and collectively, to develop capacities of resilience. We must accept and adapt to the ‘realities’ of an endemic condition of global insecurity and to the practice of so-called sustainable development. But in spite of claims that resilience make us more adept and capable, does the discourse of resilience undermine our ability to make our own decisions as to how we wish to live? This book draws out the theoretical assumptions behind the drive for resilience and its implications for issues of political subjectivity. It establishes a critical framework from which discourses of resilience can be understood and challenged in the fields of governance, security, development, and in political theory itself. Each part of the book includes a chapter by David Chandler and another by Julian Reid that build a passionate and provocative dialogue, individually distinct and offering contrasting perspectives on core issues. It concludes with an insightful interview with Gideon Baker. In place of resilience, the book argues that we need to revalorize an idea of the human subject as capable of acting on and transforming the world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of enslavement to it.

Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University investigates the impact of neoliberalism on academics in today’s universities. Considering the experiences of early career researchers as well as more experienced academics, it outlines the changing nature of working life in the university precipitated by the reality of de-professionalisation, worsening conditions of employment, and general precarious existence. The book traces the dramatic shift in the role and function of universities and academics over the last forty years. It considers how capitalist neoliberalism drives universities to operate like businesses in a cut-throat financialised education market place. Uniquely the book then provides a possible alternative in the form of the National Education Service (NES) and what this alternative system could look like. Thought-provoking and relevant, this book will be of use to postgraduate students as well as new, emerging, and established academics interested in the current state of higher education, academic life, and possibilities for the future.