Prof Simon Marginson
Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol, Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, an Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University and an Honorary Professional Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
10 Apr 2025
Has the public good role of higher education survived neoliberalism?
Neoliberal government of higher education tends to empty out much of its potential contribution to common and collective good in society, including the broad formation and self-formation of students. Neoliberalism channels the collective obligations of the sector into its implications for capital accumulation, understood in terms of GDP and individual employability of graduates as human capital. Educationists have struggled to assert a more social democratic and humanist educational approach centred on the public good or common good. There is some evidence now of state disillusionment with the outcomes of neoliberal regulation, as well as social disaffection with the promise of mass higher education to expand opportunity amid graduate under-employment. Though economic regulation of higher education and science have not been abandoned (and in some jurisdictions is taking more problematic forms involving arbitrary state interventions), it may be an opportune time to revisit the topic of public and common good. The paper reflects on the outcome of a ten-country comparative research project on the public good role of higher education, reviews the differing English-language meanings of ‘public good’ and ‘common good’, revisits the role of the state in higher education, which differs significantly between the various political cultures, and the potential to enlarge understandings of the social possibilities of higher education and knowledge, and argues that common good provides a more enabling and more cosmopolitan framework than public good.
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Dr Wenqin Shen
Dr Wenqin Shen is Associate Professor of Higher Education at the Graduate School of Education, Peking University.
He was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at UW-Madison in 2013 and 2014.
11 Apr 2025
Reimagining higher education research through Geographical Thinking: knowledge and university in space
Higher education research is recognised as an interdisciplinary field that features mainstream disciplines like sociology, economics, history, and political science.
These disciplinary perspectives highlight the importance of factors such as class, money, time, and power in the higher education system. However, higher education institutions are "place-based institutions". Place and space are key factors affecting teaching and knowledge production in the higher education system. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce geographical thinking into higher education research. With the spatial turn in social science research since the 1980s, scholars in human geography and economic geography have conducted extensive research on higher education issues. This speech will explore the historical development of geographical thinking in higher education research and analyse the inspiration and imagination it brings to the field.
Date: 11 April, 2025
Time: 15:30-16:30 (HKT)
Venue: D2-LP-04
Prof Catherine Montgomery
Catherine Montgomery is Professor of Education and Deputy Executive Dean Global in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health at the University of Durham.
Catherine’s research focuses on mobilities and immobilities in higher education and the internationalisation and decolonisation of curriculum and knowledge. She is also interested in the flows of international students and what this can tell us about the changing landscapes of global higher education. She has published widely in these areas. Catherine is currently focusing on the impact, development and history of doctoral research as knowledge mobility.
Prior to joining Durham in September 2019, Catherine held professorial posts at the University of Bath and the University of Hull, both with a focus on international higher education. At the University of Bath, Catherine was also Academic Director for International Partnerships, and she was also the former Director and founder of ‘Centre for Research in Education in China and East Asia’ at the University of Bath.
Catherine holds a visiting professorship at the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation at the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy; she is an affiliated international expert for Monash University’s China Research Network; she is an invited Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA 2018) and she was awarded a UK National Teaching Fellowship in 2010.
Catherine is the Editor of a successful journal: Compare: a Journal of International and Comparative Education.
Seminar and Workshop (18 - 22 NOVEMBER 2024)
19 NOV, 2024
Unveiling crisis in globalised higher education: Artificial intelligence insights from doctoral research in EThOS
This session seeks to illuminate new perspectives on the concept of crisis in globalised higher education (HE) by focusing on knowledge generated by doctoral research. Doctoral research is a significant part of research and knowledge building in HE, particularly in science, and doctoral students contribute to the research capacity and knowledge building of institutions. This source of knowledge offers alternative perspectives on crisis in HE, providing a rich source of research which is often under-consulted. Using the British Library's digital repository EThOS, a collection of around 637,000 doctoral studies carried out in British universities, the research harnesses Generative Artificial Intelligence approaches in order to analyse the ways in which crisis is defined and constructed in doctoral research since 2000. Through a pilot study using a prototype of a new AI tool, the paper offers both conceptual and methodological insights into constructions of crisis in this under-used field of research.
Date: 19 November 2024 (Tuesday)
Time: 1-2PM
Venue: EdUHK Tai Po Campus C-LP-02
20 NOV, 2024
Writing for publication: turning your PhD into a Journal Article
This 2 hour workshop will focus on approaches to publishing from your PhD. Turning your PhD into a journal article might seem straightforward at first but there are some complexities involved, including the different genres and characteristics of the two forms of writing and the processes and requirements of the journals. In this session we will consider these complexities and discuss approaches to publishing articles from your PhD material.
We will begin the workshop by discussing the characteristics of a research paper. To prepare for this, some advanced reading material will be sent to you and we will ask you to have a look at a thesis and a research paper by the same author and about the same topic. These are actual examples of a ‘real’ PhD which was then used to publish an article.
In addition to this, you could come to the workshop prepared to discuss some writing you are working on or planning. If possible, you could bring an extract of your writing with you to discuss on the day. This could be anything from the abstract for your PhD or an article or other publication you are working on.
Finally, I will give you some insider tips and advice from the point of view of a current academic journal editor (my journal is Compare: a Journal of International and Comparative Education). We will discuss what editors and reviewers look for in an article.
Date: 20 November 2024 (Wednesday)
Time: 6:30 - 8:30 PM
Venue: ONLINE *Last Update: 20 NOV 1@ PM*
21 NOV, 2024
Critical perspectives on internationalisation: exploring the relationship between internationalisation and decolonial agendas in global higher education
This session seeks to illuminate new perspectives on the concept of crisis in globalised higher education (HE) by focusing on knowledge generated by doctoral research. Doctoral research is a significant part of research and knowledge building in HE, particularly in science, and doctoral students contribute to the research capacity and knowledge building of institutions. This source of knowledge offers alternative perspectives on crisis in HE, providing a rich source of research which is often under-consulted. Using the British Library's digital repository EThOS, a collection of around 637,000 doctoral studies carried out in British universities, the research harnesses Generative Artificial Intelligence approaches in order to analyse the ways in which crisis is defined and constructed in doctoral research since 2000. Through a pilot study using a prototype of a new AI tool, the paper offers both conceptual and methodological insights into constructions of crisis in this under-used field of research.
Date: 19 November 2024 (Tuesday)
Time: 1-2PM
Venue: EdUHK Tai Po Campus C-LP-02
21 NOV, 2024
Reflecting on research with international students as a thematic subfield of higher education research
Research with international students becomes a vast subfield. A challenge for researchers, then, is identifying research gaps and developing critical reflections on why identified omissions are problematic for knowledge, theory, or practice. To respond to this gap, this seminar reports on our mapping of the subfield of existing research with international students through a series of systematic literature reviews and reflects on constructionism in research methodologies within broader education studies. Referencing Macfarlane’s (2012, 2022) visual mapping, this project has recreated an “ideological seascape” of research with international students and highlighted several critical points about the subfield (see Figure 1). We argue that much of the research adopts deficit narratives of international students, depicting them as wholly experiencing “challenges” or “struggles”. Pedagogic research also often problematically attempts to “fix” perceived deficits through assimilative lenses. We draw attention to the criticality of future studies and the need for the explicit theorisation and/or conceptualization of objects and the social processes pertaining to international students.
Date: 21 November 2024 (Thursday)
Time: 16:00 - 17:30 (+8 GMT)
Venue: EdUHK Tai Po Campus D-LP-02
(Hybrid Available)