Spatialising university reform

Abstract

This article investigates contemporary attempts to reform the institution of the university according to neoliberal ideological influences and oppositions to them. It employs Doreen Massey’s concept of space to focus on relations and separations made in the process. My ethnography of the University of Helsinki’s 375th anniversary celebration, which turned into a public spectacle of various visions of higher education, constitutes the main empirical material. Finland’s ambivalent position in the world renders the spatial work of forging connections and disconnections particularly conspicuous. It enables specific neoliberal aspirations (such as to be among ‘the world’s best universities’ amidst global competition) to become very strong but also allows additional trajectories, like the one about higher education as public goods, to present themselves as legitimate alternatives. The centre-periphery relations are therefore critical sites for analysing the contemporary university transformation, since they appear to be key drivers of the reform but also the primary source of resistance to it.

Living and Working Research Policies: The Case of International Scholars in Latvia

“…Whilst I elaborate on the specific peripheral positionality of Latvia in a later section of the article, it is first important to acknowledge that asymmetries of knowledge production do indeed exist, with various contradictions built into working from and within the periphery (Martinez 2019). At the same time, residing in the periphery of knowledge production, along with quite material realities, also implies 'a symbolic or performative position vis-à-vis global policy or core locations that become invoked to justify agendas to implement specific policy reforms' (Ivancheva and Syndicus 2019: 2; see also Trifuljesko 2019). It is in this intersection-between the material and symbolic peripheral positionality of the Latvian knowledge production system-that I situate my intervention and examine the lived realities of research policies from the perspective of labour.…”