rachelbrooks – Page 3 – Rachel Brooks

The materiality of university campuses: the role and significance of students’ union buildings

27724059062_7d5f58b203 In the literature on higher education, there is an increasing emphasis on the importance of virtual spaces in terms of both pedagogic practice and wider aspects of university life. It has also been argued that online spaces, and social media in particular, are playing a key role in facilitating the political engagement of students. In our research on contemporary students’ unions, however, much greater emphasis was placed by our respondents (students’ union officials and senior institutional managers) upon the physical spaces of the campus than on the virtual spaces available to students and/or students’ union officials for both academic and social activities. Indeed, the students’ union building itself was discussed, at great length, by many of the students’ union officials and senior managers who participated in our focus groups. Several respondents described how changes had recently been made to the buildings used by the students’ union, which, they claimed, had had a positive effect. For senior managers at one of our higher education institutions (HEIs), for example, a shift to a more central location on campus was thought to have had a significant influence on the visibility of the union, and the propensity of others to engage with it:

It’s much more visible, the [students’ union] is just a much more open place, it’s more centrally located, it’s better connected with other parts of the university. It’s actually a place where people are wanting, not just the students, but people want to do things in it. And I think, so it’s more valued by the university than the temporary place that was there before. And I suppose that, the effect on the student unions it’s just to make its business, its existence much more public…..I think that’s made a big difference because the student union is far more visible, not just for students, but it’s also visible for staff as well.

Similarly, union officials at another HEI claimed that the improvement in the union’s space – making it more open and welcoming – had had a direct impact on its use:

We have had this fantastic space this year, so we have been able to even engage with people that don’t have problems, all they want to do is to find a nice place to sit … To chill out, yeah. … and to play Scrabble and to …. You know the glass front, when you first walked in, that used to be a brick wall with a little window, could knock on and speak to someone in reception in the corridor. So it wasn’t even nice sort of …It was awful.

In these accounts, an emphasis on the materiality of the campus is clearly evident. In particular, the nature and location of the students’ union building is claimed to have a direct impact on the extent to which the wider student body engages (or does not engage) with the union.

Although there is currently little academic research on the role of students’ unions in the UK, a notable exception is that carried by Andersson and colleagues, which analysed the role of the union as part of a broader project that examined ‘geographies of encounter’ between different social groups at a UK HEI. They argue that while, in theory, the students’ union can be seen as a key arena for bringing students from different backgrounds together to pursue a range of social, political and leisure activities, in practice, the increasingly commodified nature of union activity militates against social mixing. Here, they point to the impact of unions letting out space to private enterprises, which then often offer a range of highly-gendered commercial activities (such as beauty salons, hairdressers and nightclubs). The students’ union, in their analysis, is a space in which students from diverse backgrounds are ‘thrown together’ but which does not take the shape of a Habermasian, egalitarian ‘public sphere’; instead it is a space that is heavily mediated by commercial interests, and tends to reinforce some forms of inequality.

Our data, however, suggest a more complex reading of the spaces of students’ union, and a more ambivalent relationship between unions and processes of commodification. Although commercial activities on campus were clearly important to senior managers and were valued by some students’ unions as means of preserving some independence (through having an income stream in addition to the block grant from their institution), in none of our ten case studies were they viewed (either by managers or union officers) as the key focus of the union’s activity. We suggest that market pressures on universities (such as competition with other institutions, and the emergence of various ranking systems) have caused unions to place less emphasis, rather than more, on their commercial activities, which, in turn, has implications for the physical spaces that students’ unions occupy. While HEIs are clearly concerned with revenue generation and ensuring financial sustainability in an increasingly competitive higher education market, the importance of measures of ‘student satisfaction’ in stimulating demand for courses has encouraged senior managers to work closely with their students’ union and, often, to value highly the contributions unions can make to improving the quality of ‘the student experience’ and ensuring ‘the student voice’ is represented effectively.

Such pressures have encouraged unions to foreground their representative function, often at the expense of campaigning activities and also, in many cases, to the detriment of commercial ventures. This has, inevitably, had a direct impact on the use of physical space on campus, with a decline in the number of bars and clubs. The same pressures have also been an important driver of institutional investment in the physical infrastructure of students’ unions – particularly a desire to increase the visibility and use of the union by the wider student body. Indeed, union officers in our research believed they had been ‘rewarded’ by investment in their buildings for their support of university priorities. In some cases, respondents also linked this type of investment to the substantial increase in tuition fees for domestic students in England and Wales from 2012 onwards:

And my view is that the university’s very much aware of the fact that the fees have gone up to £9,000 … and they’re very keen to invest in facilities for students and provide additional resource to support the student experience, and [the union is] very good at actually tailoring their message to sort of like address that particular lead. (Senior managers’ focus group)

Nevertheless, our data indicate that while institutional investment in students’ unions buildings may have had a positive impact on both the use and visibility of union space, it was not always entirely unproblematic. Indeed, some of the factors that had motivated the investment were also those that created tensions. For example, one group of students’ union officers described a struggle over the extent to which the union should look similar to the rest of the university and an insistence by senior management that they should use the same colour schemes and branding. Such tensions provide support for those who have argued that university campuses are often ‘paradoxical spaces’ in which competing, and sometimes contradictory, discourses prevail – in this case, the marketization of higher education appears to have substantially limited students’ unions’ focus on commercial activity.

This post first appeared on the Surrey Sociology blog in August 2016. A fuller account of this research is given in this article.

Spatial Disparities in Emotional Responses to Education

The blogpost below originally appeared on the Surrey Sociology blog. However, I am re-posting it here as it relates to a paper that I’m giving at the European Conference on Educational Research this week. It is based on a cross-national project I conducted in the UK and Denmark.

Introduction

Historically, educational institutions have had an uneasy relationship with emotions. Following the Enlightenment tradition, schools and universities have often been concerned only with educating the mind, while side-lining the body[1]. Their focus has thus, traditionally, been on reason, rather than emotion. Boler argues that this privileging of the rational over the affective has acted as a means of social control, with women excluded from the ideal of reason on the basis of their supposed association with emotion and nature. Analyses of contemporary higher education have, however, suggested that recent years have witnessed a significant shift in the place of emotions within the academy. Indeed, Ecclestone and Hayes maintain that higher education has become ‘therapeutised’, evidenced through: a concern with emotionally vulnerable students and staff; the rise of degree-level therapy and counselling courses; and an emphasis on therapeutic teacher training, which has influenced the nature of learning at university. Such changes, they suggest, are not confined to higher education, or even education more generally, but have permeated many areas of social policy – underpinned by a desire on the part of policymakers to promote ‘positive psychology’.

While many scholars have been sympathetic to arguments about the individualisation and psychologisation of social problems, Ecclestone and Hayes’ wider analysis of the place of emotions with higher education has had a more critical reception. Sue Clegg, for example, has taken issue with their assertion that any recognition of the affective has the effect of infantilising students and leads to the therapeutisation of higher education. Moreover, others have pointed out that there is a long history of feminist scholarship that has argued for the role of emotions within higher education to be made more visible, exploring the impact of ‘passionate attachments’ on pedagogy, and questioning the traditional binary split between emotion and reason.

This blogpost describes research that sought to contribute to this literature on the place of emotions within higher education through exploring the experiences of one particular group: students with dependent children (i.e. ‘student-parents’). It draws on data from two different European nations – the UK and Denmark – and, within each of them, from two higher education institutions (HEIs) with different market positions (one older, higher status HEI – ‘UK Older’ or ‘Danish Older’, and one newer, lower status institution ‘UK Newer’ and ‘Danish Newer’). 68 student-parents were interviewed across the two countries.

Guilt and UK student-parents

The extant literature indicates that students within UK higher education, who are also parents of dependent children, experience a range of emotions with respect to their studies, many of which are positive. However, within the current study, the emotion that was referred to most commonly was that of guilt. This was typically discussed in relation to respondents’ relationships with their children: many believed that the time they spent on studying was time that would otherwise have been devoted to childcare, and their children may well be suffering as a result. For a smaller number of respondents, guilt was felt in relation to their studies, rather than their children, primarily because they believed they were not spending sufficient time on their degree programme. For others, guilt was felt in relation to both children and study, as the quotation below from Esma (PhD in Gender Studies, UK Newer) indicates:

I think the biggest impact probably comes down to feelings of guilt, because I feel guilty when I’m with my children and I’m not working on my PhD and I feel guilty when I’m working on my PhD and I’m not with the children.

Guilt was, however, not experienced equally across the UK sample of student-parents. Although it was a common theme amongst many of the student-mothers, it was mentioned by only one of the ten British student-fathers. The guilt experienced by the UK student-mothers can be related to the strong normative constructions of mothering within the UK. The ‘intensive mothering’ promoted by the media, the state and other significant social actors can be seen as at odds with a decision to pursue a degree programme. Intensive mothering is understood as a gendered model that encourages women to spend a significant amount of time, energy and money raising their children, and which typically requires a considerable degree of maternal self-sacrifice. By placing responsibility for poor cognitive, social and educational outcomes on the shoulders of mothers, it is argued that they are set up for failure. Indeed, evidence suggests that, as a result of these particular expectations, many mothers not only fear that they may not be doing enough for the children, but also feel guilt – for not doing all that they could, or for wanting some time for themselves. Such emotions are inevitably heightened for those trying to juggle studying alongside mothering.

Feelings of guilt (or their absence) also appeared to be patterned by the institution the students attended: guilt was much more commonly mentioned by student-parents at UK Newer than by their counterparts at UK Older. There are a number of possible explanations for this difference. Firstly, the sample of UK Older students included considerably more men than the sample at UK Newer and there are notable differences between discourses of ‘good mothering’ and ‘good fathering’. Secondly, the larger number of international students at UK Older may be significant – as perhaps those who had lived most of their life outside the UK were less susceptible to ‘intensive parenting’ discourses and/or had taken the significant decision to move abroad for higher education only after feeling completely sure of their choice. Thirdly, the greater independent financial support accessed by the UK Older students may have reduced the need to juggle childcare and study in the same way as the UK Newer students, who were often self-funding. Finally, the prestige associated with attending the highly-regarded UK Older may have mitigated any ambivalence felt at not being in paid work (for the student-fathers) or not ‘being there’ for longer (for the student-mothers).

Spatial differentiation: the evidence from Denmark

Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in much of the work on mothering and student-mothers is an assumption that experiences are common across nation-states (or at least across those of the Global North). However, the current research with student-parents in the UK and Denmark revealed significant differences across national borders. Feelings of guilt were much less common amongst the Danish students than amongst their British counterparts.

This suggests that emotions are differentiated, not only by social characteristics such as gender, as discussed above, but also spatially – in this case, by nation state.

Diane Reay has argued that emotional responses to education (such as anxiety and defensiveness) often follow from making what is felt to be a non-normative choice. The significant differences in normative behaviour between the UK and Denmark, in relevant areas, would suggest that this thesis may help to explain the differences in feelings of guilt across the two national contexts. Within Denmark, the level of female employment is high and it is common for mothers to return to full-time work when their children are young. As a result, there is little societal disapproval of mothers working outside the home. Moreover, despite dominant discourses that reiterate the importance of ‘intensive mothering’ elsewhere in Europe and beyond, within Denmark many still believe that the state plays an important role in childrearing, evidenced through the large number of state-subsidised nurseries across the country. Within this context, it seems likely that student-mothers feel much less pressure to be physically present throughout the day for their children, and thus do not experience feelings of guilt when they choose to study for a degree. Indeed, if student-mothers see the alternative to studying as being in paid employment (rather than being at home with their children), it is likely that they will believe that, if anything, their children are benefitting from their current situation. Within the UK, however, few student-mothers saw the alternative to studying as being in full-time employment; thus, the comparisons they drew were different.

Differences in gender relations within the two nations may also help to explain the variations in emotional response. Male partners of Danish student-mothers appeared to view studying as an intrinsically worthwhile activity, and were supportive of it in a variety of practical ways. Often this support also included taking responsibility for childcare – a practice that was rarely seen amongst the partners of the British student-mothers. This accords with other studies that have shown that while, in all countries, women do more domestic and caring work, men in Nordic nations are much more involved in childcare than their peers in the UK and other European countries. Thus, within a context in which male partners are willing, able and expected to share childcare, it is perhaps unsurprising that student-mothers do not feel guilt at combining study with raising a family.

Concluding thoughts

By drawing on the narratives of higher education students with dependent children studying in the UK and in Denmark, the research on which this blogpost draws provides evidence of the way in which the production of one particular emotion (guilt) is inextricably linked to social locations and spatial contexts. It has argues that feelings of guilt, on the part of student-parents, are influenced by a number of social characteristics, most notably, gender: of those studying at UK universities, the student-mothers were much more likely to report having felt guilty about combining study and childcare than the student-fathers. It also shows that there are important variations by space – between the two UK universities in the sample and between British student-parents and those in Denmark. Thus, while emotion is often theorised as a personal and individual experience, this research underlines the socially-constructed nature of emotional responses.

If you would like to read more about this research, do have a look at this article, published in the British Educational Research Journal.

[1] There is also, however, a large literature on how schools and other educational institutions ‘discipline’ the body.

The changing nature of students’ unions

I will be giving a talk at the European Conference on Educational Research this week about the role of students’ unions within higher education. Below, I outline some of the key points I’ll be making.

What role do students’ unions play in today’s HE system?

Students’ unions have a long history in the UK, with the first having been established at St Andrew’s University in Scotland in 1864. Historically, they have tended to carry out a range of functions for their members including: organising social activities; providing support on a range of academic and welfare issues; representing students both individually and collectively; and campaigning on local and national issues – although the relative importance of these functions has differed over time.

Despite radical changes to the UK higher education sector over recent years, the role of the students’ union, within this shifting landscape has remained largely unexplored. With the aim of starting to redress this gap, over the past couple of years, Kate Byford, Katherine Sela and I have conducted a UK-wide survey of students’ union officers and two focus groups at each of ten case-study higher education institutions – one with students’ union leaders and the other with senior managers of the institution. The data we have generated, through these methods, suggest strongly that the role of students’ unions has changed significantly over the last decade.

Increasing importance of the representative function

Firstly, we found that a large majority of our respondents believed that the ‘representative’ function (i.e. representing the views and concerns of all sections of the student body) of students’ unions had become increasingly important and that, in many cases, this has been associated with a decline in the importance of other functions such as more ‘activist’ pursuits (e.g. campaigning on national and local issues) and the provision of services to students (through, for example, advice and guidance sessions and/or as part of commercial activities). Although this shift was welcomed by many of those who took part in our research, a significant minority of our respondents did raise some concerns about this new focus. For example, one of the focus groups comprised of senior managers commented: ‘I think what we’re probably articulating is a pattern where the student union influence [on the university] …. has just eroded and eroded and eroded and is being distilled down to this kind of pivotal role around representation and so on and that just leads to all the questions around, you know, what’s it there for, what’s it doing and that kind of thing and so on.’

Increasing importance of non-elected officers

Secondly, alongside a shift towards prioritising representation, many participants described how permanent staff within the students’ union had come to take on more power, sometimes at the expense of those who had been elected. The senior managers at one of our case study institutions were typical of many in noting that there had been a ‘shift of balance of our contacts’ away from elected officers and towards those in long-term roles. They described how there were now fewer sabbatical officer roles, and financial responsibility had been transferred from elected officers to the senior manager of the students’ union. For a large majority of respondents, such changes were seen in broadly positive terms, as providing greater continuity from year to year, and better support structures for those in elected positions (who typically occupy their role for one year only), particularly at the start of their term of office. Not all respondents were, however, entirely comfortable with this change in roles, with some believing that it sometimes made it harder for those in elected roles to advance their own agenda. Indeed, one of our respondents commented: ‘I know that some [elected] officers have found it difficult challenging the [students’ union] senior leadership team, who have naturally all come from leadership roles and are leaders themselves, to say actually, “This is the representational voice of students….and this is the direction we’d like to go with please”.’

Relationships with senior management

Finally, many of those who took part in the research believed that the relationship between students’ union officers and senior institutional managers had changed over time, and that there was now a new willingness on both sides to engage in constructive ways. This change was typically explained by pointing to developments in the external environment, particularly the increase in tuition fees and the insertion of the question about the performance of students’ unions into the annual National Student Survey. Students’ union officers at one of our case study institutions, for example, claimed that their senior managers ‘know they have to respond to the customers’, while senior managers at another university stated explicitly that the students’ union had become increasingly important because of the emphasis that had come to be placed on the ‘student voice’ ‘for a variety of reasons, not least the NSS and its influence on league tables’. Nevertheless, while a majority of respondents from both students’ unions and senior management described closer, more co-operative and less adversarial relationships, this was rarely thought to have been associated with any significant shift of power away from institutional leaders.

What is the significance of these changes?

The strong evidence of an increased focus on the representative role of students’ unions, and the importance attributed to this by many respondents provides some support for the arguments made by scholars that the student voice has become increasingly ‘domesticated’. By focussing on representation, students’ union officers inevitably foreground issues that affect the day-to-day lives of students rather than broader political or social concerns that may be more aligned with an ‘activist’ agenda. Moreover, the increasing convergence between the values and priorities of students’ unions and senior management (as a result of similar pressures coming to bear on both parties), suggests that fewer spaces are now available within higher education institutions from which to offer a radical challenge to either local or national policy.

While students’ unions may provide an important space within higher education institutions for like-minded people to get together and pursue collaborative projects, our research has provided little evidence to support the argument that has been made by Crossley and Ibrahim that they play a significant role in facilitating political engagement, or inculcating a more ‘activist’ orientation. Our data suggest that the space of the students’ union was important for bringing students together, but typically for the purpose of representing other students and/or delivering services and events in the wider institution. In line with Sabri’s argument, we suggest that student ‘voice’ was articulated primarily in relation to concerns about ‘the student experience’ rather than any more political agendas.

The increasingly powerful role, within students’ unions, of permanent members of staff also raises questions about Crossley and Ibrahim’s thesis, as elected officers (in some institutions) come to have less contact with senior managers, and strategic priorities are increasingly shaped by those without a democratic mandate. Nevertheless, in relating our data to broader themes about political engagement, it is important to emphasise that we are not claiming that the voice of all students has been ‘domesticated’. Indeed, evidence of recent student occupations in the UK suggests that there remain some spaces within higher education – even if not within the day-to-day practices of students’ unions – within which more radical critiques can be articulated and students can engage politically.

Many of our students’ union respondents believed they did have a significant influence on the senior management within their institution, and certainly felt that they were listened to by senior staff more than their counterparts had been in the past. Nevertheless, they were also clear about the limits to their influence, with almost all those who took part in the focus groups believing that, ultimately, power lay with senior managers. The evidence discussed above also suggests that the power of those holding elected positions was being eroded within students’ unions by the increasing importance of permanent members of staff. Furthermore, the focus on ‘local’ issues, as a consequence of the foregrounding of the representative role with the remit of both the students’ union as a whole and that of individual officers, suggests that the arena within which power and influence can be exerted is limited. We thus conclude by suggesting that, here, there are broad parallels with the critiques that have been made in other areas – for example, in relation to school councils and youth parliaments – that initiatives to give ‘voice’ often fail to facilitate genuine political expression or enable real power to be exercised.

Notes

This blogpost is based on this article, which was published in the Journal of Education Policy. A similar blogpost has also been published on the Department of Sociology, University of Surrey’s blog.

Students as agents for change?

Call for papers: Theorizing Citizenship in Higher Education: Students as Agents for Change?

Mark Holton (Plymouth University) and Yi’En Cheng (Yale-NUS College) are organising a session at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2017 (Boston MA, 5-9 April) on higher education students as active citizens. See call for papers below – it looks like it will be an excellent event, and of interest to sociologists and educationalists, as well as geographers

Citizenship – whether it is constitutional-legal status tied to certain rights and responsibilities; or practiced by people as they navigate obstacles to carve out spaces and communities of belonging; or even as embodied, sensuous, and felt within the psychic and emotional realms – is central to a repertoire of issues in contemporary restructuring of higher education around the world. Recent research has begun to question how various processes are changing students’ ideas and practices around citizenship: from the increasingly globalised networks of students moving around the world to the neoliberalization of higher education policies that have heavily marketized (transnational) degree programmes, term-time accommodation, and student organizations and unions; from the mounting pressure on students to search for and acquire ‘useful’ cultural and embodied capitals, such as critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and global competencies, to the ways in which students’ identities are negotiated, accepted, or rejected on campuses. At the same time, class, gender, race/ethnicity and other social differences continue to act as prisms through which inequalities are [re]produced, even though these can also occur alongside hopeful practices of love, care, solidarity, and anti-injustice. Analyses of interactions across structure, agency, and change are part and parcel of writings about these young people’s educational lives. How might the notion of citizenship help frame these ongoing discussions and/or open up conversations about students-as-citizens? What kinds of citizenships are emerging in these different moments of higher educational change? Relatedly, how can that further our understanding of higher education spaces as contentious, politicized, and possibly radical locations?

In this session, we explore how citizenship can be theorized in diverse contexts of higher education, across both the global north and south. By fostering a dialogue between citizenship studies and geographies of higher education, the session will allow us to rethink and renew the research agenda on the geographies of higher education students. We are interested in multiple ways of thinking about citizenship as informed by students’ experiences during and beyond term-time, their mobilities across various scales and borders, as well as their engagement with explicit and implicit forms of politics. We want to unpack the ways in which dominant understandings of the ‘student voice’ and the ‘student experience’ in higher education are assembled through representations, discourses, and practices of citizenship within particular political-economic and socio-cultural regimes. We are also keen to examine students’ responses to the burdens placed upon them in terms of peer, institutional and policy pressures and the extent to which this might act as potential catalysts for change. Papers that offer fresh materials, theoretically and empirically, to advancing existing scholarship on the geographies of citizenship in higher education and student lives are especially welcomed.

Please submit a 250-word abstract with title and short bio to Mark Holton (mark.holton@plymouth.ac.uk) and Yi’En Cheng (yien.cheng@yale-nus.edu.sg), by 20 September 2016.

Symposium on Student Politics and Protest

Despite allegations of political disengagement and apathy on the part of the young, the last ten years have witnessed a considerable degree of political activity by young people – much of it led by students (for example, protests against tuition fees, or as part of the Occupy movement) and/or directed at changes to the higher education system. Such activity has been evident across the globe.

We will be running a symposium at the SRHE annual conference in December to bring together contributions from various different national contexts to explore such trends in a rigorous manner. It will address a number of important themes, including: the focus and nature of student politics and protest; the contribution of students’ unions and student movements; whether students are engaging in fundamentally new forms of political activity; the characteristics of politically-engaged students; the extent to which such activity can be considered to be ‘globalised’; and societal responses to political activity on the part of students.

It will also be a means of publicising the book, Student Politics and Protest: International Perspectives, which will be published in the Routledge and SRHE series later in the year. All those presenting papers as part of the symposium (Alex Hensby, Lorenzo Cini, Gritt Nielsen, Bruce Macfarlane and Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela) have also written one of the chapters in the forthcoming book.

Student activism across the globe

The rise of student activism over the past decade

As media reports across the world have attested, since the turn of the 21st century, we have witnessed a significant increase in the number of student protests across the globe. The most high-profile of these have been in Germany (from 2008-13), California (2009), the UK (2010), Chile (2010-13) and Canada (2010-13). Such activity raises important questions about assumptions have been made, by some social commentators and politicians, about the political apathy of the young and the de-politicisation of universities. While there is plenty of evidence that, despite a relative lack of engagement in electoral politics in many countries, students and other young people have remained politically active, the rise in student activism over the past decade or so may well be related to young people’s frustration with formal politics. Certainly, numerous studies have shown that young people do have an interest in formal politics, but believe that their interests are rarely served by mainstream political parties and that electoral systems are often outdated.

How similar are these movements?

In many ways, the student protests of the 21st century have much in common. A number have shared an opposition to the further rolling-out of market reforms in higher education – particularly in relation to the introduction of (or increase in) tuition fees, and the repositioning of higher education as a private good rather than a public one. Where students have become heavily involved in wider movements, these have also often arisen in response to the intensification of neo-liberal reform. However, students have also been prepared to take action for other causes, too. In Hong Kong, for example, students were key players in the pro-democracy movement of 2014 – boycotting classes and taking part in wider acts of civil disobedience to voice their concerns about the delays to democratic reform and call for an open selection process to decide on the candidates for the territory’s leader.

It has been argued that the student protests of the last decade can been seen as, to some extent, globalised – because of the ways in which they have influenced each other, and the importance of border-less technology in facilitating much of this action. This can be seen, for example, in the way in which the Twitter hashtags #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall stimulated protest across Africa and beyond, and the links between the student protestors in Hong Kong and their counterparts in Taiwan. New technologies were also important in the 2010 UK protests against fee increases, allowing students occupying university buildings to keep in touch with those engaged in similar activities at other institutions.

However, it is also clear that, despite the undoubted importance of new technologies in facilitating communication between student activists and across national borders, the nation-state continues to exert an important influence on the nature and focus of protest. Student protests in Turkey, for example, as part of the Gezi Park resistance in 2013, were largely against what those involved perceived to be the conservative and paternalistic nature of their national government, rather than any concern about marketisation. Moreover, the nature of student activism across Africa has been influenced strongly by national-level factors such as the extent to which the state has created structures to allow students to become formally involved in policy-making.

What impact have these movements had?

The nation-state has also had a significant impact on the impact of student movements. Such protests can be seen to have brought about significant change in some countries – for example, Chile, Germany and Quebec in Canada. In Chile, this change has been far-reaching, and extended beyond higher education into other areas of social and political life. In other countries, such as the UK, student protests have been much less successful in bringing about change. In attempting to explain the differential impact of these protests, some researchers (such as Manja Klemenčič) have suggested that broad political norms are important. According to this perspective, student protests in the UK were unsuccessful largely because the government believed that students were not representative of wider public opinion, and that the population at large was broadly sympathetic to the introduction of further market-based reform.

Other scholars (such as Lorenzo Cini) have suggested that we need to look more closely at the specific structures of higher education systems. Research that has explored the different ways in which student protests have been treated in the UK and Italy, for example, has demonstrated how variation in governance can be significant. In Italy, university leaders are elected from among the professoriate and need to sustain good relationships with students in order to maintain their institutional position. Thus, they are likely to favour negotiation and compromise over more adversarial responses. In contrast, in the UK, university leaders are appointed through open competition. They are less reliant on the goodwill of students than their Italian counterparts and thus seek to minimise what they perceive to be the ‘reputational damage’ to their institution brought about by student protest through more repressive and confrontational tactics.

Nevertheless, our knowledge about why some student protests are more successful than others is still partial. Despite the frequency of student protests since the turn of the 21st century, and the significant media attention that has followed, further research is still very much needed in this area.

Note:

This blogpost originally appeared on the University World News website. It draws on ideas that are discussed more fully in Student Politics and Protest: International Perspectives, which will be published by Routledge and the Society for Research into Higher Education in the autumn.

Fathers sought for new research project

Are you a father in a heterosexual dual-parent household in the UK who is the primary carer or who shares care equally with your partner for a child aged three or under?

We are carrying out research at the University of Surrey on the experiences of fathers who take on primary or equal caring responsibility for young children.

We are particularly interested in those whose caring responsibilities connect to changes to work (whether voluntary or enforced), such as periods of extended parental leave, adjusted hours, working flexibly or part-time, changing job or becoming unemployed. However, we also hope to speak to those taking on primary or equal care responsibilities alongside existing full-time work.

If you think you, your partner, or someone you know might come into this category and would be willing to take part in an interview with us, please contact us at p.hodkinson@surrey.ac.uk to find out more. The identity of participants will be kept confidential.

Rachel Brooks and Paul Hodkinson, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey

Research fellow posts

Post-doctoral Research Fellows (2 positions – both are 5 year posts, starting on 1st August 2016)

Salary: up to £33,574 per year

I am pleased to advertise two research fellows to join my five-year ‘EuroStudents’ project, funded by the European Research Council (see here for further details). The project will explore the different ways in which higher education students are constructed across six European nations. Both posts will be based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey.

The first research fellow post will be responsible for the strand of work that focuses on institutional perspectives, i.e. the ways in which the higher education student is constructed through official university texts and staff understandings. S/he will be required to: liaise with relevant gatekeepers to secure access to research sites across six European countries; analyse websites and other public documents produced by universities (using both qualitative and quantitative methods); conduct and analyse interviews with members of university staff; and contribute to the analysis of data and dissemination of findings from the project as a whole.

The second post will be responsible for the strand of work that focuses on student perspectives. S/he will be required to: liaise with relevant gatekeepers to secure access to research sites across six European countries; conduct focus groups with students in three universities in each of the six countries; and contribute to the analysis of data and dissemination of findings from the project as a whole.

The successful candidates will have a doctorate in a relevant topic area, and experience of using relevant research methods. They will also have excellent organisation and communication skills and, ideally, knowledge of one or more of the languages covered by the project (in addition to English): Danish, German, Polish and Spanish. A willingness to travel abroad for a substantial proportion of the fieldwork is essential.

For informal inquiries contact me: r.brooks@surrey.ac.uk

Closing date: 5pm, 6th June 2016

Interviews: 20th June 2016

Start date: 1st August 2016 (or as soon as possible thereafter)

Further details about the first post and the online application form can be found here, and details and the application form for the second post can be found here. (Please do apply for both posts, if you are interested in both.)

PhD studentship

Media Representations of Higher Education Students: a cross-national comparison

Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Surrey

I am very pleased to be advertising a PhD studentship on ‘Media Representations of Higher Education Students’. This forms part of a wider project (called EuroStudents) funded by the European Research Council, which will explore the different ways in which higher education students are constructed across six European nations.

The PhD studentship comprises two strands of work. Firstly, representations of students within newspapers in the six countries will be analysed. A content analysis will be conducted for two national newspapers from each of the countries involved in the research (Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain). A broadly representative sub-sample of texts will then be chosen for further, detailed discursive analysis. In the second strand, two popular film or drama-based television programmes that feature students will be selected from each country and analysed using a discursive approach. Comparisons will be made within each country, across all six countries, and then in relation to the results of the analysis of news media.

The successful candidate will be part of the EuroStudents research team and also the vibrant research community within the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey. Further information about the research project can be found here.

Funding

The 3-year studentship is funded by the European Research Council. It covers Home/EU tuition fees and a maintenance grant of £14,057 per annum.

Entry requirements

Essential:

Masters level degree in Sociology, Education, Media, Human Geography or a related subject

Experience of media analysis

Excellent oral and written communication skills

Desirable:

Knowledge of issues related to higher education

Knowledge of one of more languages covered by the project, in addition to English (i.e. Danish, German, Polish, Spanish)

Familiarity with one or more of the countries outside the UK involved in the research (i.e. Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Spain)

Applications

To apply, please send:

1. A covering letter highlighting: (i) why you are interested in this particular research project; (ii) why you are interested in doing a PhD; (iii) which specific skills and aptitudes you feel you would bring to the project.

2. A copy of your current CV including the names of two referees and the marks you have received for your master’s modules to date. (Please feel free to include a transcript of your marks, alongside your CV, if this is easier.)

3. A sample of your academic writing (e.g. an essay or dissertation).

These should be sent by email to Rachel Brooks: r.brooks@surrey.ac.uk Please also contact Rachel for any queries you may have associated with this studentship.

Closing date: 5pm, 27th May 2016

Interview date: to be confirmed

Start date: 26th September 2016

How much mixing goes on in universities?

On Friday, I am looking forward to acting as a discussant at an event run by Sumi Hollingworth, to disseminate the findings from her recent research on social mixing within higher education institutions. In case you’re interested in coming along, I’ve pasted some details from the seminar flyer below, and you can sign up here.

Join us at this event where the findings of a research project on student friendships in Higher Education will be presented. Specifically, the research is interested in the extent of mixing across both social and ethnic difference, drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with first year undergraduates, in one case study university. A panel discussion will broaden out to discuss the implications for Higher Education more broadly, and the possibilities for social mobility through the ‘university experience’.

This research, led by Dr. Sumi Hollingworth, Senior Research Fellow at the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, assisted by Nicole Lucas, was supported by a small grant from the Society for Educational Studies.

Agenda

12.00pm – 1.00pm Presentation of research findings

Sumi Hollingworth, Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University

Researcher on social mixing in urban multicultural contexts; class race and gender inequalities in education

1.00 – 2.30pm Panel discussion of research findings

Panellists include:

Nicola Ingram, University of Lancaster (Researcher on the ‘Paired Peers’ project, which focuses on the experiences of working-class and middle-class young people as they make their way through undergraduate programs at two different universities in the same city)

Rachel Brooks, University of Surrey (Researches widely on student friendships and social network; internationalisation and student mobility; and Students Unions)

Debbie Weekes-Bernard, Runnymede Trust

A representative from the NUS Committee