Academics responding to discourses of crisis in higher education and research

Abstract

It is by now common sense that there is a global tendency towards a market-oriented reform of universities and education systems, pressured by a number of structural changes frequently described in terms such as neo-liberal globalization, the information age, the rise of the knowledge-based economy and the learning society. Universities in many regions of Europe can currently be described as being in a state of crisis, suffering an acute lack of funding and going through money-saving reorganizations, struggling with the new “rituals of verification” (Power, 1999) and with providing knowledge and education that meet the changing needs of their surrounding society and economy. While there is a general trend (Amaral, 2010), experiences in different countries, institutions, disciplinary domains and academic milieus by different individuals will of course vary. Using an opportunity generated by the organization of the Fourth International Conference of Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines at the University of Minho, Braga, in July 2012, we engaged in a process of interviewing some of our fellow academics. We wanted to gather their opinions on the use of crisis discourses in higher education and research, particularly on its institutional recontextualisation (at the European Union and national levels, as well as at universities and research centres) in the social sciences and humanities fields, and the implications of these processes for the role of the state, the power and role of academics, the character of research, and for the relations between central and peripheral European universities. We first interviewed four keynote speakers invited for this conference. This group included academics in senior positions and younger scholars, working in different institutions of higher education in Europe (Spain and United Kingdom), with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, interests and institutional positions, but all doing research in the field of Discourse Studies (Krzyzanowski, Macedo, Marín-Arrese, Richardson, van Dijk). In a second moment, we added another group of four interviewees, in order to cover more disciplines, to include academics from our own country and academics that due to their research interests and/or to their professional positions are involved in institutional policy-making, its implementation and/or its analysis (António Magalhães, Johannes Angermüller, Moisés de Lemos Martins, this volume)