Session Information
ERG SES H 03, Higher Education
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
In the modern interplay of endogenous (massification) and exogenous (shifts in the economy and labour market, globalisation and internationalisation, economisation and commodification) processes that define the contemporary debates on the future of higher education in Europe, the concept of “public responsibility” has become increasingly important. However, its meaning is not always clear:.it has been used by a variety of actors to support different arguments, from public funding through stakeholder participation, to the harnessing of higher education to the needs of the economy (cf. Bergan ed. 2004).
This paper sees the public responsibility for higher education as a constructed and deeply politicized concept whose meaning plays an important role for the future of higher education in Europe (e.g. Calhoun 2006) and thus sets out to investigate the process of discursive construction of the concept of public responsibility for education, as it appears in contemporary higher education policy in Europe.
The paper will look into the ideational and discursive aspects of the concept of public responsibility for higher education as presented in the Bologna Process, as perhaps the only platform for a common European notion of higher education, which otherwise lies in the domain of national policies. In this sense, the Bologna Process will be seen as a ground of confronting discourses and ideas on higher education, as well as a forum for deliberating the regional common denominators of meaning, conceptualisations and ideas attached to higher education.
The enquiry will focus on the appearance of the concept of public responsibility in the discourses related to the Bologna Process, and on the ways this term was used in the discursive strategies of various actors in this process. By identifying the discursive elements and semantic fields where the concept of public responsibility appears and acts as a discursive strategy the enquiry will aim to examine the background notions and different interpretations of the concept. The concept of public responsibility, as presented in the analysed documents and narratives, will be juxtaposed with influential analytical narratives concerning the transformation of higher education in Europe, in particular those that see it as an aspect of »neoliberal governance«. In this sense, the concept of public responsibility will potentially be seen as part of discursive strategy of resistance to the presumed commodification of higher education, but also as a way for further devolving the responsibility for the governance and management of higher education by including a broader range of »stakeholders« (public).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bergan, S. (ed). (2004). The University as Res Publica. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Calhoun, C. (2006). The University and the Public Good. Thesis Eleven, No. 84, 7-43. Krzyzanowski, M (2010). Discourses and Concepts: Interfaces and Synergies between Begriffsgeschichte and the Discourse Historical Approach in CDA. In R. de Cellia et al. (eds), Diskurs-Politik-Identität /Discourse -Politics -Identity. (pp. 125–135). Stauffenburg Publishers. Krzyzanowski, M., Wodak, R. (2011). Political strategies and language policies; the European Union Lisbon strategy and its implications for the EU’s language and multilingualism policy. Lang Policy 10 115–136. Schmidt, V. A. (2008): Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse. Annual Review of Political Science , 11, 303–326. Schmidt, V. A. (2010): Taking ideas and discourse seriously: explaining change through discursive institutionalism as the fourth “new institutionalism”. European Political Science Review 2 (1), 1–25. Wodak, R. (2001). The discourse – historical approach. In R. Wodak, and M. Mayer (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Sage Publishers. Wodak, R. (2008). Introduction: Discourse Studies – Important Concepts and Terms. In R. Wodak and M. Krzyzanowski (eds), Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan (pp. 1–29).
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