This symposium unites scholars from Europe, Australia and South America to consider, from critical and feminist perspectives, the conditions and governance of research practice as a component of academic knowledge production (Jacob & Hellstrom 2018) within contemporary universities. Drawing on the notions of epistemic governance more broadly (Vadrot 2011) and epistemic governance and epistemic injustice within higher education specifically (Campbell & Carayannis 2013), the symposium considers how research practice is  governed and organised by various national research assessment schemes, academic workload models and other means (Rowlands & Gale forthcoming; Wright 2014), and the implications of this for the changing and precarious nature of academic work, for linkages between academia and social activism, and for epistemic diversity (Waitere et al. 2011). The critical engagements, however, also seek to move beyond critique, pointing to the necessity of reimagining what would-seem-to-be an inevitably monologic future of higher education. 

The first presentation investigates epistemic injustice as an institutional phenomenon in academic knowledge production. Based on an institutional ethnography of feminist knowledge production in Finland, it explicates the material and relational conditions of feminist knowledge production. In doing so, it explores how knowledge is ascribed value and legitimacy. In explicating the conditions the paper shows how epistemic hierarchies are produced and how these contribute to the (re)production and resistance of inequity.

The second presentation draws on a 2018 study undertaken in Denmark on the implications of national research assessment, as a mode of governance, for research practice. The data show that the research assessment mechanism had particular effects on researchers and research practices within the arts and humanities in comparison to those from the natural sciences, and also on early career researchers. This presentation conceptualises the strategies employed by some researchers to maximise their point score under the scheme and the implications of this for changed research practice and therefore for academic knowledge production more broadly.

The third presentation draws on life-story interviews with feminist researchers in Finland who have been actively participating in different forms of social activism. Specifically, it explores how they negotiate their activist commitments with their academic work and knowledge production. The paper analyzes  the ways in which feminist activism and knowledge get articulated within institutional frames of a neoliberal academia and how academic privilege plays a key role in the ways feminist activism is shaped.  

The final paper starts from existing emotional tensions within the contemporary neoliberal university and academic work. These tensions arise as a result of an experienced mismatch between intensified competitiveness imposed by regimes of governance and non-commodified powers such as investment in social bonds. The presentation seeks to conceptualise these encounters and their effect on epistemic diversity through Loewald’s concept of Eros and Winnicott’s notion of ‘subtle interplay’ and ‘potential space.’

These papers bridge what are often the research silos of critical and feminist scholarship, higher education and policy studies, illuminating broader imperatives and trends through their juxtaposition. These trends derive from the neoliberal exigencies of a global reform movement in higher education and more widely in public-sector reform whose tenets and manifestations are seen internationally. These papers speak to the broader capacity of critical and feminist higher education research to contribute to a ‘turn’ in understandings of the sources, role and place of knowledge and the changing nature of knowledge production and of academic work. This is a prerequisite for encouraging engagement in counterhegemonic practices and possible transformations of policy that would support epistemic diversity.  

Campbell, D & Carayannis, E 2013, Epistemic Governance in Higher Eucation: Quality enhancement of universities for development, Springer, Nre York. Jacob, M & Hellström, T 2018, 'Epistemic governance and the conditions for knowledge production in HER institutions', Studies in Higher Education, vol. 43, no. 10, pp. 1711-7. Rowlands, J & Gale, T (forthcoming), ‘National research assessment frameworks, publication output targets and research practices: the compliance-habitus effect’, Beijing Journal of Education Research. Vadrot, AB 2011, 'Reflections on Mode 3, the co-evolution of knowledge and innovation systems and how it relates to sustainable development: Conceptual framework for “epistemic governance”', International Journal of Social Ecology and Sustainable Development, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 4452. Wright, S 2014, 'Knowledge that counts: Points systems and the governance of Danish universities', in D Smith & A Griffith (eds), Under new public management: Institutional ethnographies of changing front-line work., University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp. 294337. Waitere, HJ, Wright, J, Tremaine, M, Brown, S & Pause, CJ 2011, 'Choosing whether to resist or reinforce the new managerialism: the impact of performance-based research funding on academic identity', Higher Education Research & Development, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 205–17.