Paper short abstract:

How do fashion schools convince students that their work to produce wearable garments is not labor? Safeguarding a strategic arrangement of time and obligation, the arts university formalizes critique as a precarious labor performed by tutors in a discrete spatiotemporal context: the tutorial.

Paper long abstract:

When fashion students complain casually or officially about the conduct of their tutors, what tacit social contract do they break? This paper considers how the practice-based pedagogies of fashion programs such as Central Saint Martins and Parsons School of Design operate upon the logically-fraught axiom that only work, not people, can be subject to critique. That axiom attempts to constrain the relationship between tutor and student such that their roles within the university are incommensurable and mutually differentiating, entrenching a quite literal distinction between the “material” work created by the student and the “immaterial” labor of the tutor to assign, guide, and assess it. The fashion school’s regime of critique aims to convince students that the hours they spend crafting wearable garments are not remunerable labor hours but intangible investments in professional and personal development. Depoliticizing students’ identities as their aesthetic personalities, critique securitizes the arts university’s asymmetrical distribution of time and obligation which precaritizes faculty in short-term work contracts and imprisons students in long-term loan agreements. By leasing its monopoly on critique to faculty in events like tutorials and crits, the university instrumentalizes the tutor as a kind of mercenary against the labor-value of student work, insulating itself from solidarity between students and tutors to prevent such uprisings as the recent part-time faculty strike and subsequent student occupation at the New School.

Paper short abstract:

By ethnographically tracing their affective registers from encountering the practice of reading out land acknowledgement statements- this paper asserts that alternative relationalities are innovated, produced, and contested against the salvationist tendencies that orient the practice.

Paper long abstract:

In reframing the ontological limits and possibilities, this paper situates a group of international students at the academic margins of the internationalised Canadian higher educational classroom. By ethnographically tracing their affective registers from encountering the practice of reading out land acknowledgement statements- this paper asserts that alternative relationalities are innovated, produced, and contested against the salvationist tendencies that orient the practice. However, in order to become more tuned to the rhythms of alternative possibilities this paper must turn its axis of focus onto the ordinary, banal and the everyday spatial enfoldment(s) that international students occupy outside college and university spaces. This paper puts into analytical description the importance of affective relations in social movements for justice by looking at conversations that took place amongst a group of six international students at migrant rights-based grassroots organisation Migrant Students United(MSU). By asserting that fostered social relationships with transformative potentials aren't always realisable immediately, this paper furthers the a social justice orientation by demonstrating through the six interlocutors that life-making practices of resistance are uneven and ethically often messy.

Paper short abstract:

In fieldwork research with university teachers in Rotterdam (NL) and through the analysis of the use of a graph, I see a change of meanings on diversity and inclusivity. Is this a sign of changing power, or of connected narratives in a university multiple?

Paper long abstract:

Many universities underline the importance of diversity and inclusivity. In my ethnographic research in higher education in Rotterdam (NL), I saw the pivotal and revolving meaning of study success rates, as depicted in a graph. However, in comparison to the first publication in 2016, years later in 2022 debates about the content, interpretation and meaning of the graph changed and differ between relevant actors. This development raises several questions: what was and is the understanding of this graph, which meanings of diversity and inclusivity evolve from it? How do these meanings translate into diversity and inclusivity policy of the higher education institute and in which manner? Which practices are envisioned, for whom and by whom and with which motivations?

Focusing on the graph that illustrates the analysis of study success rate differences, and discussions on, over and around it, I will trace lines of thinking on study success, diversity and inclusivity in Hogeschool Rotterdam. In this process I will highlight the change of meanings through the interpretations and reactions given on the graph by several related actors. Instead of seeing changing and varying meanings of diversity and inclusivity as competing struggles to power and domination, I wonder whether we can use insights on multiplicity, and understand meanings of diversity and inclusivity as a body multiple, as fragmented objects. Instead of separate and rival lines of narratives, can we see variances; different but connected. This view opens up the possibilities for interconnections and change in the multiple university.

Paper short abstract:

The New Ethnographer aims to create a space for academics to discuss unwellness in conducting fieldwork and writing. Five years on, with the publication of a textbook, we reflect on the (lack of) changes in academia that continue to facilitate a growing mental illness epidemic in our field.

Paper long abstract:

When The New Ethnographer launched in 2017, we aimed to create a space for academics to discuss their unwellness in relation to conducting fieldwork, planning research, and writing. Five years later, with the publication of a textbook by ourselves and our contributors, we reflect on a lack of change in academia that continues to facilitate the growing mental illness epidemic in our field. Speaking to anthropologists specifically, we address and explore the specific structural challenges inherent in anthropology that continue to exacerbate unwellness in our discipline. These include a continued silence on the relationship between institutional care and the practice of fieldwork, the neoliberalisation of the academy and its impact on mental health, and the relationship between therapeutic skills and anthropological research.

Our project seeks to contribute to changing the way that ethnography is taught and practiced by centring equity, diversity and inclusion in the training and practice of ethnography, and providing perspectives that might resonate with a wider and more diverse audience – what should not be considered but is often hailed as an alternative approach to knowledge production. Because our approach is conversational and inclusive, we draw on the work of our contributors to highlight the work we have done and the challenges we continue to face five years into our project as we have grown with it. In this paper, we share the work we have done so far and address the challenges facing us, particularly in reference to industrial unrest in the HE sector.

Paper short abstract:

This paper not only aims to emphasize the importance of the university as a social space but addresses the potential of everyday dwelling and loitering of students from various backgrounds as a possible counterstrategy against the increasing polarization within the Indian society.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focusses on Indian University campuses as contested spaces. In recent years the treatment of public universities and the question of how critical of the government they are allowed to be, has become a major issue of dispute within society. One central factor is the increased public framing of dissent and protest in the academic environment as “anti-national“. In addition, students at public universities are repeatedly placed in tension with taxpayers. The polarized notions of an “ideal” university and “ideal” students are placing the students in an area of conflict and influences the everyday experiences of living on the campus which, according to previous research, has shown to be a central element in the “university experience”. Moreover, the pandemic increased inequalities and burdens of students.

This paper not only aims to emphasize the importance of the university as a social space but addresses the potential of everyday dwelling and loitering of students from various backgrounds as a possible counterstrategy against the increasing polarization within the Indian society.

Dwelling and loitering on university campuses in India are an essential part of the learning experience outside the classroom. In this paper claiming space through seemingly “doing nothing” is understood as a practice within the ongoing negotiation process of who owns the campus as well as a challenge of the neoliberal understanding of the university.

Paper short abstract:

Through a six-month ethnography, we investigated how unpaid/underpaid PhD students in neoliberal universities work as gig application consultants for income. By exploring empowerment-exploitation, we speak to global academic capitalism and propose fairer pay for PhD students.

Paper long abstract:

In today's neoliberal universities, many unpaid and self-funded PhD students work as gig application consultants, either independently or for agencies. They connect universities and international applicants by helping clients prepare their application packages. Previous research on academic gig labor has primarily focused on the work-life interface and precarity experiences of university employees. However, there is a scarcity of research on PhD students' experiences as gig laborers off campus. With more and more Chinese middle-class people seeking elite Western education, this paper investigates overseas Chinese PhD students in the humanities and social sciences and their experiences working as gig application consultants. It aims to explore the power dynamics between application consultants, customers, and universities, particularly regarding their motivation, production process, negotiation with knowledge price, and emotional investment.

The conceptual framework is built on empowerment and exploitation in labor studies. Through a six-month digital autoethnography and in-depth interviews with Chinese PhD students working as gig application consultants, we found that they empower themselves by monetizing their production through the knowledge gap between potential and current students. They also managed to negotiate the "correct" amount of emotional investment to balance exploitation with financial empowerment.

The research addresses global academic exploitation at neoliberal universities. It studies the gig economy and academic precarity using under-presented data of PhD students. Social stratification as a result of western intellectual hegemony and its effects on individuals are also examined. Our deeper examination of middle-class clients and their expectations will also provide a new window into China's societal inequities.

Paper short abstract:

With the coming of the World Bank’s “quality enhancement” project, a neoliberal transformation of Bangladesh’s public universities is taking place through the introduction of various benchmarking practices. University administrators at large have been unaware of the politics of this transformation.

Paper long abstract:

The neoliberal transformation of universities is a phenomenon of the 1980s. In the US, state-run universities of the 1960s turned into state-assisted universities, giving rise to metaphors such as academic capitalism. There have been reported differences in the spread of neoliberalism in universities of the global North. Neoliberal universities have been forced to ally with the industry. Particular disciplines, having higher industry relevance, received priority; hence the importance of Biomedicine or Computer science. Social Sciences and Arts have always been in the decline throughout this transformative period. Research agendas in universities were also increasingly driven by corporations and the market. Transformation is more complete in the global North when it comes to the neo-liberal transformation of the university. With the coming of the World Bank-prescribed "quality enhancement" project for universities in Bangladesh, a similar transformation is envisaged through the introduction of various benchmarking practices. The proposed paper attempts to analyze this transformation and puts forward the argument that while on the fringe likeminded academicians through alternative organizational activities have often tried to imagine a different university, using euphemisms such as “What university do we wish to have?”, public university administrators in Bangladesh at large have been unaware of the politics of neoliberal transformation of the universities, the long term effect of the World Bank policy prescriptions and unwarily jumped into the bandwagon of the World Bank induced "improvement".