The British Sociological Association

To ‘resist where we are’: challenges of active resistance in a marketised academy
Dr Gareth Bramley (University Teacher in Clinical and Legal Education at University of Sheffield)

This paper seeks to encourage a debate around the challenges of resisting a systemic neoliberal ideology, described within pedagogical literature as a contemporary ‘crisis’ for Higher Education.

This paper frames neoliberalism as the prioritisation of marketised goals for Higher Education, exhibited through imposition of metrics, managerialism and value for money; so, HE as a private ‘good’.

Through this framing, this paper explores potentialities for ‘actively’ resisting this neoliberal discourse. Specifically, this paper recommends scheduling sessions, within formal teaching spaces, for staff and students to talk openly, chaotically and emotionally about experiences of personal failure. Within these timetabled teaching spaces, the session’s aim is to critically explore whether experiences of failure are reductively framed against notions of individualism and the extrinsic goal of the ‘perfect’ neoliberal subject. Through a collective and cooperative approach, it is hoped that through these sessions participants can better ‘resist where we are’ within HE.

Precarious pasts and fragile futures: Understanding the contextual transitional experiences of first year undergraduate education students and their striving to embrace the transformational potential of university study in an age of precarity
Alyson Jolley Spinks (Senior lecturer and course leader in education at Staffordshire University)

Undergraduates invest in their imagined futures in response to a societal discourse of achieving secure employment and idealised futures, focusing on curating their experience and ambition. Young people are objectified as agentic, knowledge laden and creatively successful. However, they have been subject to a discourse of educational inferiority, considered culturally deficient with low expectations. As undergraduates, transitional experiences, precarious employment and instrumental education systems leave them striving for forms of individualised and agentic choice biographies. The educational social process has left young people in fracture unable to embrace transformational potential.

This study used a theoretical framework based on Foucault’s thinking. Foucault provides a lens to understand the concurrent objectification and subjectification process that young people have experienced. Using qualitative research tools, data has been gathered from first year education studies undergraduates in a post 1992 university. This data illustrates how new students experience their contextualised educational transition. It examines the fragility of their educational experiences, their constructed worlds, accidental choice-making and subsequent instrumental approach to university study. Data demonstrates that new undergraduates experience extreme uncomfortableness with the challenge of study, where potential precarity, both lived and expected, provokes further limited agency and overshadows transformational potential.  Recommendations from this study relate to creating opportunities for new undergraduates to examine and recognise their potential, the use of attentive listening to different voices, the   recognition of universal normative deficit approaches in university support and academic systems, the danger of assumed knowledge of student’s worlds, and the power of disruption. From a pedagogical perspective it recommends the essential development of tools of informed criticalities, curiosity and opportunities to develop ‘moments of connectedness.’