Unbundling : a new gendered frontier of exclusion and exploitation in the neoliberal university

Unbundling is the process of disaggregating educational provision into its component parts likely for delivery by multiple stakeholders, often through public-private partnerships and the use of digital approaches (Swinnerton et al., 2018). A neutral definition, it relates to a process that is all but neutral to higher education. Having done research on unbundling South African and English universities, on a project focused on teaching and learning processes, I could not help but realise the extent to which this process affects much more than student learning and online teaching material curation patterns. Under the premise of widening access, it contributes to a potentially profoundly gendered casualisation, automation, deprofessionalisation, and fragmentation of academic labour to new unforeseen degrees. In this, unbundling reveals a new frontier of exploitation and exclusion at universities that we need to be aware of and organise against

Forum: Russia's invasion of Ukraine : The war between us

In early December 2013 at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM, in Vienna, an institution until recently known for promoting post- and anti-communist liberal intellectuals, Timothy Snyder – a historian of Stalinism – gave a lecture on Karl Marx. He declared Marx's 'anthropological' (as opposed to 'political economic') texts crucial for social scientists to understand the world in 2013. He praised the rising New Left in Eastern Europe (or rather some Left -Liberal groups in Poland and Ukraine he met) for rediscovering Marxian values despite witnessing the collapse of the former socialist world. As a Bulgarian who is part of this tiny New Left movement and positions herself further on the Left than most groups Snyder was referring to, I was perplexed: was this a signal of an ideological shift , or yet another asymmetric negotiation attempt between a Goliath (the (neo)liberals) and David (Eastern European leftists)? Were the liberals recognising, in the aftermath of the 2008 subprime crisis, amid rising anti-austerity social movements in the region and beyond, that their transition had gone wrong, and Marxism and 'really existing' socialism had some lessons to teach

Paternalistic internationalism and (de)colonial practices of Cold War higher education exchange: Bulgaria's connections with Cuba and Angola

This article presents the findings of an archival study on the Cold War higher education (HE) exchange between Bulgaria and Cuba and Angola carried out at the Open Society Archive. Although research on the internationalization of HE mostly focuses on the introduction of new managerial governance and global rankings, scholars studying socialist countries mostly address the intricacies of student exchange. Focusing on policy transfer and expert exchange, I discuss both limitations of the framing of the subject in both Western liberal and socialist official sources and the asymmetries of the exchange between socialist countries. Exploring the exchanges between Bulgaria and Cuba and Bulgarian and Angola, my case study shows that East European socialist countries based their cooperation with developing countries in the Global South on the premise of the dominance of Eurocentric knowledge and extractivist practices in return for knowledge and technology

Revisiting precarity, with care : productive and reproductive labour in the era of flexible capitalism

This article seeks to reconsider the concept of precarity by bringing in the discussion of care. An increased academic interest in the subject of precarity and precarious working conditions in advanced, post-industrial economies is often premised on the false binary of precarity-stability. While stable working and living conditions have historically been a privilege of a minority of autonomous individuals, engaged in productive work, free from direct dependence or dependents, women and marginalised groups are often made more precarious, as their highly exploitable labour assets are not given any, or certainly not an equal value. And while stability at work can destabilize precarious lives of people with care responsibilities and marginalized groups, who need flexibility in order to navigate their lives, subjecting the affective domain to the principles of the market does not offer an effective solution to the inequalities between productive and reproductive labour. The article works on three different levels – the critique of ethnocentrism and androcentrism of the concept of precarity, the introduction of precarious living conditions into the discussion of precarious labour, and the insistence on the necessity to insert solidarity, care and love back into our workplaces as a way to resist capitalist competitiveness and alienation. We also warn against the risk of such care labour being exploited by a next cycle of capitalist appropriation. Reviewing a range of empirical studies, we explore the ways in which care destabilizes the neat boundaries between precarity and stability. We argue that repositioning care as a central activity in all human production and reproduction, both outside paid labour and inside it, allows us to see more clearly potential venues of exploitation and liberation within the predicament of precarity

EdTech-mediated outsourcing and casualisation of academic labour : toward a research agenda

Located at the intersection of scholarship on critical higher education (HE), the casualisation of the academic workforce and studies of digitalisation and online platforms in Higher Education (HE), this article examines the impact of online programme management companies (OPMs) on academic labour. OPMs partner with universities to provide core teaching functions while relying on the labour of increasingly casualised, often outsourced academics. We use a composite case study to illustrate how OPMs work in partnerships with universities to reorganise academic work. We discuss this model vis-a-vis the theoretical concepts in the digital HE, platform labour and sociology of work literature, elaborating on how the new forms of casualised labour in HE undergo real subsumption by technology-mediated programmes operated by OPMs. On this foundation, we discuss the possible implications and draw out questions for future research and trade union activity, two arenas where, we argue, more attention needs to be paid urgently to casualisation and the outsourcing of teaching through digital platform-mediated programmes

Eyes wide shut

This article presents the results of a collaborative ethnographic inquiry in contemporary Sofia and Caracas. Combining historical research and ethnography, we compare the ways in which a former and a current left-wing regime treat urban squatting. In both cities, squatters tend to be poor families escaping homelessness. In Sofia, “squatters”—usually of Roma origin—inhabit unregulated spaces deemed illegal after 1989. In Caracas, homeless families have been officially encouraged to squat but not declared legal occupants. A historical comparison shows both socialist governments turn a blind eye to extralegal housing practices. Benign, informal housing arrangements function to display solidarity with marginalized groups as a form of popular legitimacy. Yet, without formalized state protection, such arrangements produced a “surplus” population, vulnerable vis-à-vis global processes of capitalist reorganization.</jats:p

Putting the university to work : the subsumption of academic labour in UK's shift to digital higher education

This paper considers how the formal and real subsumption of academic labour in UK higher education are exposed and exacerbated by the move towards online teaching, assessment and communication. These processes have been expedited by the COVID‐19 pandemic outbreak and attention is drawn to the technology‐driven organisational and operational innovations that are transforming academic divisions of labour and labour processes. These changes, particularly in relation to the separation of research and teaching, and to the deprofessionalisation, modularisation, and outsourcing of the latter, are the focus of the paper. We argue that the formal subsumption of knowledge production (research) through commercialisation dovetails with a real subsumption of socially reproductive work (teaching) that is undergoing qualitative transformation in an increasingly marketised higher education sector. We show how digitalisation actively contributes to the growing standardisation and flexibilisation of work, deepens long‐standing gendered divisions of labour, and dissolves even further the blurred work/life boundaries for precariously employed workers. These new hallmarks of the contemporary subsumption present new challenges to workers and their collective organisations in Higher Education

Introduction: Higher education reform in the ‘periphery’

In recent years, an increasing body of work has addressed the ‘corporatisation’ and ‘commodification’ of universities, as well as higher education sector reforms more broadly. This work refers mostly to the traditional core hubs of higher education, such as the Anglo-American research university. In the emerging anthropology of higher education policy, accounts of the implementation and negotiation of reforms in more ‘peripheral’ contexts often remain absent. This collection of articles addresses this absence by focusing on the interplay between narratives of global policy reform and the processes of their implementation and negotiation in different contexts in the academic ‘periphery’. Bringing together work from a range of settings and through different lenses, the special issue provides insights into the common processes of reform that are underway and how decisions to implement certain reforms reaffirm rather than challenge peripheral positions in higher education

Migración venezolana, trabajo y protección social : percepciones y representaciones entre la población migrante venezolana en Buenos Aires durante la pandemia COVID-19

La presente ponencia se enmarca en un proyecto de más amplio alcance que explora el modo en el cual se concibió el pasaje de “trabajo no calificado” a “trabajo esencial” durante la pandemia de COVID-19, enfocando en el estudio de caso de los y las migrantes de nacionalidad venezolana en Argentina. Nos preguntamos: ¿cómo experimentan los venezolanos “altamente calificados” esta nueva visibilidad? ¿Estar en la “primera línea” cambia o refuerza su percepción de lo que significa “habilidad” y “valor” en relación con el trabajo, la provisión de bienestar social y la solidaridad social? A través de una metodología que triangula entrevistas en profundidad y una encuesta entre los migrantes venezolanos, así como el análisis de los conjuntos de datos disponibles públicamente y la cobertura de los medios, mapeamos la respuesta del Estado, los medios y la comunidad a los migrantes venezolanos durante la pandemia