Women in higher education leadership in South Asia: rejection, refusal, reluctance, revisioning

This research, linked to the South Asia Global Education Dialogue series, looks at the role of women in South Asia in respect to higher education and leadership. The research sought out existing knowledge and baseline data from the literature, policies, change interventions, available statistics and interviews across six countries in South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka). From this research, recommendations about what specific future actions and interventions for change could be implemented in South Asia have been made

Negotiating equity in UK universities.

Description of the project The research involved six case studies of higher education institutions across England, Scotland and Wales. The project aims were:to explore staff experiences of equity issues and institutional equity policies. Participants were drawn from different occupational backgrounds and a variety of socio-cultural groups paying attention also to gender, sexual orientation, ‘race’/ethnicity, disability, age and religio to conduct a critical discourse analysis of equity policies in the six institution to gather the views of senior manager-academics and administrators on their institutional equality policies, and how these relate to national policie to identify challenges, inadequacies, examples of good practice, and constraints/incentives in relation to equity policies at institutional and sector level

Re-purposing fika: rest, recreation or regulation in the neoliberalized swedish university?

Fika is the Swedish practice of assembling for a coffee break at work or home. This paper investigates the material, social and temporal investments in fika in accelerated and accountable organizational cultures, and asks what purpose it serves in neoliberalised academic employment regimes today. Analysis of our thirteen interviews with administrators and academics in a Faculty of Education in a large research-intensive Swedish university suggests that there are multiple interpretations of fika. Traditionally, fika has been used as a site for team-building, democratization, and well-being at work, but might have been re-purposed and incorporated in neoliberal surveillance and normalization technologies in which one's corporate loyalty and interpersonal skills are made visible for assessment. We noted an affective and gendered economy with fika eliciting feelings of pleasure in the social and recreational aspects, but shame and anger at what was perceived as coercion to perform a particular type of sociable subjectivity

African Higher Education: Researching Absences, Equalities and Aspirations

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Trends and needs in the Australian child welfare workforce : An exploratory study

[Extract] Until recently, there has been limited focus on the nature and readiness of the broader child welfare workforce for stronger engagement in child abuse intervention and prevention, particularly the universal workforce. There is a concentration of effort and funding in the tertiary sector but there are now increasing calls to prioritise public health prevention. An effective system of family supports, and early interventions entails an integration of programs and services across the three tiers of a public health system: primary, secondary and tertiary. To support workers in ensuring the safety and wellbeing of children and young people, all organisations that offer services to vulnerable children, young people and families—directly or indirectly—need to be able to attract, recruit and sustain a reliable and appropriately qualified and skilled workforce. This report presents findings from an exploratory study that examined broad-ranging, publicly available data to investigate emerging trends, issues and needs in the child welfare workforce and the educational profile of the workforce

The affective assemblage of internationalisation in Japanese higher education

Positive attributes stick to higher education internationalisation, and it is a policy paradigm with performative effects. Internationalisation draws on imagined virtuous flows of knowledge production and exchange, and is presented as an assemblage of detraditionalisation, expansiveness and epistemic and cultural opportunity for individuals, organisations and nation states. Policies target bodies, minds and affect, yet are presented as an unquestionable good in an imagined genderneutral, borderless, meritocratic and benign global knowledge economy. This paper explores the affective economy of internationalisation drawing upon interview data gathered in fifteen private, five national and eight public universities in Japan with thirty-four migrant academics and thirteen international doctoral researchers. We aim to contribute to internationalisation theory by exploring the sticky micropolitics of internationalisation in relation to affective assemblages, and how the gendered, racialised, linguistic and epistemic inequalities constituting academic mobility are frequently disqualified from discourse. Our discussion includes consideration of the Japanese policy context, the concept of affective assemblages, navigating gender regimes, precarity and linguistic imperialism. We conclude that the immaterial or affective labour that is required to unstick, install and maintain an internationalised academic identity and navigate the translations and antagonisms from everyday encounters with difference is substantially under-estimated

What Does It Take To Be A Good Social Worker?: A Study Exploring the Dynamics Involved in Performing Emotional Labour in the Practice Context of Vulnerable Children and Their Families

This thesis is based on the idea that a good social work practitioner needs to be able to negotiate the tension between the social worker's ethical heart and the organisation's managerial objectives. On the one hand, s/he must adhere to scripted rules and procedures, and on the other, s/he must be responsive to the emotional needs of vulnerable people. The act of holding this tension means meeting the differing expectations that play out in everyday interactions. This takes, what Arlie Hochschild (2003) termed, "emotional labour" (p. 7). Emotional labour refers to the way individuals manage their emotions so they maintain a particular outward appearance to others. The aim of this thesis is to explore what performing emotional labour means for social workers, and, in so doing, gain further understanding of the emotional dynamics of social work practice. Insights gleaned from in-depth interviews with social workers in the field of child welfare in Australia revealed that dealing with these dynamics on a day-to-day basis is hard work. Not only were participants faced with maintaining their inner equilibrium when challenged by emotionally complex situations with vulnerable children and their families, but in order to uphold the ideals of good social work practice, they also had to deal with systemic dysfunction by winning the hearts and minds of uncompromising managers and touchy employees. These findings have prompted the author to question whether too much is expected from social workers, not just by organisations, but also by the social work profession itself. When, for example, social workers are expected to be agents of change by drawing on a conscious use of self, is the performance of emotional labour a taken for granted expectation? In light of such a question, the idea of grounding social work with a greater acknowledgement of emotional reality is explored