Philosophy, globalization and the future of the university: A conversation between Sharon Rider and Michael A. Peters

Sharon Rider is Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University. She is currently Vice Dean for the Faculty of Arts and Director for Higher Education Studies at the Center for Science and Technology Studies. She studied Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Louvain and Uppsala University, and has taught as Visiting Professor at Åbo Academy and Turku University (Finland) and Gävle University College (Sweden)

"Internet universality": Human rights and principles for the internet

This paper details proposals by UNESCO to manufacture and draft a concept of “Internet Universality” that adopts a human-rights framework as a basis for articulating a set of principles and rights for the Internet. The paper discusses various drafts of this concept before examining the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet put forward by The Internet Rights & Principles Dynamic Coalition based at the UN Internet Governance Forum, and the working law Marco Civil da Internet introduced by Brazil

Managerialism and the neoliberal university: Prospects for new forms of "open management" in higher education

The restructuring of state education systems in many OECD countries during the last two decades has involved a significant shift away from an emphasis on administration and policy to an emphasis on management. The "new managerialism" has drawn theoretically, on the one hand, on the model of corporate managerialism and private sector management styles, and, on public choice theory and new institutional economics (NIE), most notably, agency theory and transaction cost analysis, on the other. A specific constellation of these theories is sometimes called "New Public Management," which has been very influential in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. These theories and models have been used both as the legitimation for policies that redesigning state educational bureaucracies, educational institutions and even the public policy process. Most importantly, there has been a decentralization of management control away from the center to the individual institution through a "new contractualism" - often referred to as the "doctrine of self-management" - coupled with new accountability and competitive funding regimes. This shift has often been accompanied by a disaggregation of large state bureaucracies into autonomous agencies, a clarification of organizational objectives, and a separation between policy advice and policy implementation functions, together with a privatization of service and support functions through "contracting out". The "new managerialism" has also involved a shift from input controls to quantifiable output measures and performance targets, along with an emphasis on short-term performance contracts, especially for CEOs and senior managers. In the interests of so-called "productive efficiency," the provision of educational serviceshas been made contestable; and, in the interests of so-called allocative efficiency state education has been progressively marketized and privatized. In this paper I analyze the main underlying elements of this theoretical development that led to the establishment of the neoliberal university in the 1980s and 1990s before entertaining and reviewing claims that new public management is dead. At the end of the paper I focus on proposals for new forms of "the public" in higher education as a means of promoting "radical openness" consonant with the development of Web 2.0 technologies and new research infrastructures in the global knowledge economy

Citizenship, democracy and social justice: A conversation with Maria Olson

Maria Olson is a researcher and lecturer in Education at Stockholm University and the University of Skövde, Sweden. Her areas of interest include democracy and citizenship in relation to education. Her major fields are educational theory and educational philosophy. Her current publications include most recently a series of papers that develop themes of citizenship, democracy and social justice, including: “Citizenship Education without Citizenship? The Migrant in EU Policy on Participatory Citizenship – Toward the Margin through ‘Strangification,’” in R. Hedke and T. Zimenkova (eds.), Education for Civic and Political Participation: A Critical Approach (pp. 155–170). London: Routledge, 2012; “Citizenship ‘in Between’: The Local and the Global Scope of European Citizenship in Swedish Educational Policy,” in S. Goncales and M. A. Carpenter (eds.), Intercultural Policies and Education (pp. 193–203). New York: Peter Lang, 2012; “The European ‘We’: From Citizenship Policy to the Role of Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 31(1), 77–89, 2012; “Opening Discourses of Citizenship Education: Theorizing with Foucault” (with Nicoll, K., Fejes, A., Dahlstedt, M. & Biesta, G. J. J.), Journal of Education Policy, 2013 (forthcoming); “Democracy Lessons in Market-oriented Schools: The Case of Swedish Upper Secondary Education,” Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, online first, Doi: 10.1177/17461979134836842013 (with Lundahl, Lisbeth), 2013; “What Counts as Young People’s Civic Engagement in Times of Accountability? On the Importance of Maintaining Openness about Young People’s Civic Engagement in Education,” in M. Olson (ed.), Theme: Citizenship Education under Liberal Democracy. Utbildning & Demokrati [Education & Democracy] 21(1), 29–55, 2012

The last post? Post-postmodernism and the linguistic u-turn

This paper adopts an autobiographical tone to review the linguistic turn and its demise at the hands Richard Rorty. Rorty, along with Continental philosophers like Lyotard rescued us from a philosophical delusion that we might achieve a neutral analysis resulting in linguistic and conceptual hygiene. This view became the basis of a highly influential doctrine in philosophy of education during the 1970s under R. S. Peters and the London school. I review the Wittgensteininspired movement and its conceptual affinities with postpositivism, postmodernism and postcoloniality as the dominating motifs of the age we have now passed beyond. © Michael A. Peters.This paper adopts an autobiographical tone to review the linguistic turn and its demise at the hands Richard Rorty. Rorty, along with Continental philosophers like Lyotard rescued us from a philosophical delusion that we might achieve a neutral analysis resulting in linguistic and conceptual hygiene. This view became the basis of a highly influential doctrine in philosophy of education during the 1970s under R. S. Peters and the London school. I review the Wittgenstein inspired movement and its conceptual affinities with postpositivism, postmodernism and postcoloniality as the dominating motifs of the age we have now passed beyond

Creativity, dialogue, and place: Vitebsk, the early Bakhtin and the origins of the Russian avant-garde

This paper attempts to avoid both the ‘Bakhtinology’ that has become the basis of the ‘Bakhtin industry’ in Russia and the Americanization of his work as a “a sort of New Left celebrator of popular culture” (McLemee, 1997) to argue for a radical contextual understanding a set of relationships among Bakhtin, Malevich, Chagall and others. The appreciation of a Bakhtinian notion of the inherently creative use of language is used as a basis for the idea of the creative university as the ‘dialogical university’. The paper begins by exploring the connections between Bakhtin, Malevich and Chagall to explore the ontological sociality of artistic phenomena. A small town called Vitebsk in Belorussia experienced a flowering of creativity and artistic energy that led to significant modernist experimentation in the years 1917-1922 contribution to the birth of the Russian avant-garde. Marc Chagall, returning from the October Revolution took up the position of art commissioner and developed an academy of art that became the laboratory for Russian modernism. Chagall’s Academy, Bahktin’s Circle, Malevich’s experiments, artistic group UNOVIS, all in fierce dialogue with one another made the town of Vitebsk into an artistic crucible in the early twentieth century transforming creative energies of Russian drama, music, theatre, art, and philosophy in a distinctive contribution to modernism and also to a social understanding of creativity itself

ECOPOLITICS OF ‘GREEN ECONOMY’, ENVIRONMENTALISM AND EDUCATION

The ‘green economy’ has emerged as a strong policy direction in Obama’s administration with $100 billion in dedicated funds over the next decade to provide infrastructure investment for a range of initiatives including alternative energy technologies that will lessen the reliant on foreign oil supplies. The concept of the ‘green economy’ has appeared at the point of the collapse of neoliberal ideology of deregulation and a new age of poverty after the worst global recession since WWII. First, this paper reviews the claims of ‘green capitalism’ examining, in particular the promise of distributed energy systems and the ‘hydrogen economy’ as proposed solutions to the energy problem of the U.S. economy. Second, it proposes a postmodern critique of neoliberal economics before examining conceptions of the green economy and its sustainability. The paper concludes by looking more broadly at the need for a broad shift from anthropocentric conceptions of economy to one based on a systems framework, and in this light, considers the relations among ecopolitics, environmental education and prospects for green capitalism.Green economy, green capitalism, alternative energy, ecopolitics

The creative university: Creative social development and academic entrepreneurship

The idea that the university needs re-imagining has gained considerable currency since the 21th century. Just why this should be needs some analysis and an examination of the functions and role(s) of universities. Some universities, especially in USA, have recently conducted exercises to achieve this in specific ways that deal with local issues (e.g. Cornell, Harvard, Minnesota, New York, Brown¹). It seems that much of the re-imagining discourse focuses on institutional financial issues, and this tends to play out as part of the crisis in universities literature, which may well be related to the crisis in schools and reform movements there as promoted by neoliberal policy agendas. Crisis discourses frequently use economic consultant advisory reports from large multinational companies (e.g. Ernst & Young and Pearson as described later in this chapter) to provide some degree of analysis. More often than not solutions offered tend to promote forms of university that such as the entrepreneurial university that emphasize research and forms of academic entrepreneurship beyond the traditional forms related to publishing. More recently teaching has become the focus in re-imagining as many universities not only become more global in their focus, but as they start to address modalities of pedagogy as presented by recent IT based systems in MOOCs