QUALITY ASSURANCE IN EDUCATION, RESEARCH AND ACCOUNTABILITY

“There is a broad consensus globally of the value of education to social and economic development. Higher education in particular plays a crucial role in creating culturally vibrant and democratic societies. Higher education and research, and the outcomes they produce in terms of well-educated graduates, a capacity for innovation and new knowledge, play crucial roles in the economic development of all our societies. So we can agree that well performing higher education institutions, accessible to all who can benefit from higher education and graduating high quality graduates is a worthwhile objective for all of us.”-

QUALITY ASSURANCE IN EDUCATION, RESEARCH AND ACCOUNTABILITY

“There is a broad consensus globally of the value of education to social and economic development. Higher education in particular plays a crucial role in creating culturally vibrant and democratic societies. Higher education and research, and the outcomes they produce in terms of well-educated graduates, a capacity for innovation and new knowledge, play crucial roles in the economic development of all our societies. So we can agree that well performing higher education institutions, accessible to all who can benefit from higher education and graduating high quality graduates is a worthwhile objective for all of us.”-

Avowing Unemployment: Confessional Jobseeker Interviews and Professional CVs

While contemporary welfare processes have widely been analysed through the concepts of governmentality and pastoral power, this article diagnoses the dimension of confession or avowal within unemployment, job seeking and CV writing. This argument draws together the threads of Foucault’s work on confession within disciplinary institutions, around sexuality and genealogies of monasticism, adding the insights of writers in ‘economic theology’. Empirically the focus is on UK JobCentrePlus, whose governmentality is traced from laws and regulations, street-level forms, websites and CV advice. From the requirement of avowals of unemployment as a personal fault in interviews to professions of faith in oneself and the labour market, a distinctly confessional practice emerges – with the welfare officer as ‘pastor’ but with the market as the ultimate ‘test’ of worth. Furthermore, the pressure to transform the self through ‘telling the truth’ about oneself is taken as a normalising pressure which extends from the institutions of welfare across the labour market as a whole. In conclusion, the demand for self-transformation and the insistence on tests within modernity is problematised

Rebels, Critiques, Cynics

Comparing Albert Camus' diagnosis of the 'rebel' with the long standing Greek and Western tradition of cynicism, in terms of critique

Critique as a Modern Social phenomenon

What are the origins and purposes of social critique? Rather than use critique as a mode of investigating social phenomenon, this book analyses critique as a social phenomenon. Critique is both constitutive of modernity and exceedingly diverse, and not only that but widely taken for granted in scholarly communities. Herein, the resources of historical sociology and anthropology are used in order to gain perspective on critique as something culturally specific to modernity. Based on this, I analyze critique as moving force in history, part of the dynamic of capitalism and consumerism, a recurring trope in the media from all any political positions, and finally as a common-place even of popular culture. Finally, I turn to some key literary writers who have explored critique as a social phenomenon within their work, thus providing a reflexive perspective on critique as a lived experience