Within an overall policy script aimed at creating fewer "world-class" institutions, Dan... more Within an overall policy script aimed at creating fewer "world-class" institutions, Danish universities are currently being remade to better serve the world of work and employment, the demands of high-technology industry, and the needs of society, which are increasingly described and defined in terms of appeals to "relevance to the economy/working life," "value" and "efficiency." This partially replaces what is identified as a "democracy" discourse appealing to notions of "participation," "relevance for the people/"society" and so forth. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, the article explores the implications of these policy shifts in terms of the ways that academic workers negotiate competing discourses about the "university." Here, a number of "closures" are identified that suggest limits to how actors can think and operate within the new policy environment as it is being embedded within various gradually changing university contexts. However, the complexity of the reform creates a range of new "openings" in which alternative, often contradictory, identities are being legitimated. The complex interplay of openings and closures suggests that we resist simplistic understandings of contemporary universities as the victims of imposed policy violence.
Internationalization of Higher Education for Development, 2019
Illuminating thus far understudied international relations in global higher education, the book t... more Illuminating thus far understudied international relations in global higher education, the book titled Internationalization of Higher Education for Development illustrates how the Brazilian government, under the presidency of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), legitimized Africa-Brazil relations often referring to the presumably shared history of transatlantic slavery as the condition for solidarity cooperation and international integration. Ress reveals how this notion of history produces a vision of Brazil as a multicultural nation able to redress longstanding racialized inequalities while casting ‘Africa’ as the continent that remains forever in the past. She explores how this ambiguous notion was translated into curricula and classroom practices, and, in particular how it shaped international students’ experiences at a newly-created university in the Northeast of Brazil. Ress demonstrates how the historicized framing in conjunction with the powerfully racialized class struct...
pathway of knowledge and practice that aims to understand and address contemporary complexities a... more pathway of knowledge and practice that aims to understand and address contemporary complexities and multidimensional social realities. However, though Social Innovation is a widely-used term; its conceptual understanding and the specific relation to social change remains under explored. People-Centered Social Innovation: Global Perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm attempts to revisit and extend the existing understanding of Social Innovation in practice by focusing on the lived realities of marginalized groups and communities. The emerging field of people-centered development is placed in dialogue with theory and concepts from the more established field of social innovation to create a new approach; one that adopts a global perspective, engaging with very different experiences of marginality across the global north and south. Theoretically, People-Centered Social Innovation: Global Perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm draws on “Northern” understandings of change and improvement as well as ‘Southern’ theory concerns for epistemological diversity and meaning-making. The result is an experiment aimed at reimagining research and practice that seriously needs to center the actor in processes of social transformation.
This article presents a research agenda for studying social enterprise (SE) initiatives in educat... more This article presents a research agenda for studying social enterprise (SE) initiatives in education reform. Whilst based on research experiences gained in Nepal, the discussion here is relevant for similar SE efforts in other ‘developing’ countries as well as high-income contexts that are increasing adopting SE strategies that have been tested elsewhere. The paper outlines how changing processes of governance position SE initiatives as potential solutions to a range of problems that have structural roots in conflicts related to ethnicity, gender and class. However, whilst SE is a new mode of organizing our understanding of such issues, it also has the potential to re-inscribe historic marginalities in new ways. A research agenda focused on exploring the lived experience of SE aims to expose such possibilities and dangers.
Within an overall policy script aimed at creating fewer "world-class" institutions, Dan... more Within an overall policy script aimed at creating fewer "world-class" institutions, Danish universities are currently being remade to better serve the world of work and employment, the demands of high-technology industry, and the needs of society, which are increasingly described and defined in terms of appeals to "relevance to the economy/working life," "value" and "efficiency." This partially replaces what is identified as a "democracy" discourse appealing to notions of "participation," "relevance for the people/"society" and so forth. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, the article explores the implications of these policy shifts in terms of the ways that academic workers negotiate competing discourses about the "university." Here, a number of "closures" are identified that suggest limits to how actors can think and operate within the new policy environment as it is being embedded within various gradually changing university contexts. However, the complexity of the reform creates a range of new "openings" in which alternative, often contradictory, identities are being legitimated. The complex interplay of openings and closures suggests that we resist simplistic understandings of contemporary universities as the victims of imposed policy violence.
Internationalization of Higher Education for Development, 2019
Illuminating thus far understudied international relations in global higher education, the book t... more Illuminating thus far understudied international relations in global higher education, the book titled Internationalization of Higher Education for Development illustrates how the Brazilian government, under the presidency of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), legitimized Africa-Brazil relations often referring to the presumably shared history of transatlantic slavery as the condition for solidarity cooperation and international integration. Ress reveals how this notion of history produces a vision of Brazil as a multicultural nation able to redress longstanding racialized inequalities while casting ‘Africa’ as the continent that remains forever in the past. She explores how this ambiguous notion was translated into curricula and classroom practices, and, in particular how it shaped international students’ experiences at a newly-created university in the Northeast of Brazil. Ress demonstrates how the historicized framing in conjunction with the powerfully racialized class struct...
pathway of knowledge and practice that aims to understand and address contemporary complexities a... more pathway of knowledge and practice that aims to understand and address contemporary complexities and multidimensional social realities. However, though Social Innovation is a widely-used term; its conceptual understanding and the specific relation to social change remains under explored. People-Centered Social Innovation: Global Perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm attempts to revisit and extend the existing understanding of Social Innovation in practice by focusing on the lived realities of marginalized groups and communities. The emerging field of people-centered development is placed in dialogue with theory and concepts from the more established field of social innovation to create a new approach; one that adopts a global perspective, engaging with very different experiences of marginality across the global north and south. Theoretically, People-Centered Social Innovation: Global Perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm draws on “Northern” understandings of change and improvement as well as ‘Southern’ theory concerns for epistemological diversity and meaning-making. The result is an experiment aimed at reimagining research and practice that seriously needs to center the actor in processes of social transformation.
This article presents a research agenda for studying social enterprise (SE) initiatives in educat... more This article presents a research agenda for studying social enterprise (SE) initiatives in education reform. Whilst based on research experiences gained in Nepal, the discussion here is relevant for similar SE efforts in other ‘developing’ countries as well as high-income contexts that are increasing adopting SE strategies that have been tested elsewhere. The paper outlines how changing processes of governance position SE initiatives as potential solutions to a range of problems that have structural roots in conflicts related to ethnicity, gender and class. However, whilst SE is a new mode of organizing our understanding of such issues, it also has the potential to re-inscribe historic marginalities in new ways. A research agenda focused on exploring the lived experience of SE aims to expose such possibilities and dangers.
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Papers by Stephen Carney