Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education

This edited volume explores how the kinds of world-wide restructurings of higher education and research work that are underway today have not only increased employment insecurity in academia but may actually be producing unemployment both for those within academia and for graduate job-seekers in other sectors. Recent and current re-organisations of higher education and research work, and re-orientations of academic life (as students, researchers, teachers) generally, which are taking place around the world, achieve exactly the opposite of what they claim: though ostensibly undertaken to facilitate employment, these moves actually produce unemployment both for those within academia and for graduate job-seekers in other sectors. TABLE OF CONTENTS Notes on Contributors Introduction Suman, Gupta, Jernej Habjan and Hrvoje Tutek I THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF HIGHER EDUCATION POLICY INITIATIVES NOW 1 The Implausible Knowledge Triangle of the Western Balkans Danijela Dolenec 2 Human and Inhuman Capital, and Schooling: The Case of Slovenia Primož Krašovec 3 Privatising Minds: New Educational Policies in India P. K. Vijayan II MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP AGAINST ACADEMIC FREEDOM 4 ‘Academic Leadership’ and the Conditions of Academic Work Richard Allen and Suman Gupta 5 Not Working: Shared Services and the Production of Unemployment Kim Emery III GENERATION GAPS AND ECONOMIC DEPENDENCY IN ACADEMIC LIFE 6 Graduate Unemployment in Post-haircut Cyprus: Where Have all the Students Gone? Mike Hajimichael 7 ‘Dare to Dare’: Academic Pedagogy in Times of Flattened Hierarchies Ivana Perica 8 Cannibalising the Collegium: The Plight of the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Managerial University George Morgan 9 Between Career Progression and Career Stagnation: Casualisation, Tenure and the Contract of Indefinite Duration in Ireland Mariya Ivancheva and Micheal O’Flynn IV THE SCOPE OF COLLECTIVE ACTION IN ACADEMIA 10 Are University Struggles Worth Fighting? Branko Bembič 11 You’re Either a Flower in the Dustbin or the Spark that Lights a Fire: On Precarity and Student Protests Mark Bergfeld 12 Whither Critical Scholarship in the Modern University? Critique, Radical Democracy and Counter-Hegemony Cerelia Athanassiou and Jamie Melrose 13 Academics as Workers: From Career Management to Class Analysis and Collective Action Hrvoje Tutek Index