Critical Higher Education
Learn more about how this theme explores the context, purpose and values of higher education systems around the world.
Higher education is a place of increasing global policy significance, which necessitates critical, theoretically informed analyses of its knowledge, practices and pedagogies. This CIE research theme explores topics such as the academy as a site of epistemological struggle over whose and what knowledge ‘counts’; a place of transition in which identities are shaped and reconstituted through engagements in relational practices, and the role of higher education in promoting or obfuscating social justice. Some research in this theme draws connections from the history of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research, which operated between 2008 and 2022.
Furthermore, higher education is not only a site of knowledge production but also a critical space for resistance, resilience, and solidarity, especially in times of crisis, authoritarianism, and conflict. It plays a crucial role in reflecting societal struggles and advancing social justice, where academic freedom and university autonomy are fundamental. This theme also explores how higher education can foster global solidarities and collaborations, particularly in times of increasing global insecurity, uncertainty, and instability.
Research questions
Research within this theme asks questions such as:
- What is the role of higher education in knowledge production, specifically, in working towards decolonised, democratised and digitised futures?
- How does higher education function as a site for resistance, resilience, and solidarity in times of crisis, authoritarianism, and conflict?
- Who are higher education’s idealised ‘subjects’ as students, teachers and leaders? What inequalities persist, how and where?
- What possibilities and closures for learners and learning are produced within the academy through relations, pedagogies and practices?
- In what ways can academic freedom and university autonomy be protected and redefined in contexts of political repression and social injustice?
- What is the role of higher education in contributing to democratic struggles, social justice, and peace, both locally and transnationally?
- How might theory investigate and interrupt the space and place of higher education?
- What is the contribution of higher education in imagining alternative futures across the globe?
- How can higher education foster global solidarities and collaborations, particularly in times of increasing global insecurity, uncertainty, and instability?
Projects
Projects have included Professor Tamsin Hinton-Smith’s British Academy funded research into Mainstreaming Gender Pedagogy across India, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Nigeria and the UK. As well as an edited book, this project developed an educators toolkit for gender sensitive pedagogy.
Also, there was a Horizon 2020-funded project into the Inclusion of Roma communities in Sweden, Hungary and the UK, in partnership with the Roma Education Fund, informed understandings of the experiences of minoritised groups navigating internationalisation agendas.
This was led by Professor Louise Morley, with work packages led by Professor Tamsin Hinton-Smith and Dr Emily Danvers. As well as the production of country reports, research outputs and policy briefs, this has had implications for work at Sussex. Led by Dr Emily Danvers and Chris Derbyshire, in 2023 Sussex committed to a pledge to support the inclusion of Gypsies, Travellers, Roma, Showmen and Boaters.
Dr. Birgul Kutan’s research in higher education is rooted in critical, historical, and relational perspectives, focusing on the challenges higher education faces during times of conflict, crisis, and authoritarianism. Viewing higher education as a space for struggle and resistance, her work explores how universities intersect with struggles for democracy and social justice beyond the academy. She is particularly interested in how higher education, as a dynamic site of contestation, can respond to crises and be reimagined to promote academic freedom, autonomy, and democratic futures, thereby influencing education and society in times of instability.
Dr. Kutan has been collaborating with academics from countries such as Turkey, Hungary, India, Iran, Syria, and Myanmar over the past decade to form global solidarities. She is currently co-editing a special issue on ‘Supporting and Learning from Universities in Times of Conflict: Towards Resilience and Resistance in Higher Education’, which emerged from a 2023 PEER Network Symposium that brought together over 75 academics and policymakers worldwide to discuss the role of higher education in fostering resilience, peace, and social justice.
Dr Nimi Hoffmann is currently completing a monograph on African intellectual communities, which examines themes of memory and erasure, violence and oppression, identity and counter-hegemonic imagining, and the question of who counts as an intellectual and what counts as intellectual work. The monograph explores the ways in which African intellectual communities conceptualised and resisted the onslaught on the economic, political and intellectual sovereignty of African societies during structural adjustment; in the process they provided distinctive re-imaginings of academic freedom, feminism and pan-Africanism.
This research theme is led by Dr Emily Danvers. We also have a lively and critical mass of doctoral researchers carrying out research in this important field.