Universities in the Neoliberal Era, 1st ed. 2017 Academic Cultures and Critical Perspectives Palgrave Critical University Studies Series

This book explores the question of how and to what extent the ongoing neoliberal transformation of higher education exerts influence on the university and academic everyday life in different societies. By listening to, observing, and comparing the critical voices of academics and students ? the voices that matter ? the book reviews first hand experiences from different societies and university cultures located within the European and semi-Mediterranean landscape, including the Czech Republic, Morocco, Turkey, and United Kingdom. 

By bringing together original fieldworks combining the structural analysis of the neoliberal shift with the academic individual?s repositioning, struggle and response, the book documents a number of similarities and differences experienced in different academic cultures. The chapters present a rich variety of subjects, including academic labor, academic identity and knowledge production, (un)employment, (in)equality, academic feminism, oppression and resistance from ethnographic, political and sociological perspectives. This timely and insightful volume will appeal to researchers, academics, students and advocates of academic freedom from different disciplines and academic cultures whose agendas prioritize higher education policies, university systems, academic production and academic labor.   

Chapter 1. Editorial Introduction; Hakan Ergül & Simten Coşar.- PART I. EMERGING CULTURES: BETWEEN NEOLIBERAL KNOW-HOW AND ACADEMIC UNIVERSALS.- Chapter 2. Beyond the Third Mission: Towards an Actor-Based Account of Universities’ Relationship with Society; Jana Bacevic.- Chapter 3. Searching for Authenticity and Success: Academic Identity and Production in Neoliberal Times; Özgür Budak.- Chapter 4. Turkish Academics’ Encounters with the Index in Social Sciences; Eda Çetinkaya.- PART II. STORIES OF MEDIATION, NEGOTIATION AND RESILIENCE.- Chapter 5. Variegated Neoliberalization in Higher Education: Ambivalent Responses to Competitive Funding in the Czech Republic; Josef Kavka.- Chapter 6. Creating Jobs for the Social Good: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Model of Education for Employment; Shana Cohen.- Chapter 7. Transformation, Reformation or Decline? The University in Contemporary Morocco and Turkey; Hakan Ergül, Simten Coşar & Fadma Ait-Mous.- PART III. VOICES OF DISSENT.- Chapter 8. The Historico-Political Parameters of Academic Feminism in Turkey: Breaks and Continuities; İnci Özkan Kerestecioğlu & Aylin Özman.- Chapter 9. ‘Homo Academicus’ in University Inc.: The ‘Ersatz’ Yuppie Academic; Hasan Ünal Nalbantoğlu.

Hakan Ergül is an associate professor at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. He has teaching and research experience in Turkey and abroad in the areas of media and vulnerable groups, media ethnography, television and journalism studies and has published books and articles pertaining to these fields. He is currently conducting a comparative ethnographic research (with Simten Coşar) on neoliberal transformation of higher education.

Simten Coşar is a professor at Hacettepe University, Turkey, and has published on Turkish politics, feminist politics, and political thought. She is the co-editor of Silent Violence: Neoliberalism, Islamist Politics and the AKP Years in Turkey, and has been continuing  with her comparative research on the feminist encounters in neoliberal academia, as part of a broader comparative ethnographic research (with Hakan Ergül) on neoliberal transformation of higher education.