CHEF Talks in March 2022

'Imagining the future of the university' and 'Making the un-visible matter'

CHEF Talk

Date: March 31, 2022, 15.00 - 16.00

Venue: Online. Participants will recieve a Zoom-Link closer to the event.

Fee: Free

Registration deadline: March 31, 2022, at 07:00

Speakers: Hans Schildermans, Postdoctoral researcher, Department of Education of University of Vienna
                 Ning de Coninck-Smith, Professor, Danish School of Education - Educational Sociology

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Abstract 1

Nowadays, several actors lay claim on the how the future of the university is being imagined (e.g., European Commission, UNESCO, OECD). More often than not, these imaginations are being articulated within the language of globalism that seems to assume the existence of an isomorphic global higher education space. The globalist view of university education takes for granted a kind of wholeness that symbolically incorporates individual institutions into a global system and thereby tends to neglect the particular histories of these institutions and the relations of conquest and colonization that brought many of these institutions into being. Therefore, there seems to be a discrepancy between the globalist imagination of the university and the realities of local grammars of university education. In this CHEF-Talk I will present my current research project that based on comparative-historical case work delves into the past futures of the university to analyze how in particular historical milieus various conceptions of the university and its future have been affirmed, negotiated, or resisted and how new ‘ideas’ of the university have been enacted, often on a very practical and a very local level.

Abstract 2

University jubilees generate books – boring books, but frequently very informative about quantitative expansions, important scientific breakthrough, renowned (male) professors and impressive campus.

What is missing from these accounts are the men and women on all levels, who on a daily basis make higher learning/universities. What is also missing are theoretical and methodological reflections about, what is told and what is not and what makes university change and where to detect the micro and affective processes, where the shifting logics of academic life become visible?

The outset of my talk will be a chapter written for an upcoming volume, edited by Gisela Hürliman and Anton Guhl entitled Staging History. Actors, Media, and Politics of Anniversaries in European Institutions of Higher Learning from 1850 to the Present.

My contribution to the volume has three parts. 1) Staging a narrative about the origins of Aarhus University 2) An untold story and 3) Theoretical and methodological challenges and reflections. In my talk, I will present a short version, focusing on the third section. In this, I draw on gender studies, and post-structural and new materialist theory in highlighting the role of the anecdote, when making the un-visible visible.

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