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Session Submission Summary

Comparative Higher Education and the Populist Turn: Crises, Conflict, Coloniality and Capitalism in Turkish, British and Hungarian Universities

Wed, February 22, 8:00 to 9:30am EST (8:00 to 9:30am EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Independence Level (5B), Independence F

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Overview

Higher Education (HE) and its persistent link to ‘crises’, the death of democracy, and the rise of populist HE imaginaries constitutes a space that calls for novel understandings of contemporary universities and their assoviated knowledge-making projects (see Dillabough, 2021). This is particularly the case in relation to HE and histories and legacies of colonialism – what Arendt referred to as the ‘imperial blueprint’ - and forms of authoritarian HE governing rationales and policies. Arguably, one way of establishing a novel comprehension of modern HE and populism is to consider more fully the work of political and social theorists concerned with colonial legacies, contemporary state-making, and nation-building in a global transnational context, particularly in relation to questions about power, HE policy, knowledge-making and political action in diverse national contexts. In this task, we see HE as representing Scott’s (2002) ‘problem space’ of state capture and coloniality and a testing ground for contemporary politics:

'A problem-space […] is an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs. That is to say, what defines this discursive context are not only the particular problems that get posed as problems as such (the problem of ‘‘race,’’ say), but the particular questions that seem worth asking and the kinds of answers that seem worth having' (p. 4).

Aims

Drawing upon a large-scale ESRC funded research on HE and Crises cross-nationally, we present three case studies (Turkey, Hungary, UK) that examine these problem-spaces through analyses of the influence of populism and authoritarianism on HE governance, HE policy-making, pressure groups and scholar and student activism in three ways. First, we expose the ways in which populist imaginaries shape the political paradoxes and contradictions experienced by scholar and student activists in HE and shape the knowledge-power dynamics within modern HE institutions. Second, we demonstrate the role of contingent national and regional politics, alongside wider geopolitics, in influencing how HE actors and associated policy represent the influence of populism in HE. Third, in each case study we assess the ways in which varied forms of moral authority about nationhood and cultural identity are used to justify populist HE governing strategies and practices.

Theoretical Contributions to Critical Comparative Higher Education Studies

We characterise populism both as a contemporary political phenomenon and as a modality of colonial and post-imperial articulations of power and governance. We also view populism as creating divisions within (liberal) democratic HE spaces where groups identify themselves as a sacred voice of the state and see themselves standing against a radical profane other (e.g. Peace Signatories) and seen by the state as threatening knowledge-making, the moral voice of the university and the state (see Mbembe 2019). Here so called ‘reasoned’ thinkers in the reasoned academy are pitted against the non-reasoned other or bad subjects of the university. This modality of politics invokes high levels of affect and is grounded in political resentments that emerge between conflicted HE constituencies seeking recognition through an enactment of competitive memory (see Rothberg, 2009) or through imperialist nostalgias articulated through losses of legitimacy or through socio-political indignation within HE. Whilst most definitions of populism are remarkably consistent within political theory, the underlying reasons, processes and contextual populist particularities amongst HE institutions and groups are contested, and there is very little work exploring HE and populist particularities cross-nationally. Whilst we adopt the position taken broadly by Laclau of enmity, aggregated aggrievement, and populist platforming and ruptures as they manifest in HE, each case study sheds new light on how populism is understood within unique HE contexts and in relation to wider geopolitics, neo-nationalisms and neo-expansionist imaginaries. We also examine, in a comparative transnational sense, the relationship HE has to populist ruptures within and across HE jurisdictions.

Each panelist engages the work of political thinkers who have sought to understand the role of modern nation-building, the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, and the rise of bureaucracy and population management as they impact upon HE. We draw chiefly from Scott, Arendt, Honig, Said, Inis, Mbembe, Ronaldo, Bradiotti, Balibar, and Foucault to articulate the central problem that concerns us - to consider how and why populist strains of national and transnational governance may find a home in HE as a consequence of unresolved and contradictory political dilemmas and conflicts. Each case study therefore ‘explores the ways in which a highly complex set of forces - emerging out of the bureaucratic machinery of modernity and the fundamental paradox of liberalism itself - that positions the university as a testing ground for the tasks of politics and governance, particularly in relation to state crises and geo-political conflicts’ (Dillabough, 2021, p. ).

Empirical Contributions

Arendt, Said, Ines, Foucault, Honig, Balibar, and Mbembe, each argue, in different ways, that these forces represent features of modern violence, emergency politics, political experimentation and state crises, with forms of institutional and geo-political bordering, burgeoning scientisms, inflated bureaucracy and rationalities emerging out of, and alongside, the state making project, from which HE in its modern form was itself born. With few exceptions (Fraser, 2017; Robertson, 2019), these forces and ‘crises’ have been principally explored from the limited perspective of economic reforms and the resultant hegemony of the corporatized ‘neoliberal university’. There is, however, no substantial comparative research that has addressed the precariousness of contemporary HE in terms of wider neo-nationalisms and the accumulation of political pressures directly impacting HE. Such pressures include, for example: resurgent forms of nationalism and constrained academic freedom which impinge on HE’s potential role in ameliorating political instability, in addressing the exclusion of disadvantaged groups, and in reducing inter- and intra-state tensions; unrelieved austerity; post-colonial HE activism, and growing populist movements. This formidable array of pressures exerts an insistent influence on HE institutions, knowledge production, policy-making and the state’s role in regulating the political landscape of HE. Consequently, our collobarative research addresses a pressing need for systematic investigation of the transnational patterns of these pressures and a comparative assessment of their potentially unpredictable outcomes for HE, its ‘public’ mission and wider civic society.

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