Transforming Universities In The Midst Of Global Crisis

This book calls into question the colonial and neoliberal university, presenting alternative models of higher education that can more effectively respond to today’s intersecting social, economic, environmental and political crises. The authors argue that universities should be driven by a different set of core values – one that promotes the common good over private or commercial interests, individualism and market fundamentalism. Presenting a broad range of educational initiatives from around the world that reflect life-affirming regenerative and relational practices, Indigenous intellectual sovereignty, and principles of social and ecological justice, the authors contend that pathways toward transforming higher education already exist within and without the university. This task, say the authors, is urgent and necessary if universities and other institutions are to hold relevance in a rapidly changing global environment. This book makes a unique contribution to critiques of the modern, neoliberal university by looking for alternatives within and beyond traditional institutions of higher education. In doing so, the authors dismantle the longstanding 'ivory tower' image of the university, instead resituating education within broader social and ecological communities. Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis is aimed at all those who have a direct or indirect interest and stake in universities, from the general reader to futurists, ecologists as well as students, academics, administrators, managers, policy makers and politicians.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Revealing the globalization, homogenization and variation that have come to characterize the collegiate system, this volume considers the future of the higher education system, and how we can consciously shape it moving forward.

What is the future of the contemporary university and for those who lead them? Considering leadership in the broadest sense, including academic leadership (teaching and research) as well as leadership practices of those in formal management positions, Jill Blackmore outlines how multiple pressures on universities have produced leadership practices in management and research which are more corporate than collegial, and which discourage many academics from aspiring to leadership. She uses a range of theoretical tools, informed by critical and feminist organisational studies, to unpack higher education and how it is being transformed in ways that undermine its core work of teaching and research. Drawing from three Australian university case studies, this book uses leadership as a lens through which to investigate the effects of restructuring of the higher education sector which have impacted differently on academic identities and careers.

This book delves into the Australia-China relationship, which is currently at its worst since 1972, when the two countries first established a diplomatic relationship. Australia is seen by the US as its front-line ally in its fight in containing China. Derived from an international symposium organized by the editorial team and held in Adelaide, South Australia in September 2021, these essays are an attempt to offer some understanding and explanations for the deterioration of Sino-Australian ties. It is also an attempt to explore the ways by which the two countries can reach some common ground for the future. Despite our very different pasts, can we seek out a shared future together, a future that avoids a war, hot or cold, between a rising power of China and the incumbent US hegemon?

Cinematic Encounters with Disaster takes Hollywood's disaster movies and their codified versions of natural disaster, post-apocalyptic survival, and extra-terrestrial threat as the starting point for an analytical trajectory that works toward new understandings of how cinema shapes and informs our conceptions of disaster and catastrophe. It examines a range of films from distinct regional and industrial contexts: Hollywood, indie movies, different kinds of documentaries from the US and elsewhere, and auteurist-realist cinema from Europe and Asia. Moving across and beyond critical and industrial categories that often inform thinking about cinema, this book contends that different approaches to film style can push us to imagine disaster in distinct ways, with distinct ethical connotations. Framed by contemporary concerns around the global climate crisis and the advent of the Anthropocene, questions about how films can best offer responses to historical exigency guide the book's explorations of spectacular 2010s blockbusters like Gravity (2013) and San Andreas (2015), environmental documentaries including the paradigmatic An Inconvenient Truth (2006), post-disaster films by auteurs including Abbas Kiarostami and Lav Diaz, and more. Conceiving of disaster as intersubjective ethics between humans and nonhuman alterity – forces of nature, errant technology, monsters, ghosts, and other entities – it analyses how formal techniques and narrative strategies render encounters in which human protagonists are confronted with the threat of death and respond in ways that can be instructive for our planet's present juncture.

This book draws on interdisciplinary social science and philosophical frameworks to offer new dimensions to debate about intellectual leadership and higher education. The chapters are focused on provoking readers to think critically about intellectual leadership in precarious times. The contributors frame critical questions about the unevenness, ambivalences, and disruptions that now mark everyday life and interactions. Rather than thinking about 'freedom from precarious times and precarity' they consider 'freedom from within' and how the sovereignty and autonomy of the individual to think and speak within the public realm might be retained, if not reclaimed. In the precarious present and in times of precarity, what has changed and why? What might now be the new social reality within which we work? Each of the contributors have been invited to take up their own perspective on what is precarious, and to examine the impacts on intellectual leadership. What does it mean to do intellectual work and be an intellectual leader? What are the implications for intellectual work and leadership if the academy itself is in precarious times?