This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Library of Humanities, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.
This paper focuses on the academic involvement in the design and delivery of new teaching and learning spaces in higher education.The findings are based on research conducted at 12 universities within the United Kingdom. The paper examines the nature of academic involvement in the design and decisionmaking process of pedagogic space design, revealing some of the complexities and the tensions within this area of academic leadership. The research found that innovation and creativity on particular projects is often restricted by the project management decision-making processes and that broader institutional aims are often underplayed once the design process goes into project mode.The paper concludes by calling for greater academic involvement in the design process in ways that allow for critical reflexivity based on discussions around the concept of 'the idea of the university'.
‘Academic identity’ is a key issue for debates about the professionalisation of university teaching and research, as well as the meaning and purpose of higher education. However, the concept of ‘academic identity’ is not adequate to the critical task for which it is utilised as it fails to deal with the real nature of work in capitalist society. It is important to move on from the mystifying and reified politics of identity and seek to understand academic life so that its alienated forms can be transformed. This can be done by grasping the essential aspects of capitalist work in both its abstract and concrete forms, as well as the historical and social processes out of which academic labour has emerged
It is a commonplace assumption that human life has become increasingly risky, and the concept of risk has become increasingly central to social scientific investigation. In this paper the increasing riskiness of everyday life is explored through an analysis of the origins, development and crisis of the welfare state. It is argued that the development of the National Lottery is part of a fundamental recomposition of the state which reflects the decomposition of the ‘law of insurance’ as the organising principle of the Keynesian Welfare State and its replacement by the ‘law of lottery’ as the principle regulatory mechanism of the neo-liberal capitalist state
In the scary media world of abused childhoods, child labour has become a major journalistic event. The news headlines record children working in conditions thought to have been abolished by social democratic reform. In spite of this mounting documentary evidence—supported by research undertaken by trade unions and pressure groups such as the Low Pay Unit—Tory ministers argued that child labour was not a problem. The Government's interest in youth was not the demoralisation of young workers at work, but the insubordination of youth, expressed as, among other things, crime, drug-taking and classroom disorder. The problem for conservative policy is the remoralisation of young people through the imposition of a new authority and the production of guides to the virtuous life.
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