300651 Grasping university through ethnography (S) (WiSe 2021/2022)

Universities all around the world are undergoing thorough transformations instigated or buttressed by global forces, and they face similar problems while competing for status, influence, and wealth. University students constitute the most central ‘stakeholder group’ in higher education whereas the student body has significantly changed in the last decades: in size, in demographic composition, in needs, aspirations, and in expectations. Student choices, visions, and their voiced critique have exerted significant pressures on individual institutions and on entire systems of higher education. Therefore, the current transformations of universities as well as those of student bodies are intertwined. While top-down approaches examining higher education from policy and from systemic perspectives have established themselves as a growing study field, inquiries observing these challenges from the vantage point of students have been rather scarce, so far. Therefore, this Seminar addresses the on-going transformations of universities from student perspective. It concentrates at students, inquiring how global influences they face directly and via their educational institutions impinge upon their preferences, choices and possibilities.
This seminar uses a constructivist perspective on the making and unmaking of social boundaries seeking to understand the changing modalities of inclusion and exclusion in higher education - across the world. The purpose of the seminar is to address the making and un-making of the social within the social spaces of universities in three ways:
• The first part is geared at theoretical foundations for grasping the social nature of university spaces. A special challenge to this perspective will be the current conditions under Covid-19 when most of interactions take place virtually. For these reasons, the available analyses may seem as ‘antiquated’. But expecting (and hoping) that an important share of academic teaching and learning will occur in co-presence in future, it is essential to grasp how the social, spatial and temporal constellations at university premises evolve.
• The second part examines how social boundaries are constructed in higher education systems in different parts of the world. The focus lies here on research on the access of people with different social and spatial backgrounds in the higher education system as well as their positioning along the lines of class, gender and ethnicity, and their experiences of inclusion and exclusion. How does the increasing heterogeneity of students – for example on the basis of class, gender, ethnicity/race, religion, disability or specific orientations – shape experiences of inclusion and exclusion? How is the university experienced both as a material and immaterial space? To what extent is university a space where specific imaginations can be developed and unfolded, and to what extent is a place where one might feel alienated as a student?
• In the third and final part of the seminar, we will look at the institutional responsiveness to the growing diversity and heterogeneity, policies of affirmative action and politics of student organisations.

Requirements for participation, required level

The seminar is open for master students. The seminar requires good English reading competences and is planned to be held in English. Students must be prepared to read all the texts listed in the seminar plan and to actively engage in plenary and group discussions. Written requirements (five text summaries to be submitted before the relevant session) will be explicated in the introductory session of the seminar.

Bibliography

Literature:
Holton, M., and Finn, K. (2020). Belonging, pausing, feeling: a framework of “mobile dwelling” for UK university students that live at home. Applied Mobilities, 5(1), 6-20.
Pfaff-Czarnecka, Joanna (Hg.) 2017. Das soziale Leben der Universität. Studentischer Alltag zwischen Selbstfindung und Fremdbestimmung. Bielefeld: transcript.
Kipnis, Andrew 2011. Governing the Educational Desire. Culture, politics and schooling in China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Nielsen, Gritt 2015. Figuration Work: Student Participation, Democracy and University Reform in a Global Knowledge Economy. Oxford: Berghahn Books.