Higher education timescapes: temporal understandings of students and learning

UNIVERSITIES: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

SPEAKER: Rachel Brooks, University of Surrey

This paper will draw on data from six European countries (Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain) to explore the higher education timescapes inhabited by students. Despite arguments that degree-level study has become increasingly similar across Europe – because of global pressures and also specific initiatives such as the Bologna Process and the creation of a European Higher Education Area – it will show how such timescapes differ in important ways, largely by nation. These differences are then explained in terms of: the distinctive traditions of higher education still evident across the continent; the particular mechanisms through which degrees are funded; and the nature of recent national-level policy activity. The analysis thus speaks to debates about Europeanisation, as well as how we theorise the relationship between time and place.

Rachel Brooks is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at the University of Surrey. She is also editor-in-chief of Sociology, an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education, and co-editor of the Routledge/SRHE ‘Research into Higher Education’ book series. She has published widely in the sociology of higher education. Recent books include: Constructing the Higher Education Student: Perspectives from across Europe (2022, with Sazana Jayadeva, Achala Gupta, Anu Lainio and Predrag Lazetic); Student Migrants and Contemporary Educational Mobilities (2021, with Johanna Waters) and Reimagining the Higher Education Student (2021, with Sarah O’Shea). Rachel is a member of Governing Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and the education sub-panel for the UK’s national research assessment exercise (REF2021).

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