Emancipatory Imaginations: Advancing Critical University Studies

The study of higher education presupposes the ‘goodness’ of the university and the academy, and the scholars who study them. Yet the social justice intent of both have long been questioned and may be emptied out. This book explores generative developments of ‘other’ ways to study, more critically and productively, the university across disciplines. While framed affirmatively, this endeavour is a space of refusal. Refusal of the status quo, of the taken-for-granted and of hegemonic powers and violences that continue within and outside higher education institutions. Part I explores possible emancipatory frames to (in)form transformative change and its enquiry. Its four chapters deliberate how Critical University Studies may be advanced in relation to its own histories of intellectual emergence, decolonial theory, Abolitionist Studies, sustainable development, and the African university. Part II asks questions about the conditions of possibility for advancing Critical University Studies. Particular disciplines, fields of study, cases, contexts and methods of analysis are discussed within the contexts of Canada, Germany, India, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Exploring the effects on different academic citizens and figures, the six chapters in this section combine to assert the pervasiveness of the problematics of the politics of participation for marginalised and minoritised academic citizens’ agency and authority; and to uphold the value of resistance in the formation and authorisation of persons and knowledges. Part III (re)turns to the necessity for reflexivity. The two chapters engage with its importance for scholarship and praxes for critical work to be disruptive. Recognising the potential of critique to (re)produce harmful patterns requires such logics and desires be identified and interrupted. Emancipatory Imaginations: Advancing Critical University Studies mobilises engagement with the question of how the critical study of the university is to be advanced in scholarship, framing, practice and praxes - within, beyond and against traditions of the past and present. It is thus of interest to academics, students and intellectuals who are concerned with transformative change within universities.