The CounterText review : universities in the neoliberal era

Abstract

There are voices among the ruins. Some of these make themselves heard in Hakan Ergül and Simten Cosar’s volume Universities in the Neoliberal Era: Academic Cultures and Critical Perspectives (2017), which contains studies and perspectives from Morocco and Turkey, as well as the UK and the Czech Republic, highlighting shared conditions as well as localised differences within Higher Education. This diversified representation and attention to contexts seems particularly apt for review in a CounterText issue that focuses on cultural identities and experiences, moving to include voices that are often marginalised in the dominant narrative – not unaffected by First World dominance, but inscribing their difference in literature, theory, and practice. The contributors to Ergül and Cosar’s volume speak from a place that is compelled to critically question its own foundations – or rather, they seek a more stable sense of place in order to counteract a feeling of groundlessness, and to uncover the neoliberal re-structuring that has ‘crept’ into Higher Education (henceforth, ‘HE’), to use Josef Kavka’s description of the process in his chapter on HE in the Czech Republic (Kavka 2017). [Excerpt]