Louise Morley

University of Sussex · Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER)

This article explores how women's postgraduate education becomes entangled with heteronormative gender regimes enacted in public discourses that caution against women becoming too educated in China. The cultural capital of the PhD is obliterated by the loss of cultural capital resulting from gender non‐conformity. Two powerful discourses—‘leftover...

Positive attributes stick to higher education internationalisation, and it is a policy paradigm with performative effects. Internationalisation draws on imagined virtuous flows of knowledge production and exchange, and is presented as an assemblage of detraditionalisation, expansiveness and epistemic and cultural opportunity for individuals, organi...

Women leaders are frequently treated as one class – a homogenised group with essentialised skills and competencies in binary relationship to male leaders. We explore how feminist ways of knowing gender and leadership, and circulations of affects, shape women’s diverse leadership practices and identities within the neoliberal, and neuroliberal acade...

In this article, Sally R Munt reflects on issues of social class discrimination in higher education in an engaging conversation with Louise Morley, both from the University of Sussex.

Today, between 10 and 12 million Roma live in Europe, comprising the continent’s largest ethnic minority. However, only 1% participate in higher education. Although the Roma are widely dispersed across Europe, and beyond, they face similar social, political, and economic challenges throughout the continent. A major site of struggle has been access,...

Today, between 10 and 12 million Roma live in Europe, comprising the continent’s largest ethnic minority. However, only 1% participate in higher education. Although the Roma are widely dispersed across Europe, and beyond, they face similar social, political, and economic challenges throughout the continent. A major site of struggle has been access,...

This is the updated and corrected version of the report uploaded last week

This research report summarises analysis made in the project Higher education, inequality and the public good: A study in four African countries. The study funded 2017-2019 by the ESRC/Newton/NRF funding partnership has focussed on Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa and has brought together researchers from those four countries, together with c...

Internationalisation is a polyvalent policy discourse, saturated in conceptual and ideological ambiguity. It is an assemblage of commodification, exploitation and opportunity and is a container for multiple aspirations, anxieties, and affordances. It combines modernisation, detraditionalisation, and expansiveness, with knowledge capitalism, linguis...

Internationalisation is a dominant policy discourse in the field of higher education today, driven by an assemblage of economic, social and educational concerns. It is often presented as an ideologically neutral, coherent, disembodied, knowledge-driven policy intervention—an unconditional good. Mobility is one of the key mechanisms through which in...

Higher education has been the object of policy attention in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. It has been seen as key to unlocking the potential of the youth bulge, responding to the demands of a growing middle class and to transforming commodities-based economies into knowledge societies (World Bank 2009; Cloete, Maassen & Bailey 2015; Chuks, 20...

Fika is the Swedish practice of assembling for a coffee break at work or home. This paper investigates the material, social and temporal investments in fika in accelerated and accountable organizational cultures, and asks what purpose it serves in neoliberalised academic employment regimes today. Analysis of our thirteen interviews with administrat...

In this article, I discuss the gendered implications of the neo-liberal research economy. I explore the complexities and contradictions of neo-liberal discourse and how it has become entangled with higher education in general, and with the research economy in particular. Drawing on critical literature, questionnaires and discussion data from women...

This chapter aims to provide an overview of women’s participation as leaders in higher education (HE) in Malaysia. It draws upon local and international feminist literature and engages with some of the explanatory frameworks that have been used to analyse the absence of women from senior leadership positions in HE in the global academy including th...

This paper draws on British Council commissioned research in response to concerns about women's absence from senior leadership positions in higher education in South Asia. The study sought existing knowledge from literature, policies, and available statistics and collected original interview data from 30 academics in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India,...

Power is a central constituent of professional relations. It can be overt in the form of decision-making, resource allocation, accreditation, and assessment. Power is also present in everyday transactions that can frequently confound and confuse and leave actors unsure of their readings of complex interpersonal encounters. The conceptual framework...

As higher education (HE) institutions globally become increasingly performative, competitive and corporatised in response to neoliberal rationalities, the exigencies of HE leadership are being realigned to accommodate its value system. This article draws on recent British Council-funded research, including 30 semi-structured interviews, to explore...

This article raises questions about gender in the neo-liberalised research economy. Theoretically, it includes Barad’s concept of intra-action to analyse how discursive-material differences between research winners and losers are created and sustained. Empirically, it draws on international research conducted at British Council seminars on Absent T...

?An interrogation under way is whether policies for widening participation in sub-Saharan Africa are working. That was one of the key questions addressed by the research project Widening Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Scorecard. Research teams found that the policies were working in the sense of increa...

The British Council in Pakistan commissioned the research in response to concerns in the profession about the under-representation of women in senior leadership positions in higher education (HE) in South Asia. The British Council in Pakistan was coordinating a series of high-level strategic policy dialogues for the South Asia region – Global Educa...

p>This article discusses the findings that relate to quality and standards in two private universities from a recent research study on widening participation in higher education in Ghana and Tanzania. It interrogates how students experience assessment, facilities, pedagogy and resources and whether the private universities attach value to the quali...

This collection of essays is about the struggle between the evils of neoliberalism and the unquestioned goodness of Freirean theory. The essays ‘of opposition’ were written and delivered by Carlos Alberto Torres to diverse audiences and in different locations and languages. Yet they contain one overarching message suggesting that neoliberal globali...

Drawing on data gathered from British Council seminars in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Dubai on Absent Talent: Women in Research and Academic Leadership (2012–2013), this paper discusses academic women's experiences and explanations for women's under-representation as knowledge leaders and producers in the global academy. Participants from South and East A...

This paper asks whether doctoral assessment has escaped the regulation of quality assurance procedures. Raising questions about the affective and micropolitical dimensions of an oral examination conducted in private, it explores how current concerns about quality assurance, standards, benchmarks and performance indicators in higher education apply...

This paper engages with Diana Leonard's writing on how gender is constituted in the academy. It offers an international review of feminist knowledge on how gender and power interact with leadership in higher education. It interrogates the ‘leaderist turn’ or how leadership has developed into a popular descriptor and a dominant social and organisati...

Knowledge, power and democracy are being more explicitly related to higher education globally. Increasingly there are calls for cognitive justice and the development of a sociology of absences, particularly in relation to structures of inequalities and knowledge production from the Global South. The university of the future will need to be cognizan...

This chapter is based on data from an international research project entitled ‘Gender Equity in Commonwealth Higher Education’ (GECHE). Funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Carnegie Corporation of New York from 2003 to 2005, this project examined interventions for gender equity in relation to access, staff develo...

This chapter is based on findings from the project ‘Widening Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Score-card’ (WPHEGT).1 An original feature of the study was the inclusion of 200 interviews with students from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). They narrated experiences, aspirations and disappointments. Positive and e...

Between 10% and 15% of the world's population are thought to be disabled. The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an example of emerging global policy architecture for human rights for disabled people. Article 24 states that disabled people should receive the support required to facilitate their effective ed...

Feminisation discourses appear to represent nostalgia for patriarchal patterns of participation and exclusion in higher education. It is curious why this particular melancholic formulation has gained currency in the context of higher education today, raising questions about the misogynistic impulse seeking to set a ceiling on women's current succes...

Quantitative increases tell a partial story about the quality of women's participation in higher education. Women students' reporting of sexual harassment has been noteworthy in a recent study that I directed on widening participation in higher education in Ghana and Tanzania. The hierarchical and gendered power relations within universities have n...

Participation rates for women in higher education have increased between 1999 and 2005 in all regions of the world, with a global gender parity index (GPI) of 1.05. Between 1999 and 2004, the GPI for gross enrolment in higher education increased in more than 77% of the 57 countries with available data (UNESCO, 2006: 27). There are now more undergra...

Incl. abstract & bibl. School effectiveness is a microtechnology of change. It is a relay device, which transfers macro policy into everyday processes and priorities in schools. It is part of the growing apparatus of performance evaluation. Change is brought about by a focus on the school as a site-based system to be managed. There has been corpora...

Incl. bibl., abstract This article critically examines the concept of gender mainstreaming and raises questions about a series of category slippages in debates and discussions. Some key concerns are the way in which women are constructed as a unified analytical category, and how gender equality is frequently reduced to issues of representation. It...

The academy today is characterised by the hyper-modernisation of global, entrepreneurial, commercialised universities underpinned by the archaism of poor quality employment environments, elitist participation and widespread gender inequalities. Counter hegemonic advocates did not predict the scale of neo-liberal driven change. Traditionalists did n...

Higher education policy and research tend to be dominated by the messaging systems of the North. De Sousa Santos argues that we need to start listening to the South and that we need to develop a sociology of absences. This paper attempts to engage with some of these absences by deconstructing participation in higher education, in quantitative and q...

Widening participation in higher education can be a force for democratization. It can also map on to elite practices and contribute to further differentiation of social groups. Those with social capital are often able to decode and access new educational opportunities. Those without it can remain untouched by initiatives to facilitate their entry i...

This article is based on an ESRC/DFID funded research project on Widening Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Scorecard (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/wideningparticipation). There are questions about whether widening participation in higher education is a force for democratisation or differentiation. W...

A autora analisa, neste artigo, a oferta da disciplina Estudos de Gênero no Ensino Superior a partir da problemática da instituição, de sua cultura organizacional e como as políticas feministas atuam como fator de mudança nas relações de poder no meio acadêmico. Depois de minuciosa análise, a autora conclui que os Estudos de Gênero são fonte de ino...

This paper discusses work-in-progress on the ESRC-DFID funded research project on Widening Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Scorecard (www.sussex.ac.uk/education/wideningparticipation). This project is examining patterns of inclusion and exclusion in higher education in two African countries with a view...

This article theorises findings from a research project investigating gender equity in Commonwealth higher education. The study interrogated enablers and impediments to gender equity in South Africa, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Tanzania. The focus of inquiry was access, curriculum transformation and staff development. This article examines one a...

This paper reviews some of the literature on women's position in the academic workforce in the UK, and considers an informal study conducted by the author of 12 women academics. A central consideration is the relationship between women's quantitative under-representation in the academy and women academics' self-concept and consciousness of their ow...

This paper is based on a research project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England which investigated employers' needs for information on higher education quality and standards. A key issue was identifying the type of knowledge that employers utilise in graduate recruitment. A finding of the study was that information on quality a...

Knowledge acquisition, processing and transfer are given central importance in today's knowledge economy in the belief that the structure and reproduction of personal capacities require permanent updating of the human commodity workforce. These complex requirements are often encoded in the concept of employability. One consequence of the policy emp...

This chapter raises questions about whether quality assurance has transformative potential in relation to gender in higher education. Quality assurance precipitates change, but it is questionable whether it incorporates an understanding of gender equity. Equity issues are not automatically performance indicators in quality audits in the UK. In taxo...

Gender is a silence in current U.K. higher education policy. Economics, rather than sociology, is the driving disciplinary force in education policy. In a market economy, individuals, rather than social groups, are the unit of analysis. Where structures of inequality are included, such as enhancing the participation of working-class students in hig...

This article is about the subtle and complex ways in which discrimination against women takes place in higher education. A major finding of the Gender Equity in Commonwealth Higher Education Project was the way in which gendered power is relayed via everyday transactions and relationships. Even where there is a sophisticated equity policy context a...

The article is based on recent research involving qualitative case studies of staff experiences of equality policies in six English, Scottish and Welsh higher education institutions (HEIs). Recent changes to UK legislation (e.g. on ‘race’ and disability) and a series of European Union employment directives (including on religion and sexual orientat...

Based on interviews with 18 UK women academics and managers on quality and power in higher education, this article interrogates the impact of quality assurance discourses and practices on women in higher education. Micro‐level analysis of the effects of audit and the evaluative state seem to suggest that hegemonic masculinities and gendered power r...

This paper discusses how the audit culture has impacted on UK academics in terms of professional identities, priorities and social relations. Micropolitics, performativity, psychic economy and the changing political economy of higher education are some of the theoretical tools used to offer some explanatory power for the range of engagements with q...

This article explores emerging themes from the literature on gender and higher education in low-income Commonwealth countries. It attempts to engage with a range of unpublished or ‘grey’ literature and to identify aspects of gender inequality that universally disturb and discomfort. The dominant literature in the field of gender and higher educatio...

This chapter aims to examine the nature of writing on gendered change in the Commonwealth higher education institutions and to outline the theoretical and historical contexts that have framed gendered changes. It considers how certain themes cohere around the mapping of conditions for women's entry and achievement in higher education and attempts t...

This paper asks whether doctoral assessment has escaped the regulation of quality assurance procedures. Raising questions about the affective and micropolitical dimensions of an oral examination conducted in private, it explores how current concerns about quality assurance, standards, benchmarks and performance indicators in higher education apply...

Incl. bibl., index

This article asks whether doctoral assessment has escaped the regulation of quality assurance procedures. It also raises questions about the affective and micropolitical dimensions of an oral examination conducted in private. It explores how current concerns about quality assurance, standards, benchmarks and performance indicators in higher educati...

Both feminism and quality assurance movements have attempted to deconstruct and reconstruct the academy. Both have called for more transparency in procedures, accountability from elite professional groups and the privileging of the student experience. Both are globalized systems calling for transformation. However, it is questionable as to whether...

This article addresses employability as a performance indicator in higher education. Questions are raised about the values behind seemingly neutral indicators of value, and whether the same employability attributes have similar economic and professional values for different social groups. A central argument is that employability is a socially decon...

An essential aspect of school effectiveness theory is the shift from the social to the organisational context, from the macro- to the micro-culture. The school is represented largely as a bounded institution, set apart, but also in a precarious relationship with the broader social context. It is ironic that at a time when social disadvantage appear...

Why, the author asks, despite the women's movement, policy initiatives, the enhanced participation of women in higher education, particularly as students, are women so under-represented in the higher strata of higher education and in the e ´lite professions in general. She seeks the answer to her question in an analysis of micropolitics, particular...

The intellectual beginnings of this book can be found in an autobiographical account of my engagement with feminism and education as a student, a lecturer, school teacher, educational policy-maker and community activist. I taught women’s studies for 11 years and from the moment I entered the academy, I have been attempting to theorise why universit...

A central concern of this study is feminism as change in the academy, and the consequences and challenges for feminist change agents. In this chapter, I examine processes that link macro-changes to micro-consequences by focusing on the dynamic relationship between political and organisational change in higher education in Britain. By so doing I hop...

This chapter consists of feminist readings of equity discourses and the extent to which equity has enabled development of academic feminism. It also questions how policies for equality have impacted on women’s employment and access to the academy. The implementation gap — that is the discrepancy between policy text, intention and practices — is eva...

Conclusions to studies are hard to write, as there are often expectations of concrete recommendations demanding immediate action, authoritative findings and monolithic solutions. This strategy can be dangerous. To denote required changes implies a new kind of rationality, with the risk of hegemonic arrogance about what constitutes progress. In one...

In this chapter, feminist academics apply political understanding to teaching, research and writing in the academy. They consider knowledge production, career development, voluntarism, isolation, networks and feminist research. Academic feminism is problematised particularly in relation to the linkage of the two terms. For many, academic feminism i...

In this chapter I aim to provide a description of my methods and methodologies, while also providing critical analysis of the research process itself, drawing on feminist theory and literature which problematises the issues of power and method (Fonow and Cook, 1991; Gitlin, 1994; Maynard and Purvis, 1994; Stanley and Wise, 1993). I outline some of...

As mentioned in previous chapters, feminists have often chosen to concentrate their efforts on knowledge production and pedagogical interventions, rather than on policy development in the academy. Pedagogy can represent a key message system and entail an alertness to the micropolitics of the classroom. This chapter explores the concepts of power, p...

In chapter 3, organisational cultures were frequently cited as explanations for the failure of equity discourses in the academy. In this chapter, I examine theories of gender and organisation. Informants comment on organisational culture in the academy in terms of atmosphere and ethos, symbolism, networks, coalitions, women in senior positions and...

This paper critically examines the concept of empowerment and considers the contradictory role of feminist teachers and authority in dominant institutions of knowledge production. Questions are raised about the emotional labour required to sustain feminist pedagogy for empowerment in the academy. Issues of student resistance, group dynamics, differ...

In this article, I explore the dynamic relationship between political and organizational change in higher education. Change is interrogated in relation to policies and discourses of New Right reform, mass expansion, new managerialism, equity and post‐modernist theories of power, with questions raised about the interconnection of demographic changes...

Incl. bibliographical references, index, biographical notes on the authors