Seminar | Neo-liberalisation in Higher Education: a Discourse-analytical Approach
Aula P, Palazzo Wollemborg, Dipartimento SPGI
16.06.2023
Scientific coordinator: Francesca Helm, University of Padua.
Seminar with Prof. Andrea Mayr (Zayed University, UAE).
The event will be held on 16 june 2023, at 10:30 AM at Room P, Palazzo Wollemborg and on line.
In this seminar we discuss the increasing orientation of Higher Education towards a neo-liberal managerial model of universities, which compete for student numbers and places in league tables by ‘selling’ knowledge and education. This is resulting in major institutional and discursive changes manifested most clearly in business-related vocabulary and visuals.
The rhetoric of the market is now so firmly embedded in the discursive repertoire of academic leaders that it informs university policy documents on teaching and learning and influences relations between university management and staff.
In the discursive hegemony of the market, teachers are constructed as self-motivated and ‘enterprising’ individuals, where teaching becomes more aligned with outcomes and tests than with knowledge as an objective in itself.
Education has moved from being related to citizenship and personal development to a model where knowledge becomes a mere commodity for ‘customers’ who must be kept happy (Ledin & Machin,2021).
Looking at several case studies, we will explore the topic through a multimodal discourse-analytical approach (Machin &Mayr, 2023).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Ledin, P. & Machin, D. (2018) Doing Visual Analysis. From Theory to Practice. London: SAGE;
- Machin, D.& Mayr, A. (2023) How to do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. London: SAGE.
Andrea Mayr is Lecturer in Media and Communication at Zayed University, UAE, where she works in the fields of Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodality with a particular interest in (digital) media activism, crime and deviance and ideologies in institutional discourses. Her publications include Language and Power (2008; 2019) and How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction (2023).
