Preamble: Singers gathering on stage. This is a paper for three voices. An attempt at a philosophic experience in the symphonic form. The first voice carries the tune and holds the shape of the paper as it focuses on Baudrillard and proposes that public education in Canada today is in fact a simulacra. The second voice has more room to roam,…

With increasing influence of illiberalism, freedom should not be considered or interpreted lightly. Post-truth contexts provide grounds for alt-right movements to capture and pervert notions of freedom of speech, making universities battlefields of politicised emotions and expressions (Peters et al., 2019). In societies facing these pressures…

The sudden, unexpected breakthrough in the intelligence shown by machines, as a wished for, but very disruptive element, will shape the future of our civilisation and Humans as individuals and collectives. The extreme drive towards commercialisation of newest developments already led to an extremely wide spread of Machine Intelligence Assistants…

This article explores how the ideologies of neoliberal linguistic entrepreneurship have created ethical tensions and contentious affects among Indigenous communities in promoting multilingualism and multilingual education. Taking the case of Nepal, our goal is to show how imperatives and characteristics that are articulated as key parts of…

"The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy" was published in 2016 to critical acclaim. Rejecting outright the marketisation of the modern university, the book proposed a countercultural approach which denounced the seductive imperatives to overwork and competition and called on academics to make a more…

This article explores students' acquisition of cosmopolitanism through transnational education (TNE). It adopts a critical approach to educational cosmopolitanism, distinguishing 'ways of being' at the dispositional level and 'ways of doing' at the practice level, to unfold the contingency and multiplicity of cosmopolitanism as well as the…

While the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold around the world, one of its most immediate effects -- beyond significant loss of life and livelihood -- has been the exposure of existing weaknesses in various sectors and systems. This is especially evident in higher education, with its growing overreliance on the…

This article provides a critical and theoretical exploration into teacher performance dispositions (orientations towards performance). The article explores research literature on dispositions, highlighting the representation of teachers in education policy and standards documents across several nations of the OECD: Australia, the USA and the UK.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore data from the University and College Union (UCU) Further Education in England--Transforming Lives and Communities research project and through this the paper develops a distinctive, theorised conceptualisation of transformative teaching and learning (TTL). Design/methodology/approach: The research…

Mass media's educative function has had a considerable influence in Kenya since the colonial period. The impact of mass media in shaping the contemporary worldviews--how people see and live in the world--has led to the transformation in the society. The influence of mass media especially in reinforcing commodification and economic rationalism…

The exponential growth of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in recent years has resulted in a marketisation and commodification of practice--popularly labeled "McMindfulness"--which divorces mindfulness from its spiritual and ethical origins in Buddhist traditions. Such commodification is criticized by utilising ideas and insights…

Care has received relatively little attention in higher education (HE) literature. However, literature alluding to care reveals contrasting perspectives. Some scholars diminish care concerns as a product of the marketised university, where students-as-consumers insist on 'safe' teaching and the avoidance of 'troublesome knowledge'. Others position…

This paper outlines clear signs of market-led instrumentalisation for HE cultures in Britain, before critiquing the "ontological turn" in HE theory and its intrinsic political abdication from those signs. It focuses on a paper by Ronald Barnett to both diagnose the problem, which is a "precarité" that is ghosted in his work,…

This article proposes a novel theorisation of higher education classroom spaces by bringing Arendt's concept of the space of appearance into relation with Guillemin and Gillam's notion of ethically important moments. The main arguments are first, that a focus on ethically important moments within the higher education space of appearance enables a…

This article demonstrates how a teaching case study approach can benefit museum studies courses. It takes as its focus the widely reported rescue of a boys' football team from a flooded cave in Thailand (2018). The success of this multinational effort led to immediate calls for the establishment of a "living museum" dedicated to…