Wesley Shumar, Professor of Anthropology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

How can universities learn from craft breweries?

Neoliberal approaches fragment the curriculum and assess the transmission of knowledge and skills at the university. At the same time, the advanced economy wants creative people with visions of a world that values more than the bottom line. An interesting development out of this dialectical contradiction is the craft economy.

Craft producers and consumers bring markets into being, whilst blurring the line between business and pleasure and embracing values beyond but not excluding the bottom line.

Could this more progressive view of entrepreneurship play an important role in the revitalization of higher education, moving it to support the development of the individual and the community?

Rebecca Lund, UNIKE postdoctoral fellow, DPU

Constructing the ideal academic: gendered practices of boasting in the neoliberal university

Universities are pressed by the OECD and EU to become ‘enterprising institutions’. This involves changes to academic cultures, characterized by the transfer of managerial practices and accounting logics.

In this seminar I unpack the social construction of “the ideal academic” in the context of such higher education reforms over the past two decades.

Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study of a Finnish University at the forefront of the ‘enterprise’ movement, I illustrate how this ideal is enacted in specific local settings through gendered (and classed) practices of boasting.

I show how an academic culture of boasting increasingly polarises those who succeed and those who fail to meet the new quality standards.

The seminar is free and open for all.