Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER)
University of Sussex, UK http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer

• Financialization = research an object of surveillance.
• Technicization of knowledge?
• Clumsy articulation of aspects of social attitudes to which politicians find it expedient to appeal
(Collini, 2012).
• Expository tactic/ social transparency
• Idealised abstraction/Clearing discursive debris
• Turning research into a contract model
(Holmwood, 2014).
• Neo-liberal capitalism transferring research into an opportunity for consumerism.
• Rectilinear accounts of cause/ effect
• Management by Numbers/ Making individuals calculable
(Cooke, 2013).
• Bourdieu’s concept of illusio – the investment in the game
(Colley, 2013).
• Academics affectively orientated to participate in self-frustrating and punitive research funding regimes.

• Gendered monopoly of the research economy
• 4 out of 5 professors in Europe = men
(Husu, 2014).
• UK 2008 RAE = men 40% more likely than women to be entered.
Women less likely to be:
 Journal editors/ cited in top-rated academic journals
(Wilson, 2012).
 Principal investigators
 Represented on research boards/peer review structures allocating funding
(EC, 2011).
 Awarded fewer research prizes
(Nikiforova, 2011)
 Keynote speakers at prestigious academic conferences
(Schroeder et al., 2013).

• Knowledge capitalism generating/reinforcing inequalities and social hierarchies.
• Research/researcher identities = constructed/reinforced via the optics and apparatus of neo-liberalism.
• What is valued in research and scholarship = shaped by market demands.
• Lower UK success rates for curiosity-driven funding
(Else, 2014).
• Feminist research = credibility deficit?
• Counter-hegemonic research= unfundable/ unknowable?
(Butler, 2006).

• Centre for Higher
Education and Equity
Research (CHEER) http://www.sussex.ac.uk/e ducation/cheer
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