Omar Kaissi* Across Northern and Southern academia, the problem of the future of academic freedom is gaining unprecedented traction. Tensions arise as higher education scholarly communities – in the words of Becher and Trowler (2001), the Academic Tribes and Territories of the ‘ivory tower’ – tear at each other’s throats over all sorts of imaginably […]

Xiaolan Jiang* Since the Chinese government announced the policy of higher education expansion in 1999, the unprecedented rapid expansion has made China’s higher education develop by leaps and bounds from elite to mass higher education, and the total number of students in higher education ranks first in the world now. China’s higher education is largely […]

Xiaomei Sun* For more than a decade, focus on student engagement has been ubiquitous in higher education (HE) research, practice, and policy making, as it is regarded as an important factor in student attendance and retention rates of HE institutions. Compared with student engagement, student voice places more emphasis on student agency, stressing the active […]

Gale Macleod*   What one item represents higher education to you? This deceptively simple question is one the members of the Higher Education Research Group at the University of Edinburgh have been considering recently. In June we hosted an event where invited speakers shared their suggestions, and argued for the inclusion of their ‘object’ in […]