Higher Education for Good:
criticality, resistance and hope
Catherine Cronin • 6 April 2023
#OER23 #HE4Good
Image: Aaron Burden (Unsplash)
“We” are in this together, but we are not one and the same.
Rosie Braidotti (2020)
via Frances Bell
Image: Barbara Kelly
#HE4Good
A time of crisis
Climate crisis
COVID-19 pandemic
Austerity
Deepening inequalities, multiple and intersecting
Surveillance capitalism
Rising authoritarianism and war
Reasonable expectations of ongoing instability
Multiple challenges & uncertainty within higher education
…
#HE4Good
A time of crisis
Climate crisis
COVID-19 pandemic
Austerity
Deepening inequalities, multiple and intersecting
Surveillance capitalism
Rising authoritarianism and war
Reasonable expectations of ongoing instability
Multiple challenges & uncertainty within higher education
Despair
#HE4Good
What is to be done?
A global call in 2022:
Acknowledge our despair,
Engage in resistance,
Imagine alternative futures,
and
Foster hope and courage
Image: George Sfougaras CC BY-NC-ND
#HE4Good
Responses coalesced into
Higher Education for Good
Image: Peter Clarke
Editors: Laura Czerniewicz & Catherine Cronin
#HE4Good
Responses coalesced into
Higher Education for Good
FIVE SECTIONS:
Image: Peter Clarke
Editors: Laura Czerniewicz & Catherine Cronin
#HE4Good
27 chapters, assorted genres �authors in 18 countries
Jamaica
Kenya
Philippines
Scotland
South Africa
Tanzania
Uganda
UK
USA
Critical reflections
Poetry
Conceptual essays
Speculative fiction
Visual & audio
Dialogue
Graphic reflection
Artwork
Australia
Austria
Brazil
Canada
Germany
Hong Kong
India
Ireland
Italy
Image: Natascha Moeller
#HE4Good
#HE4Good topics & areas of exploration
#HE4Good
manifesto?
#HE4Good
Towards a Manifesto for HE for Good
Photo by Justin Lane (Unsplash)
#HE4Good
1. Name & analyse the troubles of HE
Image: Alex Abrahams
“The negative imprint reveals the form of the positive value.”
Miranda Fricker
“There is great power and great peril in a name.”
Ursula Le Guin
#HE4Good
1. Name & analyse the troubles of HE
Neoliberalism – explicit and implicit
Coloniality – manifested in many ways
Data extraction – via myriad platforms
Multiple forms of inequality & exclusion
Image: Alex Abrahams
#HE4Good
Image: Mildegard
“There's really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
Arundhati Roy
2. Challenge assumptions and resist hegemonies
#HE4Good
Re-centering – bringing in voices and views from the margins
Crossing borders – e.g. geographic, disciplinary, status, genre
Challenging dominant narratives – e.g. knowledge, tech, economic, cultural
Image: Mildegard
2. Challenge assumptions and resist hegemonies
#HE4Good
“And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us … We seek harm to none and harmony for all.”
Amanda Gorman (2021)
Image: Hartmut Josi Bennöhr CC BY-SA (Wikimedia)
3. Make claims for just, humane & globally sustainable HE
#HE4Good
Claim and grow theories for good
Make explicit claims for just, humane and sustainable HE, present and future
Image: Hartmut Josi Bennöhr CC BY-SA (Wikimedia)
3. Make claims for just, humane & globally sustainable HE
#HE4Good
Image: Pavel Sivko CC BY-SA (Wikimedia)
4. Courageously imagine and share fresh possibilities
“Only by shifting our imagination, can we begin to think of a world that is more egalitarian, less extractive, and more habitable for everyone not just a small elite.”
Ruha Benjamin
#HE4Good
The power and value of imagination
Speculative methods, formats and approaches
Imagine (and connect) local and universal
Image: Pavel Sivko CC BY-SA (Wikimedia)
4. Courageously imagine and share fresh possibilities
#HE4Good
Image: Sirma Krusteva (Unsplash)
“…we are at a juncture which our complexity scientists would characterise as a situation of bifurcation. Minimal movements in one or other direction may produce major and irreversible changes. Such is the magnitude of our responsibility.”
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2012)
5. Make positive changes, here and now
#HE4Good
Repairing the past
Streams become rivers
Change as contagious
Communality and coalitions
Image: Sirma Krusteva (Unsplash)
5. Make positive changes, here and now
#HE4Good
“it is in the many acts,�small and large, �acting in constellations
and collectivities, �over time and place �that bear results.”
Farhana Sultana (2022)
5. Make positive changes, here and now
Image: Sirma Krusteva (Unsplash)
#HE4Good
Multiple reflections on hope
Hope as balm
Hope as antidote
Hope as continual
Image: ambi_one (Unsplash)
“Hope is invented every day.”
James Baldwin
#HE4Good
Continual conclusions & beginnings
If my students and I build anything at all
we must build imaginations
If my students and I build
a city of care
a province of justice
a nation of acceptance
We are never done
and always beginning
Sherri Spelic (2023)
Higher Education for Good
Image: ambi_one (Unsplash)
#HE4Good
This presentation is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
unless otherwise noted
Higher Education for Good:
Teaching & Learning Futures
Eds.
Laura Czerniewicz & Catherine Cronin
#HE4Good
bit.ly/HE4Good_updates
Image: Aaron Burden (Unsplash)