Coffin Boffin: Seven of the More Unusual Areas of University Research. BBC (original) (raw)

University research comes in many shapes

We discuss how society pressures and demands are reshaping university research across the globe. (This is a chapter in the book: University Priorities and Constraints (2016), Publisher: Economica (Paris), Editors: Luc E. Weber, James J. Durdestadt)

Universities as Engines of Anticipation

2018

This chapter explores the historical orientation of universities to the future, arguing that Western research universities are characterized by four distinctive orientations to the future: stewardship (the preservation and care for knowledge ,ways of being and diversity), experimentation and discovery (the use of experiment to produce new knowledge about and new realities within the world),modelling (the exploration of alternative potential future worlds through mathematical and imaginative means), and critique (the critical analysis of claims to the future, both internal and external). These orientations to the future have the potential to provide a powerful anticipatory resource for society. Historically, however, they have been allied to colonial and state-building projects, and today they risk capture by commercial interests. In the contemporary university, these future orientations are still present, distributed across disciplines. Three problems prevent their being harnessed as a powerful societal resource: the difficulties of building interdisciplinary collaborations within contemporary universities, the confusion over accountability and in whose service these resources should be used, and the tension over the forms of personhood that universities should be developing and for what ends. The chapter goes on to explore, through a study of over 300 collaborative projects, whether an emerging form of research practice – researching in public, through participatory and collaborative traditions – might offer a means of addressing these difficulties and opening up new opportunities for dialogue between the practices of stewardship, discovery, critique, and modelling within the university.

Introduction: academic research and researchers

The aim of this book is to bring together scholarly work that has investigated, empirically and theoretically, the position of research as a phenomenon in higher education. We aim to reflect contemporary debates and issues with regard to academic research and to illustrate a range of theoretical approaches to understanding it. This book highlights challenges and contradictions arising from investigations into different facets of research in universities, and from explorations into how academics negotiate ways through complex and often competing agendas.

New rules of research? – Report from the post-modern university

Proceedings of Pragmatic Constructivism, 2019

When the university Marxists in the 1970s wanted to have ‘research for the people’ as an alternative to research for research (art for art’s sake), they could hardly imagine that this claim would, in the future, be changed to ‘research for profit’. This change from ‘research’ to ‘research for profit’ has had severe consequences for the research community, for the universities and, most importantly, for research in general – for the research process and for the criteria for legitimising and evaluating what is, or is not, good research. In this paper I investigate the present conditions for conducting university research through a case study of external partners buying research at the university – ‘The Beef Report’. I do this through investigating different conceptions of science and research – romantic, modern and postmodern – in arguing that today’s university is a post-modern university (Lyotard, 1979), and that this post-modern university poses very significant new problems for bo...

Prioritising higher education: Why research is all that matters

South African Journal of Higher Education, 2018

Birthdays are joyfully relative events, which, at times, become more about reflection, and at times, regret, with each passing year. As Stellenbosch University embarks on its 100th year, celebrations and commemorations have adopted tentative nuances and burdens of heavily-laden legacies of wrongs and ills, which stand to be corrected. Much has been said, and rightly so, of assuming responsibility for questionable roles in highly divisive and harmful practices. In turn, much is envisaged for future actions of remedy and redress – particularly in relation to social responsibility and community interaction. In considering the role and responsibility of a university, many would agree that if the core of higher education is its epistemological contribution, then its impact is determined by its social worth. In this sense, any teaching and learning should not only be cognisant of its social context, but teaching and learning should always be both responsible and responsive to the world which it encounters. Yet, a university’s responsibilities can, and should never be at the expense, or risk of research. As will be discussed in this article, prioritising higher education means prefacing, and giving precedence to research. Prioritising higher education through research creates the spaces necessary for a philosophy of dialogue. Moreover, research is indispensable to meaningful teaching and learning. Put differently, it is with research that a university sustains and advances its intellectual, social and ethical project into the realm of the public. And, this implies a renewed look at the university with an ecological parlance of inquiry that accounts for the university on the basis of assemblages, engagements, reflections and sightings – whether smooth and or striated.