Keynote presentation and dialogues : The importance of the long view : the impact of COVID-19 on research into academic careers and internationally collaborative research
Start Date
14-11-2020 5:30 PM
End Date
14-11-2020 6:30 PM
Description
In this paper I argue for the importance of developing and theorising the historically long processes that generated inequalities, and which preceded COVID and will permeate how higher education research might influence its future, with and after COVID. The perspective presented incorporates a discussion of the value of a materialist concept of aufhebung and insights gained from Smith and Yang’s (2014) collection of papers presenting understandings of how indigenous studies of education can be viewed given a longer historical view. I develop the argument that critical approaches to higher education, that foreground key questions about historical injustices, are necessary if we are to emerge from these times with these priorities in-tact and with theories and methods in the process of being appropriately transformed into theories and actions significant to a future more beneficial to the planet and its inhabitants. The importance of the value of such critical approaches are illustrated through examples from two studies using critical realist lenses, whose extension through COVID-times raises new questions to be pursued: a longitudinal biographical study of early career academics careers extending over 11 years; and, a project focusing on how to generate more socially just knowledge in a research collaboration between the UK and China to develop a context appropriate inclusive educational practises in South West China.
Recommended Citation
Abbas, A. (2020, November). Keynote presentation and dialogues : The importance of the long view : the impact of COVID-19 on research into academic careers and internationally collaborative research. Presented at the Conference for Higher Education Research (CHER) - Hong Kong 2020. Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
Keynote presentation and dialogues : The importance of the long view : the impact of COVID-19 on research into academic careers and internationally collaborative research
In this paper I argue for the importance of developing and theorising the historically long processes that generated inequalities, and which preceded COVID and will permeate how higher education research might influence its future, with and after COVID. The perspective presented incorporates a discussion of the value of a materialist concept of aufhebung and insights gained from Smith and Yang’s (2014) collection of papers presenting understandings of how indigenous studies of education can be viewed given a longer historical view. I develop the argument that critical approaches to higher education, that foreground key questions about historical injustices, are necessary if we are to emerge from these times with these priorities in-tact and with theories and methods in the process of being appropriately transformed into theories and actions significant to a future more beneficial to the planet and its inhabitants. The importance of the value of such critical approaches are illustrated through examples from two studies using critical realist lenses, whose extension through COVID-times raises new questions to be pursued: a longitudinal biographical study of early career academics careers extending over 11 years; and, a project focusing on how to generate more socially just knowledge in a research collaboration between the UK and China to develop a context appropriate inclusive educational practises in South West China.
Speaker
Andrea Abbas
Andrea Abbas is a Professor of the Sociology of Higher Education in the Department of Education at the University of Bath, where she is also Head of Department. Professor Abbas is the Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Education in China and East Asia. She is Link Convenor of the Gender and Education Network of the European Educational Research Association. She is on the Editorial Board of CRiSTaL (Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning). Previously she has worked at the University of Lincoln and the University of Teesside after completing her PhD at Keele University (all UK). Her work has been published widely and has an attracted funding from research councils, charities and policy making bodies.
Professor Abbas is a sociologist of higher education. Her work is concerned with how critical theories, that give insights into how inequalities and injustices are (re)produced, can also be harnessed to lead change in diverse and complex contexts. Her current empirical work focuses on: 1) the role of pedagogy, curriculum and knowledge in the transformation of individual students and universities and how this affects what they can contribute to wider society (drawing upon critical theories of knowledge and the work of Basil Bernstein); 2) a longitudinal study of fourteen early career academics, who have been interviewed three times over a period of ten years and will be reinterviewed in order to study the impacts of COVID (engaging with Margaret Archers critical realism and drawing upon theories of embodiment, emotion and time and space); a project focussing on how socially just and intellectually and credible knowledge around inclusive education for China can be co-created by countries and researchers that embody historical inequalities (drawing upon critical theories of knowledge and critical realism). All this work engages with intersecting inequalities such as, gender, (dis)ability, class, ethnicity and nationality. It is based upon understanding the difficulty of re-shaping deeply embedded historical processes in contemporary contexts.