INTERNATIONAL

FACULTY PRESENT AT EAIR IN BUDAPEST

Karen Webber gave two presentations at the 40th annual European Higher Education Society (EAIR) conference in Budapest, Hungary on August 26-29, 2019. She co-authored one paper with two IHE alumni Chris Ferland (PhD 2010) and Charles Mathies (PhD 2010) on best practices for data presentations and practical recommendations to prevent data misuse for a range of higher education researchers. Her second paper, co-authored with colleagues from South Africa and the U.K., provided a comparative review of professional development activities of major institutional research associations. 

Sheila Slaughter presented a keynote address at EAIR titled, “Current Constraints on Academic Freedom: Marketization and Nationalism.” She explored the fate of academic freedom at a time when all knowledge has been politicized.

International Experts Compare Systems of Higher Education

Three international scholars provided comparative overviews of the relationship between the federal governments and individual provinces of Canada and Lander in Germany at the Institute on January 17. 

Deanna Rexe, Martin Maltais, and Jens Jungblut presented an open guest lecture to Erik Ness’s State Systems of Higher Education course. 

Rexe and Maltais discussed the growth of vocational and career colleges in Canada among other emerging trends in the Canadian post-secondary environment, particularly in Quebec Province. Jungblut spoke to the implications of the shifting power relationship in Germany between the federal and Lander governments on higher education policy and finance over the past seventy years. 

Deanna Rexe is vice-president of academic affairs at Assiniboine Community College and adjunct professor and affiliated scholar of Simon Fraser University. Martin Maltais is deputy cabinet director for higher education at the Quebec Ministry of Education. Jens Jungblut is associate professor for public policy/public administration at the University of Oslo.

Stich Addresses Bourdieu Study Group Conference

Amy Stich delivered a keynote address at the British Sociological Association’s International Bourdieu Study Group Conference on September 27, 2019 at Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, England.

Her talk, The Global Reach of Capital’s Long Shadow: Reproducing Inequality across Contexts, focused on the ways in which Pierre Bourdieu’s major “thinking tools” can help us better understand how higher education perpetuates social inequities within and outside of the United States.

Stich is a co-convener of the Study Group, which meets semi-annually to explore the place of Pierre Bourdieu and his theories within different national and international contexts, bringing together a range of perspectives from different geographical locations. The spring 2020 meeting in Spain, where Stich was presenting another paper, was canceled.