Introduction: Time and Space in the Neoliberal University

Abstract

Time and Space in the Neoliberal University offers new interdisciplinary analyses of borders, boundaries, blockages and im/mobilities in higher education, and how these might be identified, inhabited, resisted, and re-worked. The collection is concerned with the future of higher education, and what alternative academic futures can be claimed amidst inequalities across time and space, and stratification according to intersecting inequality regimes. The collection emerges in a neoliberal, entrepreneurial, and ‘post’-colonial educational context where the future of higher education is uncertain. Higher education institutions are increasingly concerned with ‘internationalization’, ‘diversity’, and ‘widening access and participation’, yet the sector remains stratified by and complicit in entrenched inequalities of access and outcomes among students and staff, with boundaries of who does and does not belong continually drawn, enacted, contested, and redrawn in the spatial and temporal locations of higher education.