Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University

Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University PDF Author: Kronstad Felde
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 1928502288
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University is set against the backdrop of the spread of neoliberal ideas and reforms since the 1980s. While accepting that these ideas are rooted in a longer history, the authors reveal how neoliberalism has transformed the university sector and the academic profession. In particular, they focus on how understandings of what knowledge is relevant, and how this is decided, have changed. Taken as a whole, reforms have sought to reorient universities and academics towards economic development in various ways. Shifts in how institutions and academics achieve recognition and status, combined with the flow of public funds away from the universities and the increasing privatisation of educational services, are steadily downgrading the value of public higher education. As research universities adopt user- and market-oriented operating models, and prioritise the demands of the corporate sector in their research agendas, the sale of intellectual property is increasingly becoming a primary criterion for determining the relevance of academic knowledge. All these changes have largely succeeded in transforming the discourse around the role of the academic profession in society. In this context, Makerere University in Uganda has been lauded as having successfully achieved transformation. However, far from highlighting the allegedly positive outcomes of this reform, this book provides worrying insights into the dissolution of Ugandas academic culture. Drawing on interviews with over ninety academics at Makerere University, from deans to doctoral students, the authors provide first-hand accounts of the pressures and problems the reforms have created. Disempowered, overworked and under-resourced, many academics are forced to take on consultancy work to make ends meet. The evidence presented here stands in stark in contrast to the successes claimed by the university. However, as the authors also show, local resistance to the neoliberal model is rising, as academics begin to collaborate to regain control over what knowledge is considered relevant, and wrestle with deepening democracy. The authors careful expos of how neoliberalism devalues academic knowledge, and the urgency of countering this trend, makes Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University highly relevant for anyone working in higher education or involved in shaping policy for this sector.

Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University

Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University PDF Author: Kronstad Felde
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 1928502288
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University is set against the backdrop of the spread of neoliberal ideas and reforms since the 1980s. While accepting that these ideas are rooted in a longer history, the authors reveal how neoliberalism has transformed the university sector and the academic profession. In particular, they focus on how understandings of what knowledge is relevant, and how this is decided, have changed. Taken as a whole, reforms have sought to reorient universities and academics towards economic development in various ways. Shifts in how institutions and academics achieve recognition and status, combined with the flow of public funds away from the universities and the increasing privatisation of educational services, are steadily downgrading the value of public higher education. As research universities adopt user- and market-oriented operating models, and prioritise the demands of the corporate sector in their research agendas, the sale of intellectual property is increasingly becoming a primary criterion for determining the relevance of academic knowledge. All these changes have largely succeeded in transforming the discourse around the role of the academic profession in society. In this context, Makerere University in Uganda has been lauded as having successfully achieved transformation. However, far from highlighting the allegedly positive outcomes of this reform, this book provides worrying insights into the dissolution of Ugandas academic culture. Drawing on interviews with over ninety academics at Makerere University, from deans to doctoral students, the authors provide first-hand accounts of the pressures and problems the reforms have created. Disempowered, overworked and under-resourced, many academics are forced to take on consultancy work to make ends meet. The evidence presented here stands in stark in contrast to the successes claimed by the university. However, as the authors also show, local resistance to the neoliberal model is rising, as academics begin to collaborate to regain control over what knowledge is considered relevant, and wrestle with deepening democracy. The authors careful expos of how neoliberalism devalues academic knowledge, and the urgency of countering this trend, makes Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University highly relevant for anyone working in higher education or involved in shaping policy for this sector.

Discourse and Democracy

Discourse and Democracy PDF Author: Michael Farrelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317694988
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
In this new study, Farrelly gives a critical examination of democracy as it is conceived and practiced in contemporary advanced liberal nations. The received wisdom on democracy is probelmatized through a close analysis of discourse in combination with critical theories of democracy and of the State. The central theme of the book is the paradox of pervasive reference to democracy as a legitimation of political action by liberal governments versus the converse weakening of actual democratic practice within the liberal world. Farrelly builds on the work of Fairclough and others to examine this paradox, developing a new critical concept of "democratism" as an ideology that undermines the possibility of a more genuine democracy through political actors who oversimplify the idea of democracy. The book includes critical analyses of key political texts taken from presidential and prime ministerial speeches from the US and UK that attach democracy to non-democratic practices.

Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship

Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship PDF Author: Sam Popowich
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781634000871
Category : Libraries
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Taking a broadly Marxist approach, Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship traces the connections between library history and the larger history of capitalist development.

Disciplining Democracy

Disciplining Democracy PDF Author: Rita Abrahamsen
Publisher: Zed Books
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Examines contemporary development theory and discourse and explores its relationship to processes of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa. Focuses on the emergence and implementation of the good governance discourse. Draws on examples from four countries to demonstrate the impact of structural adjustment on economic and social conditions and describes the activities of democracy movements opposed to adjustment programmes. Concludes that the good governance agenda has been largely unsuccessful in promoting stable multi-party democracies in Africa.

Discourses on Livy

Discourses on Livy PDF Author: Niccolò Machiavelli
Publisher: e-artnow
ISBN: 8026885007
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Machiavelli saw history in general as a way to learn useful lessons from the past for the present, and also as a type of analysis which could be built upon, as long as each generation did not forget the works of the past. In "Discourses on Livy" Machiavelli discusses what can be learned from roman period and many other eras as well, including the politics of his lifetime. This is a work of political history and philosophy written in the early 16th. The title identifies the work's subject as the first ten books of Livy's Ab urbe condita, which relate the expansion of Rome through the end of the Third Samnite War in 293 BC. Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) was an Italian diplomat, politician, historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer. He has often been called the father of modern political science. He was for many years a senior official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He served as a secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power.He wrote his most well-known work The Prince in 1513, having been exiled from city affairs.

Shaping Abortion Discourse

Shaping Abortion Discourse PDF Author: Myra Marx Ferree
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521793841
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This book compares the political process and role of the media using controversy over abortion.

Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation

Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation PDF Author: Guido Pincione
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521862698
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive and sustained critique of theories of deliberative democracy.

Western Europe’s Democratic Age

Western Europe’s Democratic Age PDF Author: Martin Conway
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691204594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe's Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe's postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.

Digital Democracy

Digital Democracy PDF Author: Barry N. Hague
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415197373
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The final section discusses ICTs and the citizen with chapters covering democracies online, strengthening communities in the information age and the community network. This book provides a source for those studying social policy, politics and sociology as well as for policy analysts, social scientists and computer scientists.

The Politics of Sincerity

The Politics of Sincerity PDF Author: Elizabeth Markovits
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271046112
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A growing frustration with “spin doctors,” doublespeak, and outright lying by public officials has resulted in a deep public cynicism regarding politics today. It has also led many voters to seek out politicians who engage in “straight talk,” out of a hope that sincerity signifies a dedication to the truth. While this is an understandable reaction to the degradation of public discourse inflicted by political hype, Elizabeth Markovits argues that the search for sincerity in the public arena actually constitutes a dangerous distraction from more important concerns, including factual truth and the ethical import of political statements. Her argument takes her back to an examination of the Greek notion of parrhesia (frank speech), and she draws from her study of the Platonic dialogues a nuanced understanding of this ancient analogue of “straight talk.” She shows Plato to have an appreciation for rhetoric rather than a desire to purge it from public life, providing insights into the ways it can contribute to a fruitful form of deliberative democracy today.