The UK Higher Education sector has been beleaguered by new reforms and organisational interventions that shift the university from a publicly managed institution to a corporate management framework. This manifests through the proliferation of increased bureaucracy, monitoring and evaluation methods as a container for research, rampant casualisation, budget cuts, austerity policies, increase in student enrolment and tuition fees, for example. In effect, this undermines the public mission of Higher Educating by situating the goal of knowledge production into the narrow confines of what can be measured in immediate notions of impact and economic comprehension. Further, previous autonomous models of university governance are increasingly outsourced to corporate and risk consultants and managerialists. This has profound implications for the potential of creative knowledge production and innovation as it reduces the scope of the research imagination to economic terms.

Using the key tenants of the UCU strikes, including, casualisation, austerity, pension cuts, and increasing student numbers, this project will interrogate how new managerial reforms and regulations are reshaping knowledge production and dissemination practices. In particular, it asks how the meaning of publicness is changing under increasing conditions of precarity, scarcity and the corporatisation of the search for new knowledge.