Max Weber seminar

Thinking the present with Max Weber: The University, the Scholar and the Student
Organised by the Max Weber Study Group of the BSA. Supported by the University of Salford & UCU Salford

   7 December 2012, Clifford Whitworth Conference Room, University of Salford (Manchester)

A one-day seminar on the situation of the university, part of a seminar series devoted to thinking our current predicament. With the participation of very prominent scholars from home and abroad, this seminar will reflect on the current state of the university and its attendant practices:  what is the meaning of scholarly work and teaching when the scholar is faced by a series of sometimes contradictory conditions and imperatives: output targets in research, ‘the student experience’ in teaching coupled with compulsory debt-financing (huge fees) for students, the tension between instrumentalism and knowledge for its own sake, between a public and a market-driven university ethos, between a collegial institution and a hierarchical organisation.  What is the meaning of the new regime under which universities are put to work, with its ‘quality’ indicators and debt-incurring devices, in terms of the pedagogy practised, the kinds of reason relied on, as well as the type of human being presupposed by such regime and resulting from its implementation? More generally, what kind of scholar, what kind of student, what type of human being, is being produced by these practices?

Contact: Carlos Frade, University of Salford, c.frade@salford.ac.uk
Seminar programme available at http://www.britsoc.co.uk/media/45780/Thinking_the_present_with_Max_Weber_wkshp_1.pdf