Conference Program

In recent decades, higher education institutions worldwide have been increasingly reshaped by neoliberal governance frameworks that emphasize market competitiveness, performance indicators, and managerial efficiency. Universities are now expected to function as quasi-corporate organizations, aligning their educational and research missions with global rankings, employability metrics, and short-term economic returns. This transformation raises fundamental questions about whose knowledge is legitimized, whose voices are marginalized, and ultimately, whose university it has become.

This paper critically examines the impact of neoliberal governance on academic freedom, equity, and critical thinking, drawing on sociological perspectives from education, healthcare, and welfare studies. Focusing on the tension between institutional survival and ethical responsibility, it explores how performance-based funding systems and data-driven managerial practices shape research agendas, teaching priorities, and access to higher education. In doing so, the paper emphasizes the importance of field-based and practice-oriented research that cannot be adequately captured by abstract performance indicators alone.

Particular attention is paid to collaborative research practices conducted with patient associations and healthcare professionals. Through these collaborations, research questions are co-constructed with participants based on lived experience, clinical practice, and community needs. Such forms of knowledge production illustrate how experiential, participatory, and community-based knowledges are generated in situ, yet are systematically undervalued within dominant evaluative frameworks shaped by neoliberal rationalities.

Using qualitative insights from academic practices and policy discourses in Japan, this paper argues that neoliberal governance not only restructures institutional arrangements but also subtly governs academic subjectivities. Faculty members are increasingly positioned as entrepreneurial actors responsible for securing funding and measurable outputs, while students are framed as consumers investing in their own human capital. These logics risk narrowing the intellectual space necessary for sustained engagement with fieldwork, relational research, and critical inquiry grounded in social realities.

At the same time, the paper highlights emerging forms of resistance and possibility. By foregrounding equity-oriented pedagogies, participatory knowledge production, and post-Western sociological perspectives—particularly those rooted in collaboration with patient groups and healthcare practitioners—universities can reclaim their role as public institutions committed to social inclusion, epistemic diversity, and democratic responsibility. The paper concludes by arguing that defending academic freedom today requires not only institutional autonomy but also an explicit ethical commitment to valuing field-based knowledge, collaborative research, and socially grounded forms of critical thought.