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.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly influential in society and in education (UNESCO, 2024). Nevertheless, previous research indicates that teacher education still faces significant challenges in developing the professional digital competence (PDC) of both teacher educators and student teachers (Kelentrić, Helland & Arstorp, 2024; Pedersen et al., 2024). A core problem has been the persistent emphasis on instrumental uses of digital technologies, with comparatively limited attention to how such technologies shape society, individual learners, and the processes through which knowledge is acquired (Aagaard et al., 2025). With the rapid emergence of AI layered on top of these developments, there is reason for concern. At present, there is limited knowledge on how teacher education institutions respond at the organisational level to the introduction of AI, and to what extent they integrate AI in meaningful and pedagogically grounded ways (Ceallaigh, T. Ó et al., 2025).

This study seeks to generate deeper insight into how teacher education institutions in Norway address AI as part of their institutional and educational practices. Specifically, we ask: To what extent do institutional measures reflect a shift from an instrumental towards a more critical and society-oriented perspective on digital technologies? To explore this question, we examine how AI is framed, legitimised and operationalised within strategic documents, guidelines, and institutional initiatives, and how these overall regulations, guidelines and general institutional efforts are perceived by the institutional leadership responsible for teacher education. Based on our findings, we also discuss how these findings may relate to broader discussions concerning digital competence, professional knowledge, and epistemic change in the context of emerging technologies.

The study employs a qualitative design combining document analysis with semi-structured interviews. Data will be collected from key actors across five Norwegian teacher education institutions, including deans responsible for teacher education and programme leaders or coordinators. Our analytical approach is grounded in discourse theory, using interpretative repertoires as a sensitizing concept. The material is examined through a reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) that recognizes the situated and interpretive role of the researcher (Byrne, 2022). Through this approach, the project aims to identify similarities and differences in institutional strategies, understandings, and practices related to AI, and to assess the extent to which these reflect varying degrees of institutional digital maturity (Akbarighatar et al., 2023; Begicevic et al., 2021). This way, our study may offer an empirical contribution to understanding how higher education institutions interpret and operationalize AI based on their existing digital capacities. At the conference, we will present and discuss preliminary findings from the study.

Contemporary universities are often framed as caught between democratic renewal and performance regimes organised around measurable impact. Democratic education is invoked as a remedy to the university’s instrumental reduction and democratic fragility, reclaiming its vocation from economistic narrowing. On one side, universities are expected to cultivate critical judgment, participation, and civic responsibility; on the other, they are pressed to demonstrate efficiency and quantifiable outcomes. While this contrast suggests conflict between democratic aspiration and economic rationalisation, under neoliberal governance conditions, it can mask a structural convergence.

Democratic education, while seeking to resist economisation and managerial reduction, can nevertheless articulate its value in outcome-oriented terms. Democratic aspirations may thereby mirror the instrumental grammar they seek to counter, as civic formation is framed through competences and measurable outputs. What appears as a corrective to instrumentalism may thus fold back into it. This slippage is neither inevitable nor inherent to democratic theory; it reflects justificatory environments that draw even critical vocabularies toward outcomes.

This paper argues, through a political-theoretical analysis of governance rationalities, that what appears as a tension between democratic renewal and performance accountability can operate as a dual instrumentalisation of the university. Economic rationalities translate contestable public questions into matters of optimisation and delivery, reformulating political disagreement as a technical problem of management and compliance and narrowing democratic contestation. Less examined is how democratic education discourse, although resisting economisation, can internalise justificatory logics as they become taken-for-granted in higher education. What appears as a choice between economic utility and civic formation often rests on a shared justificatory premise: that education must render its value visible through predefined outputs.

When democratic formation is framed primarily as the production of measurable civic competences, the university risks subordinating learning to specified political ends, politicising and instrumentalising education. The issue is not the democratic aspiration itself, but the justificatory structure through which it is articulated, reshaping the conditions of learning and academic work. This matters because democracy presupposes openness to plurality, judgement, and the emergence of the new, whereas performance regimes presuppose predefined ends. In this way, over-politicisation mirrors economisation: although normatively opposed, they share instrumental orientation. In both cases, democratic life is recast as specified in advance rather than sustained as an open field of judgement and contestation.

These dynamics are intensified by survival pressures. Universities secure legitimacy through demonstrable impact and positioning tied to funding regimes. As value must be rendered visible in advance, specification reshapes how learning is imagined and organised, making the space for indeterminacy—the substrate of academic freedom and critical thinking—harder to defend. What is at stake is how governance conditions reorganise democratic learning: how authority is exercised, how judgement is cultivated, and how participation becomes procedural rather than transformative.

By identifying the under-theorised convergence between economic and democratic outcome rationalities, the paper contributes to scholarly debates on learning for democracy. It suggests that defending university’s democratic mission depends on resisting the reduction of both economic and civic aspirations to deliverable objectives and sustaining conditions for plurality, responsibility, and unforeseeable beginnings.

In European (Herodotou et al., 2020; Vaarma et al., 2024) and Italian (Zingaro et al., 2021; Cannistrà et al., 2022; Delogu et al., 2024) higher education contexts, predictive AI models have been employed in institutional initiatives to identify students at risk of dropout and to inform decision-making. When predictive systems are mobilized within governance processes, they participate in constructing academic risk as an object of knowledge and intervention. Once embedded in institutional routines, this construction extends to redefining responsibility and success, shaping how achievement is measured and how support or sanction is allocated. Predictive systems may orient governance toward early support and redistribution, or become aligned with performance-based accountability and competitive positioning. It is this tension that frames the problem of predictive governance examined in this paper. While predictive systems are often introduced under an ethically grounded rationale of early identification and support, their integration into institutional processes extends beyond benevolent intent. To account for this reconfiguration, the paper conceptualizes predictive governance as a dispositif in which anticipatory knowledge production, accountability regimes, and strategic decision-making intersect. By translating educational trajectories into probabilistic risk categories, predictive systems contribute to defining what is considered measurable, actionable, and institutionally relevant. Drawing on critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 2014; Apple, 2006) and analyses of neoliberal governance in higher education (Ball, 2003; Brown, 2015; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), the analysis situates predictive AI within governance environments characterized by performativity and metric-based evaluation. When predictive metrics are incorporated into funding and assessment regimes, they may influence institutional agendas and research priorities, privileging quantifiable outputs and potentially narrowing the pluralism of knowledge. Predictive governance thus intersects with academic freedom and the democratic mission of the university. To make these dynamics analytically visible, the paper develops a theoretically derived analytical framework from a governance-oriented conception of predictive systems as dispositifs (Foucault, 2008; Ball, 2003; Brown, 2015), within which the epistemological conditions of prediction (Shmueli, 2010; Douglas, 2009) are constitutive of how risk becomes knowable and governable. From this perspective, predictive governance can be decomposed into three interrelated moments: the epistemic production of risk, its institutional mediation, and its political-operational translation into decision-making. The taxonomy specifies the informational regimes, modelling architectures, predictive quality and inferential robustness through which risk is constructed; the interpretative and evaluative mechanisms through which it becomes actionable; and the strategic purposes, governance structures, temporal orientations, uses and claims of generalizability through which it is operationalized. Rather than empirically classifying models, the framework renders explicit the normative assumptions embedded in their design and deployment. Drawing on an empirical experience conducted in an Italian university (Zanellati, Zingaro & Gabbrielli, 2024), the paper uses this case as a reflective context to illustrate how configurations of predictive governance may orient systems either toward preventive and redistributive support or toward classificatory practices that individualize structural vulnerabilities. The central question is therefore not only how to use predictive systems responsibly, but which rationality they reinforce: a performance-optimized organization or a public university committed to critical inquiry, equity, and democratic responsibility.

Taking Italian university presses and institutional service providers as a key analytical lens, the paper uses this field to interrogate the core question of the panel: how, under neoliberal governance, the Italian university system negotiates the challenges to academic freedom, equity, and critical thinking in a context reshaped by the changing ANVUR (Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes) evaluation system.

Drawing on 14 in‑depth interviews with directors and staff of 11 university presses and 3 institutional platforms, the contribution examines self‑representations, organizational and economic models, and future visions in relation to open access, research evaluation, and artificial intelligence.

The main research question is whether—and under which conditions—Italian university presses can still be understood as public infrastructures safeguarding academic freedom, equitable access to knowledge, and critical inquiry, or whether their development trajectories are being progressively realigned with market logics structuring research and scholarly publishing. Around this question, the paper develops three intertwined analytical axes: a) Tensions between ethical–political commitments to open access (often in diamond form) and economic and reputational sustainability within an evaluation regime still strongly oriented to ranked outlets; b) structural constraints—small size, underfunding, and work overload—and attempts to respond through the construction of (national vs. international) infrastructures (UPI—University Press Italiane, FedOAPress—Federico II Open Access Press, and Share—Scholarly Heritage and Access to Research, diamond hubs); c) the ambivalences opened up by generative AI regarding the reuse of open content, the protection of authorship, and the automation of editorial labor.

​Findings show, first, a wide spectrum of positions on open access, ranging from strongly principled diamond models fully supported by universities to more cautious strategies that foreground revenue risks, competition with commercial publishers, and the limited and often incoherent recognition of open access within ANVUR‑driven evaluation and funding tools. Second, they highlight chronically under‑resourced organizations that are pushed towards inter‑university cooperation and shared platforms, while a robust national infrastructure for open publishing—envisaged in policy documents but not yet implemented—remains largely aspirational. Third, interviews depict generative AI as a double-edged development: explored as technical support, yet predominantly perceived as a threat in terms of uncontrolled reuse of content, weak license enforcement, and further opacity of intellectual labor. In this perspective, the everyday editorial practices of Italian university presses emerge as key sites where the question, 'Whose university is it?' ’is played out through the concrete tensions between performance‑driven survival and the ethical mission of academic freedom, equity, and critical inquiry.