Conference Agenda

The question of uncertain and open future has been characterized the government of modern societies. Attempts to secure valued life from unhoped futures and steer human action towards desired ones has been called anticipation (Adams, Murphy & Clarke 2009; Anderson 2010; Robertson 2022). In politics, anticipatory action tend to articulate a horizon of expectations based on hypothetical possibilities that might include calculation of risks, forecasting and narration of alternative futures (Adams et al. 2009; Anderson 2010; Robertson 2022). In this research, I explore how anticipation of educational futures works through articulation of ideological fantasies.

Despite seemingly vast possibilities of a contingent future, certain discourses and ideas have kept a strong hold in education policies – they have been sticky (Ahmed 2004). In political economy of higher education anticipatory political futures have been largely relied on the sociotechnic imaginaries of knowledge-based economy (KBE), promoted by international organizations such as OECD and European Union (Robertson 2005; Hunter 2013). Despite of several critiques (e.g. Lauder et. al. 2012; Jessop 2017) the discourses of knowledge economy have remained hegemonic in international (Hunter, 2013; Robertson 2022) and Finnish national (Poutanen et al. 2022) policy actors’ agenda. What could explain the stickiness of economic social imaginaries? How to approach the appeal and longetivity of capitalist order, or in this case, the force of knowledge-based economy in reproduction of higher education policy?

As many theorists have pointed, the construction of desiring subject is essential for the ethos or the spirit of capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005; MacGowan 2016). However, research related to governance of futures or political economy of higher education is usually focused on the socio-semiotic analysis. While policy scholars have increasingly called attention to the affective elements of policies and how we are moved by them (e.g. Zembylas 2020; Lähdesmäki et al 2020; Sellar & Zipin 2019), the role of desire and inertia of social order have remained less explored in policy studies (Anderson & Holloway 2020; however Clarke 2019; Saari 2021).

I follow political theorists who have approached the inertia of social and political phenomena and stressed the meaning of desire and mobilisation of passions, affects and emotions in political articulation and justification (Mouffe, 1993; Laclau 2004). From this perspective, the construction of effective economic and national imaginaries requires construction of ideological fantasy frames (Stavrakakis 2007; Glynos 2011) that arouse emotions, mobilise individual and collective passions, and call for action. In other words, anticipatory fantasy tries to get a grip of subjects’ desire and usher one further into identification with the objects it has emphasised (Glynos 2001; Stavrakakis 2007).

In this research I provide an empirical case study of anticipatory policy rhetoric. I will focus on the Finnish higher education policy reform 2017–2019 called “Vision development 2030” by Sipilä Government. The research questions are following:

1. What kind of ideological fantasies were constructed during policy-making of vision development 2017–2019?
2. In which ways the depicted fantasies aim to engage with subject’s desire?
3. What role do fantasies play in the policy-making practices?

What makes this case interesting is the concurrent rhetoric of austerity-ridden politics and anticipatory ideological fantasy: while the one hand advanced major economic cuts in higher education sector (which lead to redundancies of employment), the other depicted beatific illustrations of significant growth of resources of higher education sector and harmonious working life in its’ institutions. Thus political rhetoric of double binding – semiotic and affective play of crisis and salvation, austerity and prosperity, horrific and beatific fantasy– is noticeably evident. As such, Sipilä Government’s vision development provides intriquing case study of a construction of collective imaginary of the educational future.

This paper applies multi-level approach to analyze the role of higher education systems in socio-economic development with a focus on post-Soviet countries and with a special emphasis on the potential for transformative impact on HEI on societal development through the formation of students agency (various types of students entrepreneurship and project-based activities, action-research, voluntarism etc.). We analyze supra-national initiatives, national policies, leading universities’ practices, and the actual characteristics of selected education programs in these universities.

We aim to reveal principally new models of policy-making that are being launched aimed at more direct impact on national socio-economic development through students agency. This shift reflects the novel global and national realities, which imply critical insufficiency of the contribution by higher education systems to socio-economic development - a problem also discussed as “global productivity paradox” but having strong national specificity.

New institutionalism theory provides the conceptual grounds for the paper, It suggests that, to some extent, all post-soviet countries (even the least democratic and open from the point of view of the objective quality of institutional environment) may promote transformative impact of education, including higher education, on the national policy level (Meyer, 2010). This can happen not only because of the presumed efficiency of mass individual agency in these contexts, but also as a response to the globally transmitted “progressive” cultural patterns associated with “World society” (meyer, 2010). to be more precise, new institutionalist argument is that education promotes being proactive, innovative, entrepreneurial as a morally positive phenomenon (linked to the broader themes like “progress”). As shown in literature, the collapse of the USSR was one of the major factors in shaping the culturally legitimate global “World society” with Eastern Europe joining the West in celebrating democracy and capitalism, which stimulated education expansion (Schofer & Meyer, 2005). From this perspective, one may expect that national policies as well as formal conditions in the leading universities and characteristics of the educational programs devoted to development of individual agency (for instance, in the form of entrepreneurship training) will be to a certain degree similar in all the post-soviet countries. however, the actual practices in concrete universities and programs may vary significantly, not always reflecting the “global standard” in the same way, though referring to the latter in explicit or latent forms.

In the last decade, an upsurge in new nationalisms and geopolitical shifts has amplified Eurosceptic sentiment and challenged the values of European integration. These transformations within the political sphere in which universities operate exert growing pressure on the openness of higher education and research. The (re)nationalization of higher education and politicization of research increasingly influence university politics, including autonomy and governance, academic freedom, open science and international engagement. Universities find themselves entangled in contrasting visions of Europe: between a vision of deeper political integration and openness and one where European nation-states (re)gain power as the locus of political sovereignty or where protectionist regionalism and security politics challenge open exchange with communities outside the EU.

When researching European higher education, the Maastricht Treaty can be seen as an ideological turning point (Mudde, 2007). By launching the European Single Market, the Treaty tightened the European integration process: a process that in many ways conditioned the development of European universities in subsequent decades. On the one hand, the Treaty prompted extensive higher education reforms, leading to the establishment of the European Higher Education Area in 2010, rooted in the need for mutual recognition of diplomas and certificates to support the free movement of persons and services. On the other hand, the Treaty became a breeding ground for new nationalisms opposing the European integration project and its strengthening of federal Europe (Brøgger, 2022). While the domain of higher education was not immune to this opposition, research into European higher education has centred on the sector’s extensive Europeanization and globalization, in part to remedy years of methodological nationalism in education research, and lack of attention to the politics of scale (Brøgger, 2019; Dale, 2009; Huisman, 2009; Lawn & Grek, 2012). The conceptions of scale – the global, the European, the regional, and the national – are often taken for granted. However, they are not merely pre-existing sites (Clarke, 2019; Papanastasiou, 2019). Rather, they seem to depend on and be embedded in social and political practices as well as scientific and academic practices. Therefore, the focus on the global scale, in particular, has to a certain degree come at the expense of scholarship (re)linking higher education and research to regional and national scales investigating recent shifts in the geopolitical landscape, the impact of nationalisms, national specificity and differences across various contexts (Robertson, 2018).

Against this backdrop and taking inspiration in an affirmative critique of the politics of scaling in education policy studies, this paper discusses how to move beyond the binary of methodological nationalism (Shahjahan & Kezar, 2013), where policies are treated as national phenomena enacted by nation-states and attached to a particular place and polity, and methodological globalism, where the emphasis is on global factors affecting national policymaking (Brøgger & Moscovitz, 2022; Clarke, 2019; Takayama & Lingard, 2021).

The paper draws inspiration from the idea of an affirmative critique that does not begin with a plea for a revolution, but, by ‘staying with the trouble’ (Foucault, 1997; Haraway, 2016), plants the seed for change. Affirming and encouraging something in that which it criticizes (Raffnsøe et al.,), affirmative critique does not condemn or distance itself from the criticized; rather, it commits itself to an ethics of engagement and entails self-transformation (Staunæs & Brøgger, 2020).