Conference Agenda

While violence in higher education has most often been examined in relation to peer-to-peer student violence (Turan et al, 2011; AHRC, 2017), academic-to-academic bullying (Meriläinen and Honkanen, 2019; Björklund ad Jensen, 2025), academic-to-student (Sinkkonen et al, 2014), or institutional sexism (Gray et al, 2026; Gray et al, 2024), very little attention has been paid to violences enacted by students towards academic staff (Banyard et al., 2017). Since the early 2000s, a growing body of work, largely concentrated in North America and United Kingdom, has examined academic experiences of student-perpetrated violences (Lee, 2006; Lampman et al, 2016; Lampman, 2012). In Europe, Asia, Oceania, South America and Africa, scholarship on this issue is limited. This presentation contributes to this gap through a cross-regional study of Swedish and Australian higher education, bringing together research conducted by the author in Australia (Smith, 2022; Willis & Smith, 2024) and parallel work in Sweden (Brax, 2024a; Brax, 2024b).

Sweden is frequently positioned as a global leader in gender equity and egalitarian labour regimes, making it a critical European case for examining how student-perpetrated violence is experienced and governed within ostensibly progressive institutional contexts. Australia provides a contrasting yet comparable system shaped by intensified marketisation, managerialism, and student-as-consumer discourses. Examining these nations side-by-side enables analysis of how shared global pressures in higher education are mediated by differing gender, labour, and governance regimes.

The central research question guiding this presentation is:

How do academics in Swedish and Australian higher education contexts experience, interpret, and respond to student-perpetrated violences, and what does a cross-regional comparison reveal about changing power relations, institutional responsibilities, and academic working conditions?

The research draws on feminist theories of violence, which conceptualise violence as relational, cumulative, and embedded within social and institutional structures rather than confined to isolated incidents (Kelly, 1988). In line with this scholarship, the paper uses the term ‘violences’ to encompass a range of student-perpetrated behaviours, including hostility, rudeness, harassment, coercive control, and physical assault. Feminist research has long critiqued hierarchies of violence that rank some harms as less serious or less “real,” noting how such hierarchies function to minimise and dismiss the experiences of minoritised groups (Kelly, 1988; Crenshaw, 1991).

Drawing on the concept of a continuum of sexual violence, this study understands psychological abuse, verbal hostility, and coercive behaviours not as precursors to violence but as forms of violence in their own right, existing on a continuum with more overt physical harms (Kelly, 1988; Boyle, 2019). Such hierarchies of violence have historically been weaponised to silence women and other minoritised academics, including non-White, LGBTQI+, disabled, and Indigenous scholars (Crenshaw, 1989; Kelly, 1988). Student-perpetrated violences are therefore analysed as practices through which power is exercised, boundaries are enforced, and academic authority is challenged or undermined.

This feminist framework is complemented by critical scholarship on neoliberal higher education, which highlights how marketisation and student-as-consumer logics reshape academic labour and authority (Brown, 2015; Connell, 2019). Within these institutional conditions, academics are increasingly positioned as service providers subject to surveillance and complaint, altering power relations and potentially enabling or legitimising student-perpetrated violences.

Although the empirical data are drawn from Swedish and Australia higher education contexts, the analysis speaks to broader international transformations in higher education. By situating student-perpetrated violence within intersecting feminist and political–economic frameworks, this research contributes to European and international debates on academic work, institutional responsibility, and staff safety, as well as wider global concerns across many industries regarding sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination in the workplace.

European education systems increasingly emphasize relational pedagogy, ethics of care, and student wellbeing as foundations for meaningful learning and educational transformation. However, empirical research on compassion in higher education remains predominantly rooted in Western psychological frameworks, leaving significant gaps regarding how these constructs manifest in non-Western educational contexts. This study addresses this critical limitation by examining faculty compassion from the student perspective at the University of Kurdistan, Iran, thereby offering an essential international comparative dimension to European debates on caring pedagogies and the erosion of human relations in neoliberal academia.

Despite robust theoretical advancements in Care Ethics (Noddings, 2005, 2012) and contemplative education approaches (Barbezat & Bush, 2014), there exists a scarcity of empirical evidence regarding the actual state of compassionate behaviors in everyday academic life. This gap is particularly pronounced in Middle Eastern higher education, where contextual factors including centralized governance, rapid massification, credentialist pressures, and specific cultural expectations regarding authority and gender relations may fundamentally alter the dynamics of care in teaching relationships. This study investigates the extent to which compassion manifests in faculty professional practices and how students' perceptions vary across demographic variables, contributing to the European/international literature on relational pedagogy.

The research is theoretically anchored in an integrative framework combining Nel Noddings' Ethics of Care with contemporary psychological conceptualizations of compassion as a multidimensional construct (Neff, 2003; Pommier et al., 2020). Within this framework, compassion is understood not as an individual trait but as a relational quality encompassing kindness (active concern for alleviating suffering), common humanity (recognition of shared vulnerability), mindfulness (attentive awareness), and the absence of indifference. This framework aligns with European scholarship on relational pedagogy (Hinsdale & Ljungblad, 2023) while testing its applicability in a distinct cultural context.

The central research questions are: (1) To what extent do compassion-related attributes exist in faculty members' professional lives from students' perspectives? (2) How do students' perceptions of faculty compassion differ according to demographic variables (gender, age, educational level)? By situating this Iranian case within the broader international literature, the study enables critical comparison with European higher education systems facing similar challenges of bureaucratization and declining relational approaches (Ball, 2012), offering insights into whether compassionate pedagogy faces universal challenges or distinct cultural barriers.

Teacher well-being (TWB) has been extensively studied, and several reviews on TWB have been published over the years (e.g., Acton & Glasgow, 2015; Cumming, 2017; Granziera et al., 2021; Hascher & Waber, 2021). These reviews have either focused on TWB as a general construct encompassing all school-levels (e.g., Acton & Glasgow, 2015; Hascher & Waber, 2021) or delved into specific areas, such as early-childhood teachers (Cumming, 2017). Although previous reviews have significantly contributed to the understanding of TWB in general, they do not consider the unique characteristics related to teaching in higher education (HE) context. In academic and HE contexts, multiple current trends, such as increased work intensity, consumer-oriented practices, growing student numbers, ethical challenges, heightened pressures related to teaching and research, as well as diminishing resources and job security, have underscored the importance of well-being (Jabbar et al., 2018; Kinman & Johnson, 2019; Si, 2024). Furthermore, the reviews addressing higher education teacher well-being (HETWB) have tended to investigate academics or faculty members in general and focused on exploring negative outcomes such as stress and burnout (e.g., Sabagh et al., 2018; Salimzadeh et al., 2017).

While reviews on the negative aspects of well-being have provided important insights into HETWB, they overlook the diversity of approaches in well-being research, including its positive aspects (see also Hascher & Waber, 2021; Urbina-Garcia, 2020). As a result, there remains insufficient understanding of how well-being is conceptualised in contemporary HETWB research and which factors are considered central to its development in the HE context. To address these gaps, the aim of this integrative review is twofold. First, it seeks to enhance understanding of how HETWB is conceptualised in recent empirical studies. Second, it aims to identify job-related and personal characteristics that influence HETWB by applying the Job Demands–Resources (JD‑R; Bakker & Demerouti, 2017) theory as an organising framework.

The JD‑R theory provides a well-established framework for examining factors that influence occupational well-being and is therefore well suited to the aims of this review. According to the JD‑R model, job demands refer to aspects of work that require sustained physical or psychological effort and are associated with physiological and psychological costs. Job resources, in turn, support the achievement of work goals, reduce the impact of job demands, and promote learning and personal growth (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017). The model describes two complementary processes: a health impairment process, in which excessive demands and insufficient resources lead to strain, and a motivational process, in which job resources foster positive outcomes such as work engagement and well-being. Later extensions of the model also highlight the importance of personal resources, such as self-efficacy and optimism, that influence how employees cope with job demands and make the most of available resources (e.g., Xanthopoulou et al., 2007).

By applying the JD‑R framework, this review systematically organises the job-related and personal characteristics identified in previous HETWB research and illustrates how different types of demands and resources are linked to HETWB. By combining a conceptual analysis of well-being with an examination of its antecedents, the review contributes to a more comprehensive and structured understanding of HETWB. More specifically, the review addresses the following research questions:

(RQ1) How is HETWB conceptualised in empirical studies?

(RQ2) What job and personal characteristics influence HETWB?

The mental health and wellbeing of students in tertiary education has become a growing concern globally, with increasing evidence pointing to rising levels of psychological distress among university students (Auerbach et al., 2016; Stallman, 2010). Simultaneously, tertiary educators are increasingly expected to serve as first responders to student mental health issues, often without adequate training or institutional support (Gulliver et al. 2018; Hughes et al., 2018; Margrove et al., 2014). Amidst this dual burden which has significant implications for student learning outcomes, the ongoing challenges of teaching and interacting with diverse student populations (Dutton & Sotardi, 2023), increasing work and productivity demands due to marketisation, and rapid technologisation of higher education have also increased work-related stress, burnout, and mental health difficulties (Fontinha et al., 2019; Johnson et al., 2019), thereby impacting the wellbeing and professional sustainability of tertiary educators.

A recent study in Australia on educator readiness to support student mental health across the education sector show that over 50% of educators report moderate to severe symptoms of depression, with nearly half experiencing significant anxiety (Dabrowski et al., 2025). These figures are mirrored in international contexts, where the massification of higher education, increased casualisation of the academic workforce, and lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated stress and burnout among tertiary educators (Kinman & Wray, 2020; Morrish, 2019). Despite the proliferation of institutional wellbeing policies and student support services (Kamarunzaman et al., 2020), there remains a critical gap between policy rhetoric and the lived experiences of educators on the ground.

This session is situated within a growing body of literature that highlights tertiary educator mental health, the emotional labour of academic work (Kinman & Wray, 2020), and the need for systemic interventions that address both staff and student wellbeing. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) socio-ecological theoretical framework, this session presents research that conceptualises educator readiness as a function of both individual capacity and systemic context.