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Research

Assembling a postsocialist university: The politics of higher education in Russia

Application summary

The PhD project engages with the politics of higher education in Russia. The main research task is to critically examine whether and how “neoliberalization” reshapes the contemporary field of Russian higher education. However, neoliberalization is a contested concept. In the existing scholarship, the neoliberalisation of university is mainly theorised from “Western” contexts. My interest lies in problematizing claims about neoliberalization of higher education in the context of postsocialist realities, authoritarian political system and state control: it is argued that neoliberal practices play a manifold role in the process referred to as ‘authoritarian modernization’ in Russia facilitating neo-authoritarian and neoconservative restoration, including the field of higher education and research. The main theoretical framework of this research is assemblage theory that allows to analyze the politics of higher education in a relational manner. Thus, the university assemblage is not local nor global production, but rather a patchwork of different parts coming from the “near” and the “far”: features of neoliberal higher education (“global”) intertwine with more “local” (or territorialized) elements such as the authoritarian and neoconservative features in Russian politics and governance, demands of local economies, or academic subjectivities partly informed by postsocialist legacies. The project, furthermore, aims at performing a ‘reparative reading’ of university politics detailing the practices of care and collegiality within the neoliberal–authoritarian university and creating democratic and postcapitalist imaginaries for higher education and research. Methodologically, this research is a non-local ethnography, which challenge the “territorialisation” of the research design; the scope of the project goes beyond national territorial or semantic boundaries keeping in mind that the neoliberalisation of higher education create various assemblages across borders.

The project was aimed at finalizing the doctoral dissertation in the field of International Relations titled "De/re/composing authoritarian-neoliberal assemblages: Ethnography of Russian universities and beyond". The dissertation started with the premise that universities are more than educational institutions. They are entangled with a multiplicity of powerful forces: imperial histories, neoliberal ideas of competition, or state-formation projects, which embed higher education institutions into world politics and international political economy. This doctoral dissertation investigared so-called neoliberalization of and in Russian universities. The topic of neoliberalization of academia, i.e. subjecting university activities to the ideas of market efficiency, has been permeating academic discussions with contributions from different contexts as well as on different areas of academic life. However, the analysis of neoliberalization in the previous scholarship uses the conceptual points of departure from the “Western” contexts. The complex connections of neoliberal reforms to other elements of economic and political power (for example, the power of the authoritarian state) beyond the contexts of the Global North is something that leads to understanding the global and seemingly universal concept of “neoliberalization” as a contested term. Following these discussions, my interest further lies in destabilizing the monolithic understanding of neoliberalism. The dissertation, thus, studied neoliberalization of universities while taking into account its connection to other projects of power that universities become a part of, in particular the statist projects of the Russian authoritarian neo-imperial regime. As a result, this research contributes not only to the discussion of the neoliberalization of universities worldwide but sheds light on the workings of the contemporary Russian Putinist regime and its authoritarian and neo-imperial politics. Eventually, this research project analyzes unstable and incoherent, yet feasible and productive, projects of power that authoritarianism and neoliberalism produce in their multiple compositions.

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