The 2025 SRHE International Research Conference will take place on Friday 28^th November (online) and 2^nd – 4^th December (in-person at the East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham, UK).

Call for Papers Opens Soon

Our Call for Papers will invite higher education researchers, practitioners, and postgraduate students to reflect on the theme: Compassion, collegiality and communities in higher education: Challenging the Discourse

Higher education is an aspiration for millions of people, a driver for social mobility, a home for the development of new knowledge through research and innovation, and a refuge for freedom of thought and opinion. Despite this, media and political discourse in many countries often depicts higher education as elitist and perpetuating social inequalities, whilst also threatening freedom of speech and cultivating anxiety among staff and students, and implying that HE offers poor value for money to students, families, and taxpayers. How are these views shaped by external parties such as politicians, the media and parents, and by the increasingly profound differences in values, experiences and voting patterns between people who have studied in higher education and others who have not?  To what extent are stakeholders within higher education – academics, students, professional service staff and leaders – complicit in accepting and repeating these discourses of higher education even if it may not reflect their beliefs and engagement with higher education in practice?  Many, maybe most, who work in higher education still believe in the collective efforts of teaching to transform students, research to push the boundaries of disciplines and the power of higher education to improve local communities, create global connections and improve society. How can people studying and working in higher education take back control of the discourse, celebrating the communities at the heart of higher education, the collegiality necessary to deliver high quality teaching and research and the compassion to support staff and students in these endeavours? Can kindness and caring (care-giving, care-receiving and caring for oneself) be at the heart of the system?  Are there ways in which higher education institutions could enhance their engagement with people who have not studied or worked in them, and communities with low proportions of graduates?

The SRHE annual international conference aims to advance the understanding of higher education, support and disseminate research and practice, and provide a platform for the perspectives and knowledge offered by systematic research and scholarship. With an international membership which spans a broad range of the humanities and social sciences, the SRHE community includes researchers, students, policymakers, educational developers, professional services staff, and others with an interest in higher education. The SRHE conference acts as a space for broad-ranging knowledge exchange, exploration of productive pathways for collaboration, and dissemination of ideas in a variety of formats, across a range of research domains. In line with this, conference submissions that do not directly address the conference theme are also eligible for inclusion, and will be considered in full by staff and reviewers.

The Oxford Abstracts submission portal will be available soon. The deadline for submissions will be Thursday 15 May 2025 (23:59 GMT+1) 

Full information about conference fees, guidelines for submission of proposals, registration processes will be available soon.