Theme
Universities are known for their cutting-edge research. How can that ethos be harnessed to enhance their educational offer, pedagogical approaches, technological innovation and approach to academic life? Future Ready Higher Education invites researchers, practitioners, and professionals across the sector to explore visionary and imaginative futures for universities.
This conference seeks to explore the multiple imaginaries of higher education looking ahead: how universities might evolve, what values could and should guide any changes, and how those who work (and study?) within it can help to shape what the future looks like so that it benefits them. It will provide the opportunity to share insights on developing cultures of lifelong learning; embracing and critiquing the role of digital technologies in teaching and research (including AI); and different conceptions of innovation and entrepreneurship for staff and students. Questions arise around the opportunities for and the impact of mobility of staff and students, principles of sustainability, and the future knowledge, skills and attributes needed by and expected of students. Fascinating research opportunities emerge through making connections between data sources, harnessing and integrating generative AI productively and responsibly, developing partnerships across disciplines and introducing methodological innovation.
Through critical, creative, and research-informed dialogue, this conference aims to move beyond reaction to technological and political trends to authentic change, to a more proactive envisioning. What questions need to be asked now to enable students, researchers, teachers and universities to create a future higher education they want to inhabit and which benefits everyone? The conference calls on participants to share research, theory, and practice that sees higher education as an ongoing space of creativity, inclusion, and purpose. By reflecting on what it means to be “future-ready,” we seek to collectively shape what higher education can become.
The SRHE 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.
Keynote Speakers
Future-ready higher education:
some things we need to talk about
These days everyone seems to have something to say about the future of higher education – often simply as a cynical attempt to make money, justify unpopular reforms, or simply to denigrate the idea of universities altogether.
This conference offers the SRHE community the opportunity to seize back the idea of ‘the future’ and put it to more honest use – as a means of reimagining what we want universities to be, to talk about the values and virtues of higher education, and reflect on what roles we think higher education might play in a fast-changing world.
In this opening talk, Neil Selwyn introduces a number of starting points from which the rest of the conference can progress. These include embracing the unknowability of the future, why we need to think about futures (plural), and how anticipating (un)desirable futures is a great way (in John Urry’s words) to ‘disturb the present’ and start making changes in the here-and-now.
Regardless of your discipline and area of research interest, this talk aims to inspire you to start thinking about higher education futures along more expansive, forward-thinking and hopeful lines … the future starts here!
Biography
Neil Selwyn is a professor in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne – having previously worked in the Institute of Education, London and the Cardiff School of Social Sciences. He has spent the past 30 years researching the integration of digital technology into schools, universities and adult learning.
Neil is recognised as a leading international researcher in the area of digital education – with particular expertise in the ‘real-life’ constraints and problems faced when technology-based education is implemented. He is currently working on nationally-funded projects examining young people’s experiences of smartphone and social media bans, AI and the changing nature of teachers’ digital work, and digital reading in classrooms. Neil has carried out funded research on digital technology, society and education for national research agencies and funders in the UK, Australia, US, Sweden and Uruguay, alongside projects for the BBC, Gates Foundation, Microsoft Partners in Learning, Save The Children, National Assembly of Wales and UNESCO.
Neil is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences, is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and he also produces the ‘Education Technology Society‘ podcast.
Higher education utopia
This talk connects with the conference’s aim to explore visionary and imaginative futures for universities. Higher education futures are often presented as being determined for us by technological and other shifts that discursively construct themselves as primary, driving imperatives for change. In this context it is important that – as a global community of scholarship – we actively develop alternative ways of imagining, advocating for and building desirable futures based in the values, interests and core purposes of higher education itself.
In this keynote I will draw on research in the scholarship of utopia as one way of approaching this task. The talk will aim to provoke discussion among the SRHE community around how we might conceptualise our preferable futures, and what forms of research, advocacy and debate are needed to secure them.
Biography
Sian Bayne is Professor of Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, where she is Director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education and leads on Education Futures in her role as University Assistant Principal. Her research is critical and interdisciplinary, currently focused on higher education futures, utopia and the impacts of artificial intelligence on education. She gives regular keynotes on the future of digital and higher education and publishes widely. She is affiliated with the Edinburgh Futures Institute and the Moray House School of Education and Sport. More information about her work is available on her web site.