This Network is currently inactive. To propose a new Network or for a new team of convenors to take on an existing SRHE Network, please see the following Network Guidance Notes.

Former Convenors

Ourania Filippakou
Email: ourania.filippakou@brunel.ac.uk

Gert Biesta
Email: Gert.Biesta@brunel.ac.uk

David Aldridge
Email: David.Aldridge@brunel.ac.uk

The group’s mission is to contribute to the development of the higher education research community locally, nationally and internationally. During the near half-century since SRHE was established, books, journals and courses on higher education have increased spectacularly. However, as an area of academic work, what is published tends to be either descriptive or prescriptive. Should there be a theoretical approach, it is invariably derived from other disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, politics and economics. The subject’s lack of a clear identity is shown by the location of many leading higher education research centres in broad-based education departments and sometimes even in business or management schools.

It is intended that four overarching themes will provide its initial focus:

• Reflecting on ways of researching higher education;
• The place of conceptual analysis and its relationship to theorisation in understanding higher education;
• Theorising higher education as an aid to understanding the policy process
• Ideas of/for higher education and the university in the 21st century.