Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education - Neoliberal Policies of Funding and Management

This book explores how the kinds of world-wide restructurings of higher education and research work that are underway today have not only increased employment insecurity in academia but may actually be producing unemployment both for those within academia and for graduate job-seekers in other sectors. Recent and current re-organisations of higher education and research work, and re-orientations of academic life (as students, researchers, teachers) generally, which are taking place around the world, achieve exactly the opposite of what they claim: though ostensibly undertaken to facilitate employment, these moves actually produce unemployment both for those within academia and for graduate job-seekers in other sectors.


Suman Gupta is Chair in Literature and Cultural History at The Open University, UK. His published books include Re-Reading Harry Potter (2003, 2009), Social Constructionist Identity Politics and Literary Studies (2007), Imagining Iraq (2011), Consumable Texts in Contemporary India (2015) and Philology and Global English Studies (2015).
Jernej Habjan is Research Fellow at the literary institute of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia. He has co-edited, with Jessica Whyte, (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy (2014).
Hrvoje Tutek is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. He is currently finishing his dissertation in the DFG research group 'Globalization and Literature' at the University of Munich. He was an active participant in the 2009 Croatian student protests against state budget cuts aimed at public universities.