Harrison_Smith_Kinton_New institutional geographies of HE_IR version.pdf (2.23 MB)
New institutional geographies of higher education: the rise of transregional university alliances
journal contribution
posted on 2015-11-18, 10:53 authored by John HarrisonJohn Harrison, Darren SmithDarren Smith, Chloe KintonThis paper opens up debates about the deepening uneven geographies of higher education through a critical analysis of transregional university alliances. Focusing on the formation of research consortia and Doctoral Training Centres we reveal the emergence of over fifty transregional alliances between UK universities. Despite each consortium operating at a variously defined regional scale there has been no explicit attempt to account for their geographical basis. Providing the first-ever analysis of this unfolding phenomenon, we demonstrate how the rise of transregional alliances is indicative of, and a response to, universities operating in an intensely neoliberalised political economy. Bringing together emergent theories of regionalism with emerging worlds of (neoliberal) higher education, our paper reveals how, why and where universities are engaging in more intensively targeted, exclusive approaches to regional development. We argue that higher education is conducive to the weakening of fixed regional territories and propose the metaphor of ‘regional constellations’ for interpreting transregional geographies. Finally, our analysis suggests that while high-performing research institutions may compete better by forming consortia, transregional alliances lead to a more unequal and divided university sector.
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
Environment and Planning A: Economy and SpaceVolume
48Issue
5Pages
910-936Citation
HARRISON, J., SMITH, D.P. and KINTON, C., 2016. New institutional geographies of higher education: the rise of transregional university alliances. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48(5), pp.910-936.Publisher
© SageVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015-12-16Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and the definitive published version is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0308518X15619175ISSN
0308-518XeISSN
1472-3409Publisher version
Language
- en