Ruling Relations in Academia: Exploring Gender, Power and Exclusion in HE

IAS Residential Fellow Professor Helen Peterson delivers a seminar on their research -

The seminar will present work-in-progress on ‘ruling relations’ in academia, a concept developed by Dorothy Smith. The seminar will discuss how the concept can be used in sociological research and be combined with organizational theory and specifically how it can be used to explore power relations in academia and processes of inclusion and exclusion. Investigating “ruling relations” involves researching the complex of bureaucratic, administrative, and professional discourses and practices that organize and govern social life. In more concrete terms such investigation draws attention to globalized systems for institutional coordination such as rankings, research audits, excellence initiatives, hiring criteria, bibliometrics, workload allocation, and funding structures. Ruling relations are further characterized by being translocal and is particularly useful for comparative, cross-country studies, between for example higher education in Sweden and the UK. The seminar will invite the participants to explore their own experiences of academic ruling relations and make taken-for-granted everyday practices visible.

Arrivals from 11:45 am for a 12:00 noon start. For those joining in-person, lunch will be served after the seminar from 1:00pm.

International House can be found here on the campus map.

If these in person tickets have sold out, you can still register for the online Teams webinar.