Call for Papers
Society for Educational Studies 2025 Colloquium: Higher Education: (Re)Shaping the Future
Oriel College, Oxford
Thursday 4th September – Friday 5th September 2025
The Society for Educational Studies invites abstracts for its 2025 annual colloquium to be held at Oriel College, Oxford, September 4th-5th in line with the Colloquium’s theme – Higher Education: (Re)Shaping the Future. The deadline for submission is1200 on Friday 30th May 2025.
Higher Education in the United Kingdom today, as elsewhere, is facing an existential moment. While the general aims and purposes of higher education have remained relatively consistent over the last 100 hundred years, the relative focus and emphasis of these aims have ebbed and flowed. Participation rates in higher education in the United Kingdom have increased significantly over the last fifty years. So too, the institutions and places within which higher education takes place have altered – not least through the Further and Higher Education Act in 1992. Higher education has become increasingly internationalised and, at the same time, greater attention – in research and practice – is paid to matters of teaching quality, student experience and civic contribution. The Secretary of State has signalled strongly that any future rises in student fees will be linked to expectations to reform.
At the same time, some have spoke of higher education being in some form of ‘crisis’. University finances are now a common matter of concern, with the financial environment characterised as ‘increasingly challenging’ by the Office for Students with 40% of providers expected to be in deficit in 2024 and many providers operating some form of redundancy scheme for staff.
In such a context, universities (and indeed other providers of higher education) seek to compete for resources – including income generated from home and overseas student fees and from research. Intertwined with these financial concerns and heightened competitive environment are core questions that bring into sharp focus the purpose and value of higher education for students, for the economy and for civic society. These questions include:
- What constitutes quality in teaching and learning in higher education and how should this be evaluated?
- What civic role do, and can, universities play today and how might that civic contribution be measured?
- What does a positive student experience mean in terms of higher education?
- How successful have widening participation and widening access agendas been, and what future directions might these agendas take?
- How have processes of internationalisation impacted higher education today and how might these processes impact higher education in the future?
- How do the challenges facing higher education today impact those who work in higher education, including their identity, their work and their precarity?
With these questions – and others – in mind, the Society for Educational Studies invites abstracts for its 2025 annual colloquium to be held at Oriel College, Oxford, September 4th-5th in line with the colloquium’s theme – Higher Education: (Re)Shaping the Future.
Paper proposals (in the form of abstracts) should be sent to Professor Andrew Peterson ([email protected]), Professor Tom Harrison ([email protected]), and Aidan Thompson ([email protected]) no later than 1200 on Friday 30th May 2025.
Registration for the Colloquium will be free for all members of the Society for Educational Studies, and will include the conference meal, other meals, and one night’s accommodation (Thursday 4th September). Places are limited and priority will be given to those members presenting a paper.
A round of small grants (up to 3 projects of £10,000 max and up to 3 projects of £20,000 max) is proposed on an inter-connected theme. Full details of the Small Grants scheme is available here.