Power

The concept of ‘power’ is pivotal to understanding the practices and policies that shape and define higher education, from the level of international and national higher education politics and governance to the pedagogical space of the classroom. In everyday speech, power is most often associated with the capacity for leading, deciding, and having authority over others. In this sense, it is connected to a cluster of concepts like coercion, domination, control, or manipulation and understood as something that certain actors have more of than others do. In higher education research, however, power remains a contested, multidimensional, and dynamic concept, and the understanding of power as a question of having authority over other people is only one of many understandings.

Arguably, some kind of power always imbues ...