Richard Watermeyer
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 764577 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Richard Watermeyer |
| NOMBRES | Richard |
| APELLIDO | Watermeyer |
| FIRMA | WATERMEYER R |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2365-3771 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 105 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2012 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Metacognitive AI literacy
While use of artificial intelligence (AI) proliferates across educational, professional, and civic domains, conventional AI literacy frameworks remain anchored in functional skills acquisition and fail to address the fundamental epistemological challenges posed by probabilistic, opaque algorithmic systems. This article argues that AI literacy must be reconceptualised as a metacognitive social practice that transcends individual competencies to en…
Academics’ Weak(ening) Resistance to Generative AI
The disruptive potential of generative AI (GenAI) tools to academic labour is potentially vast. Yet as we argue herein, such tools also represent a continuation of the inequities inherent to academia’s prestige economy and the intensified hierarchy and labour precarisation endemic to universities as prestige institutions. In a recent survey of n = 284 UK-based academics, reasons were put forward for avoiding GenAI tools. These responses surface c…
Citation Metrics and Highly Ranked Scholars
An Epidemic of the Quantified SelfRejection, or recommendation of self-improvement, is a quotidian aspect of academics' working life.But personal endorsement -particularly of the kind that is unsolicited -that you're doing things right, comes as a welcome if abrupt and uncertain relief.It's a relief in helping to deflect, however fleetingly, myriad feelings of imposterism (Wilkinson 2020) and outsiderism (Khadka et al. 2018).It's a relief also in…
Postdigital Citizen Science and Humanities
Whilst much global research takes place in universities, many researchers in the sciences and humanities do not work within these institutions. Some citizen researchers run their own companies or provide independent consultancy, having left their roles in universities through a conflict of values, where they experienced hostile, hierarchical, or restrictive practices. In a world where many postdigital and biodigital challenges do not sit neatly u…
Academic anomie
The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has ignited a near universal rethink of what is tolerable or desirable in work settings. In higher education—where discontent has been exacerbated by the pandemic—the potential for a ‘great resignation’ is a very real threat. The long-term impact of a crisis management approach in universities has led to a state of ‘pandemia’, according to Watermeyer et al., (British Journal of Sociology of Education 42:651…
Over worked and undervalued? Knotted tensions of identity, purpose, and change in contemporary higher education
Whilst concerns about rising managerialism have reverberated around the higher education sector for decades, there is evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated such trends and deepened cracks within the system. Whilst it is relatively easy for such discussions to become polarised – where ‘managers’ are pitched against ‘staff’ – the reality is far more complex. In this paper we analyse and interpret findings from a survey of 780 academic an…
A Crisis of the Professoriate
Generative AI and the Automating of Academia
The neoliberal transformation of higher education in the UK and an intertwined focus on the productive efficiency and prestige value of universities has led to an epidemic of overwork and precarity among academics. Many are found to be struggling with lofty performance expectations and an insistence that all dimensions of their work consistently achieve positional gains despite ferocious competition and the omnipresent threat of failure. Working …
Three perspectives on leadership in higher education
There is a fragmented and complex literature about higher education leadership representing a diversity of ideological perspectives about its nature and purposes. Internationally, the literature has been strongly shaped by the importation of concepts and theories from management studies and a tradition of scholarship led by university leader-researchers. Drawing on an extensive literature review—drawing on over 250 books, book chapters, reports a…
Postdigital Citizen Science and Humanities
This collective article presents a theoretical kaleidoscope, the multiple lenses of which are used to examine and critique citizen science and humanities in postdigital contexts and from postdigital perspectives. It brings together 19 short theoretical and experiential contributions, organised into six loose groups which explore areas and perspectives including Indigenous and local knowledge, technology, and children and young people as citizen r…
‘Living at work’
The COVID-19 pandemic has been the source of large-scale disruption to the work practices of university staff, across the UK and globally. This article reports the experiences of n = 4731 professional services staff (PSS) working in UK universities and their experiences of pandemic-related work disruption. It specifically focuses on a transition to remote-working as a consequence of social restrictions and campus closures, presenting both quantit…
‘This can’t be the new norm’
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the university sector globally. This article reports on the Australian findings from a large-scale survey of academic staff and their experiences and predictions of the impact of the pandemic on their wellbeing. We report the perceptions of n=370 Australian academics and accounts of their institutions’ responses to COVID-19, analysed using self-determination theory. Respondents report work-related str…
Education without limits’
This article reports on how those working in post-secondary education and training in Singapore perceive the professional effects of a transition to online learning, teaching and assessment (LTA) as a consequence of the COVID-19 global pandemic. It draws on a survey sample of n=1553 educators and trainers working in Singapore and their perspectives on a how a migration to online LTA is producing long-term, if not permanent changes to the organiza…
Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the operation of universities around the world. A transition to online platforms and remote forms of working as a consequence of national lockdown measures and campus closures has produced new labour challenges for academic faculty. This article makes use of 12 months of reporting from the academic trade press related to the experience of the pandemic in the UK higher education sector. Accounts publis…
Public engagement professionals in a prestige economy
Over the last decade, there has been significant investment made by the UK higher education policy and funding community in embedding public engagement within British universities. While some public engagement is undertaken by university staff – often on a voluntary and unpaid basis – much is carried out by public engagement professionals (PEPs), typically from within professional services divisions. The following account, based upon a multi-site…
When masses meet markets
The institutional form and conception of Higher Education have changed through the growth of mass higher education, which in many national systems now operates on market logics. Drawing on theories of credentialism, this article provides a critical analysis of the inter-relationship between massification and marketization and examines a range of consequences this has for institutional relations and dynamics. A central feature of credential inflat…
‘The Covid-19 crisis is not the core problem’
This article, drawing on data from an international survey – distributed in the summer of 2020 – explores the experiences and concerns of academic staff (n=167) working in universities in Ireland and their perceptions of their institutions’ early response to the pandemic. Concerns related to transitioning to remote online working, impact on research productivity and culture, and work intensification, as intersected by enhanced managerialism, are …
Covid-19 and digital disruption in UK universities
COVID-19 has caused the closure of university campuses around the world and migration of all learning, teaching, and assessment into online domains. The impacts of this on the academic community as frontline providers of higher education are profound. In this article, we report the findings from a survey of n = 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy. Respon…
Pandemia’
Universities in the UK, and in other countries like Australia and the USA, have responded to the operational and financial challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic by prioritising institutional solvency and enforcing changes to the work-practices and profiles of their staff. For academics, an adjustment to institutional life under COVID-19 has been dramatic and resulted in the overwhelming majority making a transition to prolonged remote-wor…
Competitive accountability and the dispossession of academic identity
This article discusses the intensification of research performance demands in UK universities in relation to the complex terrain of academic identity formation. It considers whether a demand for academic researchers to produce and evidence economic and societal impact – in the rewards game of the UK’s performance-based research funding system, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – influences their self-concept as ‘engaged researchers’. While …
Competing institutional logics in universities in the United Kingdom
Theoretical literature on institutions emphasizes the importance of logics – shared rationalizations – in determining many aspects of organizations. In this literature, universities are often discussed as an example of an institution with a particularly strong and cohesive logic, one rooted in notions of academic excellence and the pursuit of universal knowledge. However, more recent literature has argued that multiple institutional logics often …
Evaluating 'impact' in the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF)
Little is known about the process of evaluating the economic and societal impact of research undertaken in university settings. In this paper, we explore the accounts of senior academics and user-assessors, populating disciplinary sub-panels spanning the humanities and social sciences, convened to judge and ‘score’ the impact claims of researchers from UK universities as a new component of research evaluation within the specific context of the UK…
Dilemmas of public participation in science policy
Public participation is ubiquitous in many contemporary democratic societies – used for many purposes, and in many contexts, with particular and growing relevance for policy-making on science and technology issues. However, there is a dearth of evidence as to its qualities and benefits. We contend that the implementation and interpretation of participation faces a number of dilemmas that – together –undermine its successful adoption. In this pape…
Institutionalizing public engagement through research in UK universities
In this article, we draw on open-text responses taken from an online attitudinal survey provided by public engagement (PE) professional service staff working across universities in the United Kingdom (UK). These are individuals employed to support and sometimes lead academic staff, principally research active academics, in PE activities. Their responses provide an insight into the current and future status of PE in UK higher education (HE) and sh…
Artifice or integrity in the marketization of research impact? Investigating the moral economy of (pathways to) impact statements within research funding proposals in the UK and Australia
A focus on academic performativity and a rationalizing of what academics do according to measurable outputs has, in the era of higher education's (HE) neoliberalization and marketization, engendered debate regarding the ‘authenticity’ of academic identity and practice. In such a context, a ‘performative’ prioritization of leveraging ‘positional goods’, such as external research funds, presents a specific challenge to the construction of academics…
Impact in the REF
This article focuses on ‘impact’ as a new condition of research assessment for UK academics. It explores a history of resistance to an ‘impact agenda’ and how impact as a component of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – a system of performance based funding – is viewed by academics as an infringement to a scholarly way of life; as symptomatic of the marketisation of higher education; and as fundamentally incompatible and deleterious to the …
Artifice or integrity in the marketization of research impact? Investigating the moral economy of (pathways to) impact statements within research funding proposals in the UK and Australia
A focus on academic performativity and a rationalizing of what academics do according to measurable outputs has, in the era of higher education's (HE) neoliberalization and marketization, engendered debate regarding the ‘authenticity’ of academic identity and practice. In such a context, a ‘performative’ prioritization of leveraging ‘positional goods’, such as external research funds, presents a specific challenge to the construction of academics…
Excellence’ and Exclusion
A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom's 'Research Excellence Framework' (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities' response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014…
Evaluating 'impact' in the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF)
Little is known about the process of evaluating the economic and societal impact of research undertaken in university settings. In this paper, we explore the accounts of senior academics and user-assessors, populating disciplinary sub-panels spanning the humanities and social sciences, convened to judge and ‘score’ the impact claims of researchers from UK universities as a new component of research evaluation within the specific context of the UK…
Pandemia’
Universities in the UK, and in other countries like Australia and the USA, have responded to the operational and financial challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic by prioritising institutional solvency and enforcing changes to the work-practices and profiles of their staff. For academics, an adjustment to institutional life under COVID-19 has been dramatic and resulted in the overwhelming majority making a transition to prolonged remote-wor…
Competing institutional logics in universities in the United Kingdom
Theoretical literature on institutions emphasizes the importance of logics – shared rationalizations – in determining many aspects of organizations. In this literature, universities are often discussed as an example of an institution with a particularly strong and cohesive logic, one rooted in notions of academic excellence and the pursuit of universal knowledge. However, more recent literature has argued that multiple institutional logics often …
Selling ‘impact’
The intensification of an audit culture in higher education is made no more apparent than with the growing prevalence of performance-based research funding systems like the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the introduction of new measures of assessment like ‘impact’ or more specifically, the economic and societal impacts of research. Detractors of this regulatory intervention, however, question the legitimacy and credibility of such a…
Competitive accountability and the dispossession of academic identity
This article discusses the intensification of research performance demands in UK universities in relation to the complex terrain of academic identity formation. It considers whether a demand for academic researchers to produce and evidence economic and societal impact – in the rewards game of the UK’s performance-based research funding system, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – influences their self-concept as ‘engaged researchers’. While …
Institutionalizing public engagement through research in UK universities
In this article, we draw on open-text responses taken from an online attitudinal survey provided by public engagement (PE) professional service staff working across universities in the United Kingdom (UK). These are individuals employed to support and sometimes lead academic staff, principally research active academics, in PE activities. Their responses provide an insight into the current and future status of PE in UK higher education (HE) and sh…
When masses meet markets
The institutional form and conception of Higher Education have changed through the growth of mass higher education, which in many national systems now operates on market logics. Drawing on theories of credentialism, this article provides a critical analysis of the inter-relationship between massification and marketization and examines a range of consequences this has for institutional relations and dynamics. A central feature of credential inflat…
Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the operation of universities around the world. A transition to online platforms and remote forms of working as a consequence of national lockdown measures and campus closures has produced new labour challenges for academic faculty. This article makes use of 12 months of reporting from the academic trade press related to the experience of the pandemic in the UK higher education sector. Accounts publis…
Public engagement professionals in a prestige economy
Over the last decade, there has been significant investment made by the UK higher education policy and funding community in embedding public engagement within British universities. While some public engagement is undertaken by university staff – often on a voluntary and unpaid basis – much is carried out by public engagement professionals (PEPs), typically from within professional services divisions. The following account, based upon a multi-site…
Dilemmas of public participation in science policy
Public participation is ubiquitous in many contemporary democratic societies – used for many purposes, and in many contexts, with particular and growing relevance for policy-making on science and technology issues. However, there is a dearth of evidence as to its qualities and benefits. We contend that the implementation and interpretation of participation faces a number of dilemmas that – together –undermine its successful adoption. In this pape…
Science engagement at the museum school
This paper explores the accounts of science teachers working within the UK 's only ‘museum school’ and what they perceive as the benefits and shortcomings of ‘museum pedagogy’ as a process of object‐based teaching (and learning). Museum pedagogy is in this context considered for its potential in harmonising informal and formal approaches to science education. Discussion focuses on teachers’ use of cultural artefacts as a pedagogical strategy inte…
Expertise, authority and embodied pedagogy
The paper reports a study of masterclasses for young opera-singers, taught by experienced, world-class singers. These and similar forms of learning in the creative and performing arts represent fertile opportunities for the investigation of pedagogy. Given the recent ‘performative’ turn in sociological studies of education, and of cultural forms more widely, it is especially pertinent to examine the work of pedagogy in an overtly performative con…
Confirming the legitimacy of female participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)
This paper offers a study of a Saturday science-activity club for young secondary school aged girls, in Cardiff, UK. It provides a critical analysis of interactions between group participants and their mentors in building an equitable and experiential learning zone for the promotion of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) as subject and occupational choices. This study explores how science outreach programmes for young women re…
Measuring the Impact Values of Public Engagement in Medical Contexts
This article considers the impact values attributed to public engagement with science and technology (PEST) as articulated by a cohort of U.K.-based medical researchers ( n = 84) within a partially open-ended survey. Two discrete yet interlinking impact categories emerge—impact of PEST on researchers and the research process and impact of PEST on the public image and reputation of research/researchers. These accounts reveal a limited sentiment am…
Confirming the legitimacy of female participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)
This paper offers a study of a Saturday science-activity club for young secondary school aged girls, in Cardiff, UK. It provides a critical analysis of interactions between group participants and their mentors in building an equitable and experiential learning zone for the promotion of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) as subject and occupational choices. This study explores how science outreach programmes for young women re…
Measuring the Impact Values of Public Engagement in Medical Contexts
This article considers the impact values attributed to public engagement with science and technology (PEST) as articulated by a cohort of U.K.-based medical researchers ( n = 84) within a partially open-ended survey. Two discrete yet interlinking impact categories emerge—impact of PEST on researchers and the research process and impact of PEST on the public image and reputation of research/researchers. These accounts reveal a limited sentiment am…
Expertise, authority and embodied pedagogy
The paper reports a study of masterclasses for young opera-singers, taught by experienced, world-class singers. These and similar forms of learning in the creative and performing arts represent fertile opportunities for the investigation of pedagogy. Given the recent ‘performative’ turn in sociological studies of education, and of cultural forms more widely, it is especially pertinent to examine the work of pedagogy in an overtly performative con…
Issues in the articulation of ‘impact’
This paper reflects on the emergence of an impact agenda and its incorporation as a feature of the academic contract in UK universities. It focuses on the depositions of senior academic managers across a range of social science research centres, as they critically reflect upon their organizational strategy for capturing and communicating the socio-economic impact of their research. Their testimonies articulate manifold issues in impact capture ye…
Science engagement at the museum school
This paper explores the accounts of science teachers working within the UK 's only ‘museum school’ and what they perceive as the benefits and shortcomings of ‘museum pedagogy’ as a process of object‐based teaching (and learning). Museum pedagogy is in this context considered for its potential in harmonising informal and formal approaches to science education. Discussion focuses on teachers’ use of cultural artefacts as a pedagogical strategy inte…
Public intellectuals vs. new public management
Much is written apropos a rationalization for public engagement in science and technology (PEST). Less copious is a literature that considers PEST in a broader form and operationalized in the specific environment of higher education and the impact of its undertaking on the working lives of academics. This paper considers the status of public engagement in higher education (PE-HE) in the UK and the deliberations of academics, distinguished for the…
Selling ‘impact’
The intensification of an audit culture in higher education is made no more apparent than with the growing prevalence of performance-based research funding systems like the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the introduction of new measures of assessment like ‘impact’ or more specifically, the economic and societal impacts of research. Detractors of this regulatory intervention, however, question the legitimacy and credibility of such a…
(Re)Theorising global knowledge flows
Extended review of Globalizing knowledge: intellectuals, universities and publics in transformation, by Michael Kennedy, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2014, 424 pp., $34.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-80-479343-8
Excellence’ and Exclusion
A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom's 'Research Excellence Framework' (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities' response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014…
Impact in the REF
This article focuses on ‘impact’ as a new condition of research assessment for UK academics. It explores a history of resistance to an ‘impact agenda’ and how impact as a component of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – a system of performance based funding – is viewed by academics as an infringement to a scholarly way of life; as symptomatic of the marketisation of higher education; and as fundamentally incompatible and deleterious to the …
Artifice or integrity in the marketization of research impact? Investigating the moral economy of (pathways to) impact statements within research funding proposals in the UK and Australia
A focus on academic performativity and a rationalizing of what academics do according to measurable outputs has, in the era of higher education's (HE) neoliberalization and marketization, engendered debate regarding the ‘authenticity’ of academic identity and practice. In such a context, a ‘performative’ prioritization of leveraging ‘positional goods’, such as external research funds, presents a specific challenge to the construction of academics…
Dilemmas of public participation in science policy
Public participation is ubiquitous in many contemporary democratic societies – used for many purposes, and in many contexts, with particular and growing relevance for policy-making on science and technology issues. However, there is a dearth of evidence as to its qualities and benefits. We contend that the implementation and interpretation of participation faces a number of dilemmas that – together –undermine its successful adoption. In this pape…
Institutionalizing public engagement through research in UK universities
In this article, we draw on open-text responses taken from an online attitudinal survey provided by public engagement (PE) professional service staff working across universities in the United Kingdom (UK). These are individuals employed to support and sometimes lead academic staff, principally research active academics, in PE activities. Their responses provide an insight into the current and future status of PE in UK higher education (HE) and sh…
Evaluating 'impact' in the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF)
Little is known about the process of evaluating the economic and societal impact of research undertaken in university settings. In this paper, we explore the accounts of senior academics and user-assessors, populating disciplinary sub-panels spanning the humanities and social sciences, convened to judge and ‘score’ the impact claims of researchers from UK universities as a new component of research evaluation within the specific context of the UK…
Competing institutional logics in universities in the United Kingdom
Theoretical literature on institutions emphasizes the importance of logics – shared rationalizations – in determining many aspects of organizations. In this literature, universities are often discussed as an example of an institution with a particularly strong and cohesive logic, one rooted in notions of academic excellence and the pursuit of universal knowledge. However, more recent literature has argued that multiple institutional logics often …
‘The Covid-19 crisis is not the core problem’
This article, drawing on data from an international survey – distributed in the summer of 2020 – explores the experiences and concerns of academic staff (n=167) working in universities in Ireland and their perceptions of their institutions’ early response to the pandemic. Concerns related to transitioning to remote online working, impact on research productivity and culture, and work intensification, as intersected by enhanced managerialism, are …
Covid-19 and digital disruption in UK universities
COVID-19 has caused the closure of university campuses around the world and migration of all learning, teaching, and assessment into online domains. The impacts of this on the academic community as frontline providers of higher education are profound. In this article, we report the findings from a survey of n = 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy. Respon…
Pandemia’
Universities in the UK, and in other countries like Australia and the USA, have responded to the operational and financial challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic by prioritising institutional solvency and enforcing changes to the work-practices and profiles of their staff. For academics, an adjustment to institutional life under COVID-19 has been dramatic and resulted in the overwhelming majority making a transition to prolonged remote-wor…
Competitive accountability and the dispossession of academic identity
This article discusses the intensification of research performance demands in UK universities in relation to the complex terrain of academic identity formation. It considers whether a demand for academic researchers to produce and evidence economic and societal impact – in the rewards game of the UK’s performance-based research funding system, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – influences their self-concept as ‘engaged researchers’. While …
‘This can’t be the new norm’
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the university sector globally. This article reports on the Australian findings from a large-scale survey of academic staff and their experiences and predictions of the impact of the pandemic on their wellbeing. We report the perceptions of n=370 Australian academics and accounts of their institutions’ responses to COVID-19, analysed using self-determination theory. Respondents report work-related str…
Education without limits’
This article reports on how those working in post-secondary education and training in Singapore perceive the professional effects of a transition to online learning, teaching and assessment (LTA) as a consequence of the COVID-19 global pandemic. It draws on a survey sample of n=1553 educators and trainers working in Singapore and their perspectives on a how a migration to online LTA is producing long-term, if not permanent changes to the organiza…
Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the operation of universities around the world. A transition to online platforms and remote forms of working as a consequence of national lockdown measures and campus closures has produced new labour challenges for academic faculty. This article makes use of 12 months of reporting from the academic trade press related to the experience of the pandemic in the UK higher education sector. Accounts publis…
Public engagement professionals in a prestige economy
Over the last decade, there has been significant investment made by the UK higher education policy and funding community in embedding public engagement within British universities. While some public engagement is undertaken by university staff – often on a voluntary and unpaid basis – much is carried out by public engagement professionals (PEPs), typically from within professional services divisions. The following account, based upon a multi-site…
When masses meet markets
The institutional form and conception of Higher Education have changed through the growth of mass higher education, which in many national systems now operates on market logics. Drawing on theories of credentialism, this article provides a critical analysis of the inter-relationship between massification and marketization and examines a range of consequences this has for institutional relations and dynamics. A central feature of credential inflat…
‘Living at work’
The COVID-19 pandemic has been the source of large-scale disruption to the work practices of university staff, across the UK and globally. This article reports the experiences of n = 4731 professional services staff (PSS) working in UK universities and their experiences of pandemic-related work disruption. It specifically focuses on a transition to remote-working as a consequence of social restrictions and campus closures, presenting both quantit…
Sociology (30 obras) · Political science (27 obras) · Higher education (21 obras) · Higher Education Governance and Development (21 obras) · Public relations (20 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Psychology (14 obras) · Pedagogy (10 obras) · Higher Education Practises and Engagement (9 obras) · Medicine (9 obras)