A Flat Earth Society? Imagining Academic Freedom

Bibliographic Data

ID3526003
AuthorsRagna Boden (0000-0001-7874-2440, Cardiff University), Rebecca Boden, Debbie Epstein (Cardiff University)
Year2011
Volume59
Issue3
Pages476-495
Publication date2011-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-954x.2011.02014.x
OpenAlexW1809566243
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited32

This paper starts from the standpoint that academic freedom is a necessary precondition to sociological imagination that challenges and defies the status quo. In the introduction, we consider the legacy of sociology as praxis - intended not merely to understand, but to change the world. We then move on to conceptualise academic freedom as requiring formal, infrastructural and psychic freedoms. We then chart the genealogy of universities from academically free, but socially exclusive, institutions to their present state, using the history of higher education in the UK as a case study to consider the prospects for universities and academics within them to contribute to a vibrant and sustainable defiant sociological research imagination and the consequences of their failure to do so. We finish with a manifesto for the reinvigorating of a defiant sociological imagination building on the radical traditions we have referred to above

Academic freedom · Epistemology · Higher education · Manifesto · Political science · Praxis · Social science · Sociological imagination · Sociology · State (computer science · Status quo · Academic Freedom and Politics · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Higher Education Governance and Development · Law

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