'Living at work': COVID-19, remote-working and the spatio-relational reorganisation of professional services in UK universities.

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  = 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 quantitative and qualitative findings that speak to the various spatio-relational impacts of PSS working at distance from university campuses.

COVID-19: A Neoliberal Nirvana?

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.

Heritable Human Genome Editing: The Public Engagement Imperative.

In the view of many, heritable human genome editing (HHGE) harbors the remedial potential of ridding the world of deadly genetic diseases. A Hippocratic obligation, if there ever was one, HHGE is widely viewed as a life-sustaining proposition. The national go/no-go decision regarding the implementation of HHGE, however, must not, in the collective view of the authors, proceed absent thorough public engagement.

COVID-19 and digital disruption in UK universities: afflictions and affordances of emergency online migration.

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  = 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy.

'Excellence' and Exclusion: The Individual Costs of Institutional Competitiveness.

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) calls "neoliberalism's war on higher education" or more precisely the deleterious consequences of non-participation in the REF.