Six European universities will join forces to educate young researchers who will be examining the university reforms currently influencing the global university development. This will be part of the new international Universities in the Knowledge Economy (UNIKE) project. The project is supported by the EU's Marie Curie Actions Fellowship Programme and will be running over five years - from 2013 to 2017.
The UNIKE project will train a networked group of critical researchers who will examine the changing roles and scope of universities in emerging global knowledge economies. They will also compare developments in Europe and the Asia-Pacific Rim. The project will comprise 12 new PhD projects and 2 postdoc projects and is currently open. Applicants from all countries are eligible for the positions.
The 12 individual doctoral projects focus on the following topics:
- ASEM meetings and HE ‘policy travel’ from Europe to Asia
- Internationalisation of higher education in centres and peripheries
- Conjunction of Chinese and Western educational traditions in the design and teaching of Sino-Danish Centre courses
- Academic values between globalisation and globalism
- Models of doctoral education
- Mapping the field of higher education industries, and choosing case studies
- Audit culture and the Industries of ranking
- Think Tanks and Academic Entrepreneurs in the Production of Knowledg
- Impact of governance changes on the educational categories and internal life of universities
- Alternative forms of university ownership, finance and organisation
- Governance through Autonomy – A context-rich comparative study.
- Management and gender
The two 2 individual post-doctoral projects are to address the following:
- New landscapes of publishing and knowledge dissemination
- Academic entrepreneurialism, civil society and democracy
Application deadline is Sunday 3 February 2013 at 17:00 CET.
Universities which partnered in this project are Aarhus University (Denmark), University of Bristol (UK), Roehampton University (UK), Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France), Univerza V Ljubljani (Slovenia) and Universidade do Porto (Portugal). There is also a number of associated partners, among which are Times Higher Education, The Sino-Danish Center in Beijing, the Magna Charta Observatory, the Center for Graduate Education Research at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, and others.
"The project has a wide and international scope and is initiated in collaboration with five other European universities and 15 universities from the Pacific Region. The purpose of the project is to establish a global network for researchers, including PhDs and postdocs, which can critically analyse university developments in different parts of the world," says Susan Wright, professor at Aarhus University and head of the project.
The project starts with the academic year 2013.
More about the calls and the project on the project page: http://unike.au.dk/