After the unsuccessful end of the spring 2009 French university movement, faculty and student activists searched for new political strategies. One promising option was an internationalist project that sought to unite anti-Bologna Project movements across Europe. Yet an ethnographic study of two international counter-summits in Brussels (March 2010) and Dijon (May 2011) shows that this strategy was unsuccessful. This article explores the causes of these failures, arguing that activist internationalism became caught in a trap of political mimesis, and that the form of official international summits was incompatible with activists’ temporal, representational, and reflexive needs.
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Two Failures of Left Internationalism
Political Mimesis at French University Counter-Summits, 2010–2011
Eli Thorkelson
Eli Thorkelson
Nancy Abelmann (2009) The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation
Review by Eli Thorkelson
Eli Thorkelson and Steve Fuller
Annie Vinokur and Carole Sigman (eds) (2010) L’enseignement supérieur entre nouvelle gestion publique et crise systémique
Review by Eli Thorkelson
Michèle Lamont (2009) How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment
Review by Steve Fuller
Katherine Nielsen and Eli Thorkelson
Ethnographers have constructed contradicting assertions, and indeed assumptions,
about the nature of learning, how it is best accomplished, and
how students internalise this learning in order to form both individualised
and collective identities. Are the rites of passage, so often described in analyses
of postgraduate socialisation – the oral examinations, the viva voce, the
departmental seminar, or graduation ceremony – the only routes available
for understanding how anthropological culture is inculcated into students?
Is the role of the supervisor as mentor pivotal in the successful completion
of a Ph.D? Or is this more of a master/apprentice relationship? Does this
proc ess maintain its relevance in a globalised field and with instant virtual
access to experts from other institutions anywhere in the world? Such issues
have been of interest to both students and faculty within the anthropology
discipline, in particular, and the social sciences more generally.
Eli Thorkelson, Guy Redden, Christopher Newfield, Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich and Marie-Pierre Moreau
Christopher Newfield (2016) The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 430 pp., ISBN 9781421421629
William C. Smith (ed.) (2016) The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice Oxford: Symposium Books, 302 pp., ISBN 9781873927724
Michael W. Kirst and Mitchell L. Stevens (eds) (2015) Remaking College: The Changing Ecology of Higher Education Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 323 pp., ISBN 9780804793292
Zuleika Arashiro and Malba Barahona (eds) (2015) Women in Academia Crossing North–South Borders: Gender, Race and Displacement Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 166 pp., ISBN 9781498517690
Genine A. Hook (2016) Sole Parent Students and Higher Education: Gender, Policy and Widening Participation London: Palgrave Macmillan, 230 pp., ISBN 9781137598868