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New frontiers: exploring the space/s of higher education

Given the tremendous number of submissions this special issue has attracted, it appears there is considerable interest among higher education scholars around the world in exploring the theme of space in higher education. After receiving 53 submissions, we whittled the selection down to just 13 articles that best represent the range of issues canvassed and a global reach. Echoing the spatial theme of the issue, our selection includes contributions from across the globe: Australasia (Australia, New Zealand), the United Kingdom (England, Ireland), continental Europe (the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark) and North America (USA, Canada). It is also pleasing to see contributions exploring the dimensions of space and higher education from a range of disciplinary perspectives including education, social sciences, philosophy and business as well as the arts, architecture and media and communications, and including theoretical, methodological and empirically based work. In all cases, spatial considerations – whether physical, virtual or figurative – provide the common vector throughout. The theme of academic belonging and the extent to which universities provide a ‘space’ for such belonging is a recurring theme throughout the issue. This no doubt reflects the fact that the university is an increasingly contested space, even in relation to the very concept of the university itself. On the one hand, we see the rise of the all-encompassing ‘global’ or entrepreneurial university (Marginson & Considine, 2000) and, on the other, the somewhat less heroic and fragile university in ruins (Readings, 1996). Belief in the capacity of higher education to drive and transform economic and social development is widely held and has led to flows of students, academics and knowledge around the globe. Fuelled by what has been termed ‘knowledge economy optimism’ (Cuthbert & Molla, 2015), we see higher education imbued with extraordinary transformative potential. What does this mean for those who inhabit universities – academics and students? The issue of the meaning and purpose of the university is taken up in the opening article by Nørgård, Smedegaard, and Bengtsen who examine academic citizenship by asking what it means to dwell in the contemporary university. Through the concept of the ‘placeful university’, they explore the potential of genuine mutual obligation between university and society for advancing personal, academic and societal value. Lolich and Lynch also address the issue of academic belonging by examining to what extent students ‘buy into’ the pervasive knowledge economy narrative. They argue that while there is congruence with such narratives with respect to issues such as employability there is also incongruence. Most notably, affective drivers – such as love of topic and care for others – act as significant disruptors to the otherwise dominant instrumental narratives coming from knowledge economy discourses. The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is also the subject of the article by Charteris, Gannon, Mayes, Nye, and Stephenson, which focuses on the constitution of academic subjectivities. Through three stories about the experience of ‘becoming academic’, they explore affective dimensions of working in the contemporary university