Transitions and Trajectories in Higher Education: Faculty and Learner Experiences.

Universities within broader knowledge systems are an important point of investigation in the evolving Anthropocene marked by critical structural transitions, encompassing individual, institutional and collective agential trajectories. This interplay of transitions and trajectories brings into focus the ‘public’ nature of learning spaces, and the paper takes at its starting point this interplay investigating higher education in urban studies and its allied spaces of learning through the lens of Justice, broadly construed. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in India, Tanzania, Sri Lanka and Thailand, on understanding faculty practices and learner experiences, the paper highlights the tension that emerged, particularly in two types of change embedded with their own strategic intents – on the one hand the evolving nature of higher education and allied spaces of learning, and on the other, the pathways imagined and practiced by faculty and learner themselves.

In particular, the paper is set against the backdrop of the nature of ‘public’, and the inherent rights to quality and democratic education that it promises. It is informed by ongoing conversations around questions of decolonization of higher education, critical representational politics, epistemic justice, and identities and marginalizations, through evidence provided in the narratives of faculty and learners, and touching on issues of pedagogic content, access and educational attainment, campus climate, institutional and non-institutional structures and challenges of technology.

Understanding such negotiations in spaces of higher education and affiliated networks of learning in the context of urban studies allows us to critically examine the just nature of ‘public’ knowledge and knowledge systems.