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Full-Text Articles in Education

Reconceptualizing College Impact Studies Through A Fractal Assemblage Theory, Laura Elizabeth Smithers Jan 2020

Reconceptualizing College Impact Studies Through A Fractal Assemblage Theory, Laura Elizabeth Smithers

Educational Foundations & Leadership Faculty Publications

College impact studies have formed the common sense of understanding institutional relationships to student growth and change for decades. In this time, they have become entangled with the production of the neoliberal university. This paper1 presents an alternative theorization of student change on campus, a fractal assemblage theory. Assemblage theory is discussed through a single common language of major assemblage theory concepts across four authors. After exploring these concepts in depth, this paper returns to the stakes of assemblage theory: higher education research not to channel student to predetermined outcomes, but to create student futures in excess of our …


Contemporary Philosophical Proposals For The University: Toward A Philosophy Of Higher Education By Aaron Stoller & Eli Kramer, Editors, Laura E. Smithers Jul 2018

Contemporary Philosophical Proposals For The University: Toward A Philosophy Of Higher Education By Aaron Stoller & Eli Kramer, Editors, Laura E. Smithers

Educational Foundations & Leadership Faculty Publications

Aaron Stoller and Eli Kramer’s (2018) edited volume Contemporary Philosophical Proposals for the University: Toward a Philosophy of Higher Education is a thought provoking addition to the literature between philosophy and higher education. The editors argue for the possibilities of philosophical thinking, particularly a reconstructive philosophy as read through the work of John Dewey, to ameliorate the problems of our neoliberal times. The contributed chapters extend this work to particular sites in higher education as well as through additional philosophers and philosophical schools of thought. This volume will be of interest to philosophers engaged with problems of higher education, university …


Knowledge For Social Change: Bacon, Dewey, And The Revolutionary Transformation Of Research Universities In The Twenty-First Century, Chris R. Glass Jan 2018

Knowledge For Social Change: Bacon, Dewey, And The Revolutionary Transformation Of Research Universities In The Twenty-First Century, Chris R. Glass

Educational Foundations & Leadership Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Nomadic Subjectivity: Movement In Contemporary Student Development Theory, Laura Elizabeth Smithers, Paul William Eaton Jan 2017

Nomadic Subjectivity: Movement In Contemporary Student Development Theory, Laura Elizabeth Smithers, Paul William Eaton

Educational Foundations & Leadership Faculty Publications

This essay opens space for movement in higher education~student affairs by using poststructural philosophy as a counterweight to balance the corpus of student development theories that create and inscribe in/dividualized subjectivity onto students. Taking up Jones and Stewart’s (2016) structuring of waves in student development theorizing, we unpack régimes of truth that undergird the profession of college student educators: discipline/control (a doubled biopower that centers the whole student), and dividuation (a fracturing of the whole student into component parts). We extend dividuation to include an adherence to representationalism through method in perpetuating and inscribing the student as in/dividual (neoliberal subjectivity). …