Contemporary higher education – at the limit of comprehension?
- Professor Simon Marginson
- Professor Lynn McAlpine
- Professor Søren Bengtsen
Researching into the increasingly fast-changing societally and politically contexts of universities and higher education, put difficult demands on epistemologies and conceptual frameworks applied in such research. While the complexities of empirical contexts of higher education are often foregrounded in the research, the underlying epistemological challenges are more rarely brought up for critical discussion. In this session we explore the many-sided and often contradictory challenges we are faced with as researchers in order to grasp, sense, and interpret the high level of nuances, nestedness, and unruliness of higher education policies and practices intersecting across educational, institutional, societal, and cultural contexts. We present and discuss the ways we all share an epistemological root in critical realism but have each developed our own research approaches in order to capture the complexities of higher education policy and practice interrelations.
Our reflections are based on the following three questions, which each of us will reply to:
- What complexities within higher education are we researching into and why? Why do we give this the significance we do?
- How has an epistemological stance within critical realism helped us in our research?
- In what ways have we translated (operationalized) the critical realist stance into our own research framework (e.g. the multi-scalar approach, and nested context framework)? What are the affordances and constraints?
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Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol, Professor of Higher Education (emeritus) at the University of Oxford and Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education. He is also an Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University, Visiting Research Professor at the University of Hong Kong, and Professorial Associate of the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Social Sciences in UK and of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and a member of Academia Europaea. From 2015-2024 he was Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). Simon’s work is focused primarily on global, international and comparative higher education, global science, higher education in East Asia, and the social contributions of higher education. His most recent book is Global higher education in times of upheaval: On common goods, geopolitics and decolonization (Bloomsbury Academic, February 2026).
Lynn McAlpine is Professor Emerita of Higher Education Development at the University of Oxford and Professor Emerita at McGill University. She is also Visiting Professor at Lancaster University, a Fellow of the UK Society for Research into Higher Education and has received two honorary doctorates in recognition of her contributions. A key interest is lifelong and professional learning – learning that is situated within global trends such as internationalisation, national policy regimes, and institutional afordances and constraints. Her work explores how post-PhDs experience and navigate their careers and personal lives, whether within the academy (from postdocs to more senior leaders) or beyond (from NGO policy analyst to private sector CEO/ codirector/ founder of a start-up).
Søren S. E. Bengtsen is Professor at the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University, Denmark, where he is also Co-Director of the research centre ‘Centre for Higher Education Futures’ (CHEF). Bengtsen serves as Chair of the Danish Network for Educational Development in Higher Education (DUN), and as Co-President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society (PaTHES). He is Co-Editor of the three book series: ‘Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives’ (Springer), ‘World Issues in the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education’ (Routledge), and ‘Key Concepts for the University’ (Bloomsbury).