PG DATA.docx

This research examines the challenges faced by teachers of post-graduate students from the perspective of the emerging concept of neuroliberalism. The latter, a relatively new development in educational governance, draws attention to the way in which trends in brain science, affect studies and technology are changing the way the role, positionality and purpose(s) of HE practitioners are understood. In a field inflected by long-standing debates about reflexion, neuroscience, and educationalising, neuroliberalism is used as an overarching governmental principle to bring together seemingly disparate strands of policy and practice. Drawing on analyses of qualitative data from interviews of teachers on post-graduate programmes, we discuss how our interviewees’ concerns about HE practices are driven by a neuroliberal agenda focused on meta-cognition, affect and techno-hybridity. Starting this study in the wider debate about neuroliberal governance, we suggest that while the latter circulates a more humanistic, less technocratic discourse of how HE should function, in its effects this development represents a deepening of existing power imbalances and a reinforcement of structures whose goal is to normalise and exploit an increasingly volatile vision of HE practice and provision in perpetual motion.