Institute of Education

What is ‘higher education’ and what does it do for persons, organisations, communities, cities, nations and the world? What difference does it make? How do we know? While these questions and others related to the contributions or effects of higher or tertiary education are discussed across the world, there is no agreement on what are those contributions. The higher education sector is connected to most other parts of society, and it is often difficult or impossible to isolate its discrete causal effects. In some quarters a disabling thinking prevails. Higher education is modelled as if all that this vast sector produces is measurable earnings benefits for individual graduates and new research-based products for globally competitive industry. Yet graduate earnings are partly shaped outside education, by family background and economic fluctuations; and higher education not only augments careers, it immerses students in knowledge, and it helps to shape them as people, and has many other individual and collective-social outcomes, as Assessing the contributions of higher education will show. Still, the fact that radical simplifications dominate this debate is not surprising. It is difficult to grasp the full range of what the sector does. There is no universal template and no comprehensive account. Perceptions of what higher education is vary according to beliefs about government and society, and the disciplinary or purposive lens used to view the sector, not to mention the interests at stake. Is both a common and comprehensive understanding possible, and if so, how? That question repeatedly returns during this book.

Human agency, implying, from sociology’s perspective, proactive or even transformative individual behaviour upon the social world (or “social structures” as sociologists call them), remains one of the central concepts and problems for both social science and practice. Current stage of societal evolution, de-structuration, makes individual agency especially important for both individual and collective well-being. In this context, the contribution of contemporary art (2018–2022) to agency issues remains little known in the academic world. The objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary art representatives (artists, curators, and experts) express the issue of agency through their artworks, and to compare this viewpoint with the interpretations from other areas of public life. The focus is on those aspects, ideas, and meanings related to agency that are accessible to a broad audience and can be applied to phenomena outside the realm of art but remain overlooked or underdeveloped in current academic discussions on agency. The authors analyse initiatives in both institutional and non-institutional art on a global scale, and explore their manifestations and impact in comprehending and advancing agency. Finally, this article proposes a typology of agency manifestations in contemporary art: (1) straightforward (strong, radical, protest) agency; (2) escapism; (3) panic agency; (4) subject-object carnivalism.

This chapter examines 20 years of public sector reforms in Russia and their impacts on the structure, functions, and outcomes of policies, programs, and institutions in the areas of social support, health care, and education. Understanding the social system that has emerged over that period requires knowledge of sector-specific changes at multiple levels of government (federal, regional, and municipal) as well as nation-wide changes in administrative and civil service regulations and practices.