The Possibilities of Sustaining Critical Intellectual Work Under Regimes of Evidence, Audit, and Ethical Governance

This paper explores three closely related practices: the turn to 'evidence' and re-endorsement of positivist assumptions; audit and the commodifcation of knowledge; and the new governance of research ethics. In each case I show that these moves involve a discursive shifts in the meaning of higher education, analyse the ways in which they represent newer forms of control within the academy, and consider the implications for critical intellectual work. I argue that disrupting dominant ideas and practices that currently pervade universities is important as part of the debate about more creative ways of moving forward.