Sharon Traweek

Location

UCLA
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles
90095
United States

Position

I am affiliated with Gender Studies and History Departments, plus the Terasaki Center

Biography

Ah .. Knut H. Sørensen (NTNU) and I just finished Questing Excellence in Academia: A Tale of Two Universities. Click https://www.routledge.com/Questing-Excellence-in-Academia-A-Tale-of-Two-... to access website that includes link for free digital version of full book text. The book begins: “Unlike almost most other studies of neoliberal universities and academic capitalism this book ethnographically explores and interprets those transformations and their contradictions empirically in the everyday practices of students, faculty members, and administrators at two public universities: NTNU in Norway and UCLA in California.” We juxtapose - but do not 'compare' in the conventional academic sense – those two universities’ ways of engaging with the changing global political economies of academia since the 1970s. Neither NTNU nor UCLA were considered ‘important’ then; now both are. We address how and why that has happened as a way to understand the changing global ecologies for knowledge making, circulation, and privilege.