Call for Papers: How are we doing on campus? Multilayered Perspectives on Today's Universities - Volume 5 Issue 3 (2024): October

By the 2020s, we have been globally and locally experiencing multiple crises and transformations. Numerous critical issues such as ongoing impacts of the climate crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, societal tensions related to migration processes, political crises, economic inequalities and crises, rapid entry of digitalization and artificial intelligence into education intersect on university campuses. In addition, we should not ignore the impact of the February 2023 earthquake in Turkey on universities. During this timeframe when living conditions, resources, and expectations for the future have been changing, university students, academics, administrative staff, and university administrations found themselves in the midst of multiple transformation processes to which they are expected to quickly adjust.

The physical, social, political, and economic contexts we are in pose challenges in foreseeing the future. This unpredictability at times affects our mood, dampens our enthusiasm and fortitude. Increasing anxieties, unwillingness, fatigue, feelings of injustice make it difficult to get up in the morning and come to campus, and call for questioning the meaning of our relationship with the university as an institution. However, the university has a critical role both in terms of education processes and research processes. The university is still important as the institution that will produce the literature and new tools to name, interpret, and propose solutions to these crises on the one hand, while experiencing the effects of them on the other.

While the arrival of the generation born into smart technologies in the early 2000s at universities with their unique learning style, sensitivities, and expectations and what conventional university education might offer to them were being discussed, with the pandemic the sudden and compulsory introduction of distance education further transformed the university experience. Recently, artificial intelligence has fallen into the center of campus agenda with its excitement and fears. Internationalization gaining momentum despite inadequate institutional capacities and the reflections of migration-related social tensions on campuses have limited the possibility to experience universities as spaces for encountering differences. The loss of power of democratic institutions in the political field and ongoing restrictions on academic freedoms have seriously eroded the quality of universities as a space that hosts the discussions of diverse ideas. Economic difficulties and uncertainties have negatively affected both the living conditions and future expectations of university employees and students. These effects together are directing all of us to rethink our mental health, academic motivation, education and assessment methods, and curricula in higher education.

Keeping all these points in mind, with the Reflektif issue titled "How Are We Doing on Campus? Multilayered Perspectives on Today's Universities", we aim to think together about the academic and mental well-being of all components comprising campuses and enhancing approaches. In other words, we aim for an issue focusing on the effects of social, political, and economic macro processes on campuses. We would also like to emphasize that we are open to quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method studies, which we hope will include studies focused on all components of the university.

Within this framework, we invite papers that address higher-education-related problems and solutions to them, focusing on, yet not limited to, the following themes:

• Well-being of University Students (Motivation and experience of university students; changing mental health needs on campuses; policies and preventive/protective activities to support well-being, university dropouts, and NEETs)
• Well-being of Academics and Administrative Staff (Unhappiness of university employees: performance pressures, mobbing, and hierarchies; motivation and experience of academics and administrative staff; policies and preventive/protective activities to support well-being)
• Political Agendas and the University (Academic freedom; reflections of the restriction in the representation capacity of politics on campuses; polarization on campuses)
• Economic Agendas and the University (Effects of economic uncertainty and income distribution imbalance on housing crisis, housing opportunities and university experience; inequalities of access brought by digitalization)
• Distance Education (Experiences of students and academics with distance education; effect of different distance education tools and methods on academic motivation, experience, and success)
• Artificial Intelligence at the University (Experience of students and academics with artificial intelligence tools in higher education; effectiveness of artificial intelligence as a learning and assessment tool; ethical codes; examples of good usage)
• Contemporary Curriculum and Course Frameworks (The changing ways in which students interact with knowledge, and curricula that can meet this change; feminist interventions in the curriculum; re-visiting the decolonization discussion in the context of the curriculum development in Turkey; different assessment methods such as digital portfolios, gaming)
• Earthquake and the University (Effects of the earthquake on the mental health of university students, academics, and administrative staff; primary and secondary traumatization on campus)
• Pandemic and the University (Effects of the pandemic on the mental health of university students, academics, and administrative staff; experience of returning to campuses after the pandemic)
• Sustainability on Campus (Experiences of and suggestions for teaching and implementing awareness about renewable energy sources, waste management, water conservation, green buildings, etc. on campus; experiences of and suggestions for teaching and implementing social sustainability issues such as inclusivity, equal opportunities, and rights on campus)
• Inclusiveness and Internationalization on Campus (Campus as a meeting place: Erasmus experiences and beyond; YÖS (Foreign Student Examination) system and its impact on campus; infrastructure of internationalization of universities and improvement suggestions; perceptions, experiences, and relationships of students; discrimination on campus, experiences of and suggestions for inclusiveness on campus)
• What Comes Next (Professional, economic, and reputational returns of the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees; the difficult track: being a doctoral student; the relationship of the business world with today's university graduate)
• A Knotty Process: Academic Career (Academic promotion processes; funds and resources; publication processes)

 

Issue Editors: Alev Çavdar, Ömer Turan

Deadline for submission: July 15, 2024