School of Arts and Social Sciences

In view of the ongoing so-called 'refugee crisis', which began in late 2014, there is a growing potential <strong>demand for higher education</strong> (HE) opportunities amongst refugee communities in Europe and elsewhere. The EU acknowledges this need and supports the integration of people with refugee backgrounds into HE, including through funding of online linguistic support for new arrivals. Thus far, however, we know relatively little about the participation<strong> levels of students with refugee backgrounds in European universities</strong>. As noted in the recent Eurydice report, most countries of the Erasmus+ programme do not have specific policy approaches on this matter despite several systems referring to refugees and/or asylum seekers in national legislation. Furthermore, the report suggested that few countries still undertake systematic monitoring, confirming the low priority of this issue in the national HE systems. In the absence of to...

Bringing our collective experiences of past collaborations through a virtual connection, we created an international research team of 16 multidiscipline, multicultural, and multilingual academic women called “COVID GAP” (Gendered Academic Productivity) to explore the ongoing challenges and effects of COVID-19. Identifying as insider researchers, we engaged in a two-phase, primarily qualitative research project to better understand the lived experiences of academics during the pandemic. Our past individual experiences with cooperative research informed our roles and responsibilities and how we organized and communicated. This article is a reflection of how COVID GAP has refined our collaborative process in response to an evolving comprehension of our own lessons learned including understanding the nature of cooperative research and that it takes time and effort. From our experience, we provide specific recommendations for group collaborations emphasizing the need to identify a team c...

The discourse on research productivity during the early months of COVID-19 has been dominated by bibliometric and quantitative studies highlighting the fewer publications from women scholars compared to men, but few considered the reasons behind this phenomenon. This paper offers new empirical insights into the experiences and perceptions of women scholars during the early stages of the pandemic using the feminist standpoint theory approach to understand why they have been seemingly less productive. Our findings, based on 101 qualitative survey responses, illustrate the centrality of support with respect to childcare, professional-emotional support from peers and mentors that were lost. Restricted access to institutional facilities, resources, loss of structure, additional time required to prepare for online teaching, and increased service load have negatively impacted research productivity. These factors are compounded by poor mental health with high cognitive and emotional tolls, ...

In view of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ which began in late 2014, there is a growing potential demand for higher education opportunities amongst refugee communities in England and more widely in Europe. Whilst exact numbers are not certain, it is necessary to establish whether such demands can be met at all. Based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with nineteen refugees and asylum seekers residing in England, this study explores refugee background students’ perceptions of the barriers to higher education and builds on previous research by including participants of varied ages, locations and study statuses — namely, aspiring to enrol, or currently enrolled in universities. While existing previous research provided extensive accounts of barriers to access, these were presented as separate issues, where in reality, these factors rarely occur in isolation. Thus, the analytical focus in this paper concerns how these different barriers to access not only accumulate, but also inter-...

Purpose This paper aims to identify the documented effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on early career researcher (ECR) activity, development, career prospects and well-being. Design/methodology/approach This is a systematic literature review of English language peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2021, which provided empirical evidence of the impact of the pandemic on ECR activity and development. The search strategy involved online databases (Scopus, Web of Science and Overton); well-established higher education journals (based on Scopus classification) and references in the retained articles (snowballing). The final sample included 11 papers. Findings The evidence shows that ECRs have been affected in terms of research activity, researcher development, career prospects and well-being. Although many negative consequences were identified, some promising learning practices have arisen; however, these opportunities were not always fully realised. The results raise questions...

This report provides summary of findings and recommendations of the 'Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis on Doctoral Researchers in the UK' project delivered by doctoral researchers at the Department of Education, University of York. The project was organised around the key themes of: supervision; facilities; working from home; impact on research; livelihood; and, productivity and wellbeing

The European Tertiary Education Register (ETER) is the reference dataset on European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). ETER provides data on nearly 3,500 HEIs in about 40 European countries, including descriptive information, geographical information, students and graduates (with various breakdowns), revenues and expenditures, personnel, and research activities; as of March 2023, data cover the years from 2011–2020. ETER complies with OECD-UNESCO-EUROSTAT standards for educational statistics; most data are collected from National Statistical Authorities (NSAs) or ministries of participating countries and are subject to extensive checks and harmonization. The development of ETER has been funded by the European Commission and is part of the current efforts to establish a European Higher Education Sector Observatory; it is closely connected to the establishment of a broader data infrastructure in the field of science and innovation studies (RISIS). The ETER dataset is widely used i...