About HECU10

HECU 10 Logo

Lancaster University, UK.
 4th – 6th July 2022

Key Dates

Submission of proposals: Extended to 12th December 2021
Notification of outcomes: 10th January 2022
Early Bird Registration deadline: 14th March 2022
Registration Deadline: 13th June 2022

About the Conference

Higher Education Close-Up is a peer reviewed biennial international conference, focused on issues relating to in-depth research into higher education. HECU10 takes place at Lancaster University on 4th – 6th July, 2022 and follows on from the very successful HECU9 in Cape Town, South Africa in November 2018. Higher Education Close Up is a virtual network of the Society For Research into Higher Education. The conference venue will be the luxurious Lancaster House Hotel, with accommodation for delegates in the hotel’s ensuite rooms.

The conference runs from lunchtime on the first day to lunchtime on the third day to enable colleagues to travel to and from Lancaster.

Conference Theme

The theme for HECU10 is ‘Critical approaches to close-up higher education research’.

The theme is intended to open discussion around multiple understandings of criticality in close-up higher education research.  This includes, but is not limited to, the use of critical theory and/or critical pedagogy as a lens through which to engage with research into higher education. Equally it refers to taking a critical stance in terms of a questioning approach to the research processes themselves and towards the broader social framework in which higher education is situated.  The theme raises questions about how we conduct such close-up research in a time in which higher education itself, and the practices and values of the academy, are subject to critique and challenge.  How do we demonstrate critical reflexivity as close-up researchers in a time of ‘fake news’ and challenges to the role of expert knowledge? In what ways is a commitment to critical approaches a necessary feature of the fine-grained, nuanced research that defines the ‘close-up’ approach, in contrast to other forms of research?  Finally, we should consider the relationship between close-up research and more macro perspectives:  understood through the lens of criticality what are the tensions between them and in what ways may they be complementary (this thread also encompasses the notion of interdisciplinarity and what it means to adopt a critical interdisciplinary approach).Each of the keynote speakers has provided a think piece, which raises questions about different aspects of this theme.  We ask that conference participants submit proposals for papers that in some way respond to these questions that that an interactive conversation can develop before, during and, we hope, after the conference.

The Call for Proposals outlines this process in more detail

Discussion List

The Higher Education Close Up discussion list is at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/HIGHER-EDUCATION-CLOSE-UP.html. Please join this list for conference announcements and to participate in ongoing discussions of in-depth higher education research.

Publications from the conference

As with previous conferences, we aim to put together a Special Issue of a journal based on selected papers from the conference. The papers will be selected on the basis of: a) academic quality and b) their contribution to making a coherent collection, taken together.

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