Dr Vassiliki Papatsiba

Academic agendas of knowledge generation, collaboration and public policies

Vassiliki is investigating knowledge agendas in the academy, and the effects of research funding, policies and institutional governance on scientific rationality and individual behaviours of researchers. This strand of inquiry is being actively pursued through her EU-funded research project, namely ‘European Universities in the era of Knowledge and Networks’ (EUKnow, ongoing until December 2013) and a new project that she is developing with Dr Yann Lebeau (University of East Anglia) which examines current practice and perceptions of research collaboration among European social science researchers.

Universities, their communities and networks within Knowledge societies

Vassiliki is researching the role of networks and how these alter the conditions under which universities work, but also engage with and impact upon society. Vassiliki is currently involved in a collaborative multi-country investigation into how higher education institutions are networked in knowledge societies in three regions of the world: Europe, the USA and Japan. The ‘Change in Networks, Higher Education and Knowledge Societies (CINHEKS)’ project is funded by the European Science Foundation’s Higher Education and Social Change (EuroHESC) research programme. Within this strand of research, Vassiliki is working on comparative profiles of HEIs and is also interested in the ways in which networking elicits strategies of differentiation, 'world-class’ drift and constructions of excellence, as well as tendencies of exclusion and/or inclusion with respect to the production, circulation and use of knowledge.

Internationalisation in HE

Vassiliki has developed a keen interest in a broader set of issues that relate to policy and practice of Internationalisation in HE:

• critical study of supranational policies and the Bologna Process
• convergence processes and comparative methodology of case studies of HEIs
• competitiveness, and its impact on systems, institutions and academic communities
• understandings of the role of higher education and research, academic freedom and conceptions of the student

Within this strand of research, she conducted a comparative study on cross-European collaborative initiatives in study programmes at Master’s level in Engand, France, Norway and Spain (European Universities and Rationales of Tradition and Change- EURoTaC), for which she earned a prestigious Marie-Curie Intra-European Fellowship (EIF) at the University of Oxford.

Academic Mobility, post-national citizenship and identity

Vassiliki has a longstanding interest in the governing ends of educational policies, and the ways in which they shape student identities. She researched EU policies and student experiences of mobility within the Erasmus programme. Her doctoral research on the same topic (2002, University of Paris X-France), received the second prize for best thesis in social sciences in 2002, and subsequently led to a single-authored book (2003) and various peer-reviewed publications.