Leeds Beckett University

School of Arts, United Kingdom

Meaningful Matters: Rethinking Academic Impact    Nov. 19-20, 2025

.

Meaningful Matters: Rethinking Academic Impact

PEDAGOGY 2025

Abstracts: May 30, 2025

In recent years universities have increasingly subscribed to ‘academic capitalism’, an economic model which commodifies learning and insists upon a constant assessment of ‘impact’ aligned to market-led priorities. Academia has, accordingly, adopted a lexicon of capital: investment, stakeholders, added-value. It demands quantifiable outcomes which must be continuously evidenced at a productive pace. There is an anxiety that only activities which are measurable according to a monetary index matter. These are prioritised above all others to maintain relevance and, in turn, existence.

Internally, the university has responded by enforcing its own economy, one that maps to quantitative measures of learning that equate to employability and the readiness of students to interface with mechanisms outside of academia. Such frameworks overlook many of the more immeasurable byproducts of education: creativity, critical thinking, difference, well-being and, crucially, meaning making.

Artist and former economist Robert Filiou offers a radical concept that critiques this thinking: a poetic economy. This is a philosophy that resists reductive quantification and impatient efficiencies and, instead, leans directly into the ongoing potential of lifelong learning. For education is not a product, but a latent process in which knowledge isn’t resolved immediately, but rather only when the subjective conditions are right. In keeping with Filiou’s idea, the question we ask is what if the university stood firm, and made a decision to do things differently, foregoing those metrics – economic or otherwise – and returning academia to those things that really matter?

In this context we welcome contributions from educators, practitioners and researchers that seek to challenge traditional institutional approaches and structures, reflecting the evolving complexities of academia. We are particularly interested in projects that demonstrate:

-creative, progressive and / or interdisciplinary approaches to teaching, learning and research

-student-led / community-engaged / industry projects

-examples of reprioritising academia around inclusive, reflexive and humanist pedagogies

-explorations (or abandonment) of value systems centred around alternative criteria for impact and success

Submit:

Part of the conference Pedagogy 2025: Emerging Theories, Teaching & Technologies  

Abstract Deadline: May 30, 2025