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Research on the role of women in Public Relations (PR) has seen a notable increase in recent years (Topić et al., 2019), yet exploratory studies on the subject remain limited, particularly concerning the role of women in the academic sphere of PR in Spain. Guided by the imperative to reflect on the role of PR professionals operating within the Spanish academic landscape, this chapter aims to identify and reflect on the role of women in PR academia in Spain to discover the extent to which women are leading the communication faculties where PR is taught; to identify the presence of women in the departments where communication studies take place and to determine women's leadership in national research activity. This study follows a combined approach with two dimensions, exploratory and interpretative, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques. The interpretative approach is developed using a focus group with women currently working in PR education and leading projects and institutions in the Spanish academia. Through this research, we discover the struggles and opportunities they face and identify possible solutions and ideas to improve the situation of women in academia and, specifically, in PR.

This chapter is focused on what we can learn from oppressive governance, in this case specifically relating to university governance in terms of vice chancellors and presidents, to the deputy vice chancellor and deputy president and down the ever-growing university hierarchy to deans and heads of schools and their deputies, from a Freirean perspective. Freire wrote at length about how leaders ‘controlled’ education and why they did so, but he also wrote at length about how governments control populations – himself being both a political prisoner and a person in exile to escape persecution. This chapter subsequently examines Freire's ideas around what techniques people employ to control populations and applies them to a higher education setting because the similarities are numerous and the tactics familiar.

This chapter acts as an introduction to the book, where it sits in the current literature, why it contributes something new and why that contribution is important to the field. In some respects, the introduction acts as a literature review which allows the book to both build on and augment current thinking. The primary function of the introduction will be to highlight that this book removes itself from ideological aspirations of returning to a university governed by and for scholars and instead highlights the dangers of managerialism, how Freire helps highlight those dangers and subsequently what a realistic path forward might be to minimise the damage of several decades of the neoliberal university.

This chapter is dedicated to understanding the idea of international as a key notion to the development of globalisation and to promoting the rescaling of spaces and subjects in contemporary higher education. The author discusses the concept of scale as a performative device that activates the capacities of bodies. Instead of seeing scale as a naturalised and hierarchical structure of spatial distribution, the author understands it as an ensemble of discourses and practices that produce scalar effects. Globalisation uses scale to promote the idea that subjects would become ‘international’ by being linked to privileged spaces and bodies in the Global North. In this sense, globalisation is not merely about nodes where certain flows converge. Rather, the author understands it as the political conditions that control and constrain the space for certain flows to occur and not others. Using assemblage analysis, the author presents and analyses three scenes taken from his ethnographic records that have as a guiding line the materialisation of the international. These scenes report the experience of being a Latin American doctoral student attending a congress in the United States, a tense situation experienced at a Chilean university academic event, and the unpretentious manifestation of an elaborate idea of internationality from a personal experience of a trip to India. The results point to three elaborations of the international: an optimistic view of a shared world, a geopolitical internationality and the production of a global corporeality.

For researchers and sector agencies around the world, poor academic integrity is seen as a significant risk to universities (Bretag & Harper, 2017; QAA, 2020; TEQSA, 2019). Given the existential threat that acts of academic misconduct are deemed to pose to higher education, interest in ways of developing academic integrity is correspondingly high and often invokes the concept of values (Macfarlane et al., 2014; Morris, 2018). However, to ascribe to academic integrity, the status of a self-evident, perhaps universal, value of contemporary higher education is contentious on many levels. This chapter takes in turn three of the most common ways in which students and scholars infringe on the principles of academic integrity – plagiarism, collusion, and contract cheating – and explores what the prohibiting of each of these acts reveals about the values of contemporary higher education. It argues that, far from neutral or universal, the values of academic integrity appear both normative and culturally specific, promoting a particular conception of higher education which risks excluding large sections of the global population. To counter this, the notion of threshold values – borrowing from Meyer and Land's (2005) notion of the “threshold concept” – is proposed, identifying the development of shared values as crucial to ensuring that contemporary, globalized universities are inclusive and accessible spaces.

This performance autoethnography may or may not be interpreted as a continuation of a conversation regarding the experiences of those with devalued statuses in academic settings. The authors rely on “strange accounting” to consider their experiences in the academy from various standpoints: before and after promotion, before and after leaving academia. While reflecting on our past experiences, we introduce the concept of “everyday precariousness” as a way of explaining the normalization of instability, insecurity, and negative affect that is part of everyday life for those with devalued statuses in academic settings and beyond. Everyday precariousness is an embodied experience for those in vulnerable positions. Normalized exposure to risks, such as discrimination, harassment, bullying, or structural instability, produces an undercurrent of threat that permeates academic culture. Our stories of everyday precariousness span race, ethnicity, class, academic roles, and gender boundaries (among many others). Analyzing these experiences furthers previous work on the uses of strange accounting as well as the dynamics of status silencing. In the final analysis, unresisted and unabated, everyday precariousness and status silencing can lead to institutional failure and resonance disasters.

This chapter analyses the other aspect of an oppressor/oppressed relationship by looking at what happens to the oppressed, in this case, the academics and staff not in leadership roles. This chapter looks at why the tactics leaders employ work, and why people do not retaliate, and what systems have been put in place to prevent the people from having any consequential power. This chapter thus looks at how the power of the majority in the academy has been slowly eroded by managerial promises of empowerment, self-governance or having an opinion on the institution's direction when in reality, they have no opinion, and the only decisions they can make are inconsequential. This is why time and time again, we see universities restructure, remove non-profitable courses and increase targets to unrealistic levels to maintain power over the majority.

The final chapter examines Freire's numerous views on why people do not free themselves from the ruling majority, or at least, why they cannot free themselves. This chapter subsequently examines the problem with people taking stands and fighting for their rights, even when they are morally and ethically in the correct position. Freire knew no victory came without consequences and risks, and for many, the threat of these consequences is what prevents them from taking a stand. However, this chapter also examines how universities built their power over several decades, while at the same time making sure the opportunities to face consequences for these actions were also being diminished by placing the wider academy in difficult positions, they would be unlikely to ever get out of, without the academy knowing they were being maneuvered into an untenable position.

This chapter provides an overview of Freire's primary approach to how governments control people, why governments dictate what is being taught and why they seek out control over educators. This chapter investigates the similarities Freire found between the most oppressive governments and dictatorships that rules by violence, to how our educational institutions are controlled. The stakes might be entirely different in these scenarios, but he knew the ultimate objective in all these situations was to remove power from the people, give it to a powerful few and ensure the people would never be able to regain control once more. These ideas and suggestions are key moving forward because it provides a baseline to understand how Freire thought about manipulative behaviours, and why tactics used in extremely violent situations can essentially be watered down and used to control people in universities in much the same way.