Dr Fadia Dakka

Fadia Dakka Profile Photo

Senior Research Fellow in Education

Email:
fadia.dakka@bcu.ac.uk

Dr. Fadia Dakka studied International Relations (BA, MA) at Bologna University (Italy) and King’s College London (MA) before obtaining a Doctorate in Social Sciences from the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, where she taught and guest lectured on Social Policy and Education before moving to Birmingham City University (2016). She served as Deputy Research Centre Director of CSPACE (2018-2022) and is currently Co-Director of STERG (Space, Time & Everyday Life Research Group).

Broadly speaking, her interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, sociology and theory of higher education. She researches in the field of Critical University Studies, critiquing the derives of the contemporary, corporate western university (commodification, managerialism, competition fetish) from a philosophical and sociological standpoint. She explores how universities adapt, respond, survive and reproduce intense competition and commodification considering institutional and psychosocial levels of analysis and implications (e.g. mental health and wellbeing).

Fadia examines university crises as part and parcel of intersecting, global crises prefiguring alternative ecologies of knowledge production (university futures) through the adoption of Rhythmanalytical and Rhythmological perspectives. She examines university crises as part and parcel of intersecting, global challenges, trying to prefigure alternative ecologies of knowledge production (university futures) through the adoption of rhythmanalytical and other rhythm-informed perspectives. She is currently working on theorising rhythm as a distinct form of ethics that underpins critical pedagogy in (higher) education.  

Currently, she is working in partnership with Prof. Michel Alhadeff-Jones, executive director of the Time and Complexity Lab at the Sunkhronos Institute (Geneva) and with Dr. Gaia Del Negro (University of Milano, Bicocca) on a number of initiatives such as the  2023 Research Symposium series Spaces, Times and the Rhythms of Adult Education (STRAE) and the Postgraduate Group Discussion (GR2I) on Rhythmic Intelligence, hosted by STERG. With Prof. Michel Alhadeff-Jones (Switzerland) and Prof. Sabine Schmidt-Lauff (Germany) she convenes STREAM: Spaces, Times and The Rhythms of the Education of Adults and its Movements), a newly formed international network within ESREA (European Society for Research of the Education of Adults). 

She is Adjunct Associate Professor (visiting) in the department of Education and Lifelong Learning of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), working with Norwegian colleagues on international projects, research collaboration and teaching.

She stays committed to honour the memory and continue the intellectual legacy of the late Emeritus Professor and mentor Mike Neary, mobilising Lefebvre’s unfinished Rhythmanalytical Project to the creation of a post-capitalist, co-operative university.

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