Wright, S., Carney, S., Krejsler, J. B., Nielsen, G. B., Ørberg, J. W. (2020). Enacting the University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective. Springer Nature B. V. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1921-4

The anthropology of higher education is a small area in the subfield of the anthropology of education. While most anthropologists who work in education are doing research in K-12 institutions or informal educational contexts, there is a highly specialized group of anthropologists working in higher education. Nevertheless, Enacting the University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective by Susan Wright, Stephen Carney, John Benedicto Krejsler, Gritt Bykærholm Nielson, and Jacob Williams Ørberg is a very important book. It makes important theoretical and methodological contributions to social and cultural anthropology more broadly. And while it is looking at the university in one European country, the implications of this work are important for everyone who works in higher education globally. This review will focus on two main contributions. The first is a contribution to thinking about ethnography. Second, the volume makes important contributions to our thinking about institutions in a globalized and neoliberalized world and the ways the larger forces intersect with the activities of people within them.

Enacting the University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective is not a traditional ethnography. It is not the sole researcher engaging in participant observation with a specific group of people. Rather it is a team of researchers who are looking at a small set of large institutions (Danish universities) as they sit within a national and international context. Anthropologists tend not to see ethnography as a method but rather something like a stance toward the other. This perspective on ethnography offers the ethnographer a “tool-kit” of methods, rather than simply relying on participant observation. In fact, the focus on ethnography as a method in other fields has led to some prominent critiques in anthropology (Ingold 2014, Herzfeld, 2001). But even as a stance toward the other, traditionally, anthropology has thought of that other in fairly simple terms. And when one begins to think of the other as “Danish Universities,” this raises a whole host of new problems. These are problems that some anthropologists have been trying to address (Holmes & Marcus 2008, Marcus 2011, Riles 2000, Strathern 2004). In a global world, ethnography often needs to be practiced in teams, and those teams need to be able to echo the kinds of collaborations that one sees in other institutions and organization in the global economy (Marcus 2011). Following Riles (2000), anthropologists are not outside of the global networks they study but are themselves part of these complex institutions and networks where there is no outside.

Wright and her team very much take this principle of being a team within the network to heart. And to understand Danish University reform ethnographically, the team takes on the different levels of analysis woven together with Wright’s Introduction and Conclusion. In this way, they are able to look at interactions and discourses at the macro level of the OECD, EU, and Danish government, as well as at the levels of university leaders, university faculty and researchers and students.

This leads directly to some of the theoretical contributions the book makes to the study of universities and large-scale institutions within a global context. In the opening chapter and the Conclusion, Wright explains the two senses of the term “Enacting.” Drawing on the perspective that developed in British cultural studies and the Birmingham School, enactment on the one hand is the enactment of laws and the ways that power frames the field withing with actors interact. The second sense of enactment is the more on the ground struggles and practices of individuals who are engaged in a range of practices, from interpreting how to best follow the law to active resistance and attempts at rearticulation. And even among the elite policy makers and the university leaders, there is not a single vision, but rather a set of ideas that people interpret differently. Using a number of theoretical tools