Reflecting on TASA 2025: Universities, Security, and the Space for Critical Inquiry

I was delighted to receive the TASA Student Bursary to attend the November 2025 conference at the University of Melbourne. I'm a PhD researcher at the Australian National University examining how universities in the Pacific Islands region function as security institutions. The bursary came at a critical point in my research. I had just finished fieldwork across the Pacific and needed to test my emerging ideas.

My research examines the University of the South Pacific, asking how Pacific universities enable or constrain local conceptions of security through the identities they reinforce, the knowledge they validate, and the institutional practices they adopt. The question helped me shape a paper for TASA that discussed how corporatisation of universities was influencing not just academic practice, but how communities understand and respond to existential threats.

The sessions on universities at TASA were sobering. The patterns I observed in the Pacific aren't regional anomalies, they're global. The panel on 'Slow Academia' became a reflection on the overwhelming speed of academic life and the perceived impossibility of building solidarity while being complicit in the systems we critique. Across sessions, I heard echoes of my fieldwork: the push toward rankings, the narrowing of disciplinary spaces, the quiet death of regional publishing. What emerged was a sense of operating within structural constraints that feel totalising. The pull toward global norms transcends geography and context.

But the conference also clarified why this work matters. In an era of AI-generated content and weaponised disinformation, critical thinking grounded in social sciences is essential. Universities remain among the few institutional spaces where power can be interrogated and dominant narratives challenged. The question is whether universities will retain the capacity and courage to perform these functions, or whether economic rationalism will keep narrowing what scholarship is possible.

For researchers working at sociology's margins, the TASA conference provides essential intellectual community. The bursary enabled me to engage with scholars thinking rigorously about universities as social institutions, feedback that sharpened my analytical approach, and practical guidance on turning fieldwork into scholarship. A particular shout out to the 'Sociology of Education' community that shared so many sessions together. These conversations are shaping how I approach analysis and publication.

I left TASA 2025 with lots of new contacts and a lot of reading to do. I'd welcome further contact from TASA members interested in similar research topics or who can see areas of crossover. My appreciation to the TASA Executive Committee and the conference organisers for their support of PhD and early career researchers.

Jay Caldwell