14th International EUREDOCS Conference

Call for Proposals

Centre de Sociologie des Organisations – Sciences Po et CNRS

December 15-16, 2025 – Paris

EUREDOCS is a network of European doctoral students researching on issues related to the Europeanization of higher education and research. The network gathers doctoral students and those awarded the doctoral degree in the last three years researching on European higher education issues. It aims to facilitate and enhance communication among them and to promote publication and dissemination of research results and enable exchange and mobility among young scholars in this field.

EUREDOCS is an interdisciplinary network and accepts membership from doctoral students and recent doctoral awards in sociology, political science, economics, history, and educational studies.

The 14th EUREDOCS Conference focuses on the topic:

Disengagement, reengagement, over-engagement of public authorities in European higher education and research?

To submit a proposal, please fill in the form (see below) and send it to: jerome.aust@sciencespo.fr and christine.musselin@sciencespo.fr

Calendar:

The deadline for the submission of a proposal is 15th of September 2025

The decision about selection will be sent by the beginning of October 2025.

All papers selected for presentation must be available by 30th November 2025.

The Conference will be held at Sciences Po in 15-16 December, 2025.

The 2025 Conference theme:

The 14th EUREDOCS Conference will focus on the theme: Disengagement, reengagement, over-engagement of public authorities in European higher education and research?  

The spread of new public management, the rise in competition or market-based mechanisms regulating the higher education and research sector, the decrease in public funding in some European countries led many scholars to conclude to a disengagement of the state in this sector.

The recent development of the private (for profit or not) higher education sector in Europe is also often understand as a signal for a more or less volunteer reduction in the influence of the public sector and the transformation of training programs into private goods funded by private money.

But others rather conclude to a transformation of the policy instruments. Public authorities intervene as much as before but not the same way. They rely more on incentive and competitive devices than on regulations and rules. They also change their principles of action, from allocating a little bit to all to concentrating resources on some.

Still others observe that this is not a substitution of old instruments by new ones but an addition of former and newer devices, thus in fact reinforcing or transforming the influence and control of public authorities on higher education and research. Even more: the discourse on knowledge society and knowledge economy justify an intensive – and in many cases renewed – engagement of public authorities on the selection of society relevant topics, the definition of what training should be about, direct intervention on priorities in research agendas, international students to attract, training programs to develop. By setting the rules of the competitive games, public authorities would more and more intervene on the scientific and pedagogical arena.

At the same time, these new tools and this new engagement are the vehicle for new forms of influence and control. By setting the rules of the competitive game, public authorities also redefine what it means to govern the academic world.

Looking critically to the role of public authorities on higher education today also questions whom such public authorities are and which of them (local, regional, national, European, supranational?) are actually disengaging, reengaging, over-engaging? The interplay between these different levels and the variation in their intervention capacity, from one country to another and overtime is also to be addressed. The conference will also address the emergence of new forms of engagement and the question of how to characterize these new forms of control.

The forthcoming EUREDOCS Conference welcomes papers focusing on these different issues within European higher education systems and at the European level.

We furthermore encourage comparative approaches from international and national standpoints, historical perspectives, multidisciplinary approaches, various methodologies.

Open track:

Preference will be given to proposals related to the conference theme, but the EUREDOCS conference also provides an open track option to allow other PhD students working on other European topics and issues in Higher education research to contribute to the conference.

Organization of the 2025 EUREDOCS Conference 

The 14th EUREDOCS Conference will be held at Sciences Po, on 15-16 December, 2025.

The Conference will be organized in sessions. In each session no more than four papers will be presented and discussed (45 to 60 minutes for each paper).

The attendance of doctoral students without contributing a paper is possible. Participants without a paper have to cover their own expenses.

Accommodation and food expenses will be covered for participants presenting a paper. All participants will have to pay for their travelling expenses.

All papers selected for presentation must be available by the 15th of September 2025.

Participants and discussants will be asked to read the papers before the beginning of the Conference. Contributors will have 15 minutes to present a short version of their paper. For each paper a discussant will be assigned from among the other participants presenting a paper to comment on the presented paper. The discussant can comment for 15 minutes as well. Then, a general discussion will follow taking about 15 to 30 minutes.

Each session is chaired by a senior researcher, usually a member of the Scientific Committee. 

Requirements: 

Being a doctoral student or having recently (not earlier than January 2023) defended your thesis and working on a topic concerning higher education and/or research in Europe.

Proposals: 

Submit a proposal (two pages maximum) on a topic to be presented by using the proposal form at the end of this text. The proposal as well as the potential presentation must be in English. 

Submission of proposals: 

Proposals should be sent by email to: christine.musselin@sciencespo.fr by the deadline of 15th September 2025.

Selection process 

The proposals will be reviewed by the members of the Scientific Committee of EUREDOCS. The relevance of the proposal for the theme of the Conference will be taken into account. For those papers submitted on the open track, the Scientific Committee will consider the significance of the topic or issues to be developed.

All papers will be considered in terms of their research quality. We will appreciate proposals based on solid empirical material (quantitative as well as qualitative) and including an appropriate theoretical framework. The evaluation of the proposals will take into account the number of years already spent working on the PhD thesis.

Replies will be sent to the applicants by the beginning of October 2025.

More about EUREDOCS?

1. The Network 

EUREDOCS is a network of European doctoral students working on issues related to the Europeanization of higher education and research. The network was created in 2004 upon the initiative of Sylvain Kahn (at the time Director for European Affairs) and Christine Musselin (CNRS research professor at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations) at Sciences Po in Paris. 

It aims to facilitate and enable more communication among doctoral students and those awarded the doctoral degree in the last three years researching on European higher education issues. The network also aims to promote publication and dissemination of research results and to facilitate exchange and mobility among young scholars in this field. 

EUREDOCS is an interdisciplinary network and accepts membership from doctoral students and from those recently awarded doctoral degree in sociology, political science, economics, history, and educational studies. 

Europeanization of higher education and research is to be understood in a broad sense. It obviously addresses the Europeanization of national higher education and research policies. It also includes the analysis of the (potential) harmonisation, standardisation, convergence or normalisation processes that might affect the structure, academic curricula, accreditation procedures, the quality assessment and assurance systems, academic career patterns, the role of higher education institutions in local or regional development, the structure of university governance, the production of knowledge, the relationships between research and industry, the institutional structures for teaching and/or research etc. Furthermore, it deals with the role of supra-national bodies in these processes, the influence of American models, the impact of internationalization, etc.

2. The Activities

The activities of the EUREDOCS network mainly consist of organizing regular international conferences.

3. The Euredocs Scientific Committee

In order to develop and run this network, Sciences Po has founded a scientific committee composed of six well-known European research centres and their representatives:

• CIPES, Center for Research in Higher Education Policies, Portugal (António Magalhães)
• CSO, Sciences Po and CNRS, France (Christine Musselin)
• CHEF, Aarhus University, Denmark (Susan Wright)
• UCL Institute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom (Vincent Carpentier)
• OSPS, University of Lausanne, Switzerland (Gaële Goastellec)
• Department of Government, University of Bergen, Norway (Svein Michelsen)

The conferences are organized jointly by the members of the Scientific Committee who also review the papers submitted. The Scientific Committee will also select the best papers of each conference and look for a possibility to publish them in an international journal. 

4. The EUREDOCS Conferences

One of the objectives of the EUREDOCS network is to organize international conferences for doctoral students and new doctoral degree holders related to the EUREDOCS thematic priorities and interests. These conferences aim to: 

• promote exchange, foster discussion and reflection among doctoral students and recent doctoral degree holders, 
• encourage them to write and present papers at academic meetings and conferences, 
• provide practical experiences as discussants and commentators, 
• foster scientific exchange and debates. 

We expect the conferences to represent opportunities for doctoral students and new doctoral candidates to find a place dedicated to their work, where they can present contributions and where they are confronted with different perspectives, where they will meet senior researchers who will act as moderators or be part of audience. The conferences also serve as an opportunity for further cooperation and exchange. 

We expect that many of the papers presented can then be revised for publication in different journals. The members of the Scientific Committee will support this process. 

Each conference provides an opportunity for a limited number of contributors (between 12 and 16) to present a paper on a focused issue (which is part of a PhD thesis but normally not the whole project), in order to allow debates and develop relationships among participants sharing common interests and knowledge on a common theme. For each conference a new topic will be explored, a call for proposals will be disseminated and the Scientific Committee will select the best from among the submitted proposals. 

The previous EUREDOCS Conferences were held at Sciences Po in Paris (2004, 2009, and 2014), at the University of Bergen (2005, 2012), at the International Centre for Higher Education Research, University of Kassel (2006), at the Centre for Higher Education Studies, School of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies, Institute of Education, University of London (2007) and at the CIPES, Center for Research on Higher Education Policies, University of Porto and University of Aveiro (2008), OSPS, University of Lausanne (2010 and 2023), Society for Research in Higher Education in London (2016), at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, (2018), University of Porto CIPES (2021).

14th International EUREDOCS Conference

Paris – December 15-16 2025

Disengagement, reengagement, over-engagement of public authorities in higher education and research?

PROPOSAL FORM

The deadline for the submission of a proposal is the September 15 2025. Proposals must not exceed two pages  (Calibri 12, single space)

Family name:

First name:

Email address:

Status:

Title of thesis:

Please tick the relevant box to determine your status:

First year	Second year	Third year	Fourth year	Thesis defended in (month/year)

• Title of contribution submitted to EUREDOCS Conference
• Summary of contribution proposed (max 150 words; excluding references. References to be shown separately)
• Theoretical framework
• Empirical data and methodology used
• Main/provisional results