This book scrutinizes the paradoxical functions of reflexivity in contemporary higher education: its capacity to enable institutional learning, adaptation, and renewal, while also eliciting a risk of entrapment in cycles of audit, performativity, and bureaucratic self-monitoring. This book pursues a key guiding question across all its collective contributions: does reflexivity liberate universities and the citizens of academe, or it entraps them? This book provides an integrated exploration of reflexivity as a composite conceptual lens and as a practical condition of university governance, policy-making, and academic life altogether. It brings together multidisciplinary and comparative perspectives that locate reflexivity within each and at the intersection of scholarship, policy, and practice. In doing so, this book engages with key debates in higher education studies, including governance and institutional identity, quality assurance and accountability, the metamorphoses and multi-layered challenges of the European Higher Education Area and other major transnational initiatives, as well as case studies that demonstrate how reflexivity operates across different settings. As a Festschrift in memory of Lazăr Vlăsceanu, this book honors a foundational European scholar whose work on reflexive modernity and the reflexive university remains highly relevant to present-day transformations and interrogations.
