There is now a rich pedagogical literature that attests to the absolute centrality of assessment and feedback in effective student learning at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. And yet – despite this consensus in the pedagogical literature over the crucial importance of assessment and feedback – they are not, it seems, fulfilling their purpose or potential for students or lecturers alike. This symposium starts from the premise that assessment and feedback matter, that they are not working at present and that we need to find ways to do them differently. The symposium brings together five original articles from contributors who all want to explore alternative ways of thinking about, and doing, assessment and/or feedback so that they work better both for our students and for us as their lecturers.

This article contends that the creation of a legacy by students enables them to situate their time and experiences at university within their broader life goals and expectations. Legacy learning refers to the act of creating an archive or artefact for the benefit of posterity; collating, collecting and creating a virtual or tangible article, or objet, for successive cohorts to utilise as a learning resource. It is also a tangible product that students may use to demonstrate their skills to prospective employers; something to take away with them from the process of learning. At the heart of the concept are two key factors: collaboration and the process of self-reflection. This article illustrates legacy learning through the examination of a final year module on Asia for which small groups of students had to produce a documentary video and individual self-reflection paper. Although the putative goal of the endeavour was envisioned as the realisation of the documentary itself, the self-reflection exercise by students suggests that the underlying learning value of the exercise may in fact rest in the self-realisation of the learner.

Students of ‘conventional’ academic disciplines can struggle to determine the extent of their employability. Work-based modules offer a potential solution to this issue. That these type of modules give students the opportunity to apply their knowledge and realise the scope of possible employment opportunities afforded by their degree is commonly accepted, but real issues arise in tackling the assessment of ‘on the job’ experiential learning, particularly in the area of politics. This article outlines an integrated and iterative approach to assessment, starting with the design of the component parts of the module, moving on consider the role played by simple tools such as the framing of key narratives, the development of placement diaries incorporating SWOT analysis and the use of the Politics and International Relations Subject Benchmark Statement. The importance of integrating the module design with the final assessment processes is described, and some examples are offered of how students have described the ways in which the module has enabled them to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and scholarship and employability.

Despite attempts by higher education institutions to improve the quality of feedback on assessed work, dissatisfaction expressed by students remains visible. This article draws upon the preliminary findings of a Higher Education Academy Collaborative Research Project on assessment feedback within two large political science and international relations departments. It offers a critical review of current feedback practices and processes and identifies four key issues – negativity, transferability, intelligibility, and consistency – that require attention in order to deliver more effective assessment feedback. The article also suggests practical ways forward in addressing these issues, highlighting in particular the importance of both structure and timing in helping to produce high-quality feedback efficiently.

The provision of high-quality feedback is crucial to student experience, but it is increasingly challenging for academic staff to fully meet student expectations. One response is to use simple, freely available screen capture technology to offer individual video assessment feedback at no extra cost to staff time. This article will outline exactly how this relatively new technology can be harnessed and how students have responded to feedback delivery in this form at the University of Reading. The article will argue that screen capture software has significant potential to enhance the student experience of feedback provision but is currently highly underutilised in UK Higher Education.

This article evaluates the use of audio feedback on assignments through the case study of a politics course and argues that audio feedback provides a more personal feel to feedback. Criticism, it appears, is easier to accept in the spoken word. In addition, the article highlights the chief practical benefit of audio feedback, namely that it reduces the overall time spent by lecturers in providing comments. But while the article is positive in favour of audio feedback, it also discusses some potential challenges that include anonymous marking and the fact that one size does not fit all, with different students preferring different types of feedback. Finally, the article identifies a number of practical tips that relate to the adoption of this method of feedback.

Populism has become a resilient political phenomenon. Much of the normative political science on this topic is concerned with the relationship between democracy and populism. At the same time, the characterisation of post-war democracy has emerged as a key focal point in recent contributions to political history. This research note explores how both these developments and their disciplines might benefit from closer collaboration. It highlights, therefore, some of the distinctive features of populism’s relationship with democracy and shows how these might be accounted for by incorporating insights from history. At the same time, it argues that historiography has largely ignored the populist question in the history of post-war democracy and makes some suggestions as to how the history of populism might be included in this research.

Racism and xenophobia are no longer isolated issues affecting only small portions of a society. Rather, these issues are now at the forefront of debate and have assumed a position on the frontlines of political warfare. In 2016, both the UK and the USA found themselves embroiled in bitter battle, a battle wherein the citizens themselves became their own worst enemies. The Leave/Stay campaigns in the UK and the 2016 US presidential campaign precipitated a rebirth of nationalism, reinvigorating entire populations and charming even the casual observer into political action and discourse. Yet in both cases, what began as an endeavour to serve the needs of the citizenry morphed into a battleground of derision and division. As this article reveals, the parallels between campaigns are not merely provocative they are disarming.

The use of simulations in higher education teaching is burgeoning in political science curricula, particularly in international relations and European Union studies. This article contends that most simulations suffer from complexity bias and put too much emphasis on substantive knowledge. Drawing on the author’s experience, two ideal types of simulations are developed. ‘Complex’ simulations focusing on negotiating content and ‘simple’ simulations focusing on negotiating dynamics. It is argued that the transmission of transferable skills is facilitated by multiple repetitions of similar negotiating contexts within the same module. This suggests that instructors face a trade-off between teaching transferable skills and substantive knowledge and should locate their simulations at either end of this continuum. Where students are not native speakers, not yet familiar with specialised terminology or simply unversed in negotiating dynamics, there is a particularly strong argument to make for carrying out simple simulations first, followed by complex simulations later in the curriculum. Finally, opportunities for collaborative research are highlighted. Gathering and pooling data from simple simulations bridges pedagogy and research at minimal additional cost.

In Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown argues that neo-liberalism has undermined democracy in a hitherto unprecedented form. To be specific, neo-liberalism has undermined what is at the heart of democracy: popular sovereignty, the demos – it has, in a word, undone the demos and, hence, democracy. Analysing neo-liberalism and its relationship to democracy, Brown draws on the works of Michel Foucault and Karl Marx. The exchange here between the three reviewers – Mitchell Dean, Alen Toplišek and Anne Barron – and Wendy Brown focuses on a number of issues: the use and usefulness of Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism for analysing neo-liberalism; the way that neoliberalism ‘economises’ everything including politics and democracy; the nature of the state and of sovereignty, and how the left should relate to these; and the nature of critique in its different forms (Kantian, Foucauldian, Marxist and others). These are issues that are important not only for the specific argument of Undoing the Demos, but more generally for social and political theory today.

Some years ago, I was inspired by Foucault’s (1981) extraordinary statement at Stanford University that ‘Our societies have proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two games – the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game – within what we call modern states’ (239). So much was this the case that I cited the term ‘demonic societies’ in the title of a modest essay (Dean, 2001). One of the stranger effects of higher education’s neo-liberalization – to which a chapter is devoted in Wendy Brown’s important book – was that all research ‘outputs’ would be put in an online repository by the library. Libraries, which had hitherto been charged with the collection and organization of knowledge, would now be instruments in the management of the performance of academics. This cannot be a very satisfying job, which I imagine falls to those whose positions are among the most precarious of library staff. In any case, my essay was placed there not as ‘“Demonic societies”: liberalism, biopolitics and sovereignty’ but as ‘Democratic societies…’, and without the inverted commas of the original.

In her latest book, Wendy Brown presents a compelling analysis of neo-liberalism in which she demonstrates how the transformation of classical liberal values in neo-liberal governmentality has impacted liberal democracy both in our understanding of it and its functioning. Brown’s main argument is that neo-liberalism prompted an economization of politics, of everything public and in common ownership. By implication, what was once understood as pertaining to the sphere of the political and separate from the world of economics has now been usurped by economic values and rationality. She ingeniously turns to Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics (translated into English only in 2008), where Foucault observed the early stages of this significant reversal in modern governing rationality already a few years before Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan started making the headlines. It is precisely in these posthumously published lectures at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1979 that Foucault analyses the emergence of a new governmental rationality, liberalism and its development into what has become known as neo-liberalism. As Brown argues, Foucault attempts to mark neo-liberalism’s singularity and distinctiveness as much as to establish its continuity with liberalism (54). This ambiguity seems to confound Brown, leaving the reader wondering which position she will take in her book: is neo-liberalism just the next logical stage in the contemporary development of liberalism, or are the two political rationalities distinguishable to the extent that we can defend the classical tradition of liberalism while rejecting neo-liberalism? Brown clearly takes the latter position, and it is at this point that I believe important problems arise in her defence of liberal democracy.

Wendy Brown is a cultural/political theorist of exceptional intelligence and acuity. Her insights have resonated with many (including this avid reader of her work) who share her sense that what gets anointed as ‘legal and political thought’ routinely bypasses the big questions around which the theory and practice of politics should be organised, or does not address them coherently. She has won wide acclaim for the uncompromising astuteness with which she has articulated that sense, excavating and exposing in one book after another the ambivalences, contradictions and hidden assumptions on which political orthodoxies of left, right and centre invariably rest. Her targets have always been the discursive formations that dominate ways of thinking about politics; her project always to interrogate the cultural hierarchies that sustain these.