On March 24, Dr. Mara Fidell, University of Manitoba, Canada, opened the series of CHEF lunch talks with an extremely interesting account of academics in a Canadian university, analysing how corporations were gaining control of the university’s public budget and mobilising to fight back and reclaim research freedom and shared governance.

In the talk, Dr. Fridell introduced the international context of contemporary Canadian political approaches to post-secondary education transition management, in relation to immigration policy in settler countries, international management, marketing, and institutional and educational software markets' burgeoning involvement in the medical and post-secondary education sectors, and in relation to broad labor-repression initiatives. Dr. Fidell's talk was briefly also contextualized by a historical-comparative account of the social and institutional work of the communities of scholars in contrasting class inequality and citizenship phases.

Biography: Dr. Fridell was the 2012 cabinet secretary in a central Canadian province, in charge of the education policy portfolio, and as a sociologist at the University of Manitoba, in Fall 2016 she was part of an innovative (in 21st century Canada) faculty strike strictly for workplace control. Dr. Fridell currently serves on the umbrella organization for regional faculty unions.