Call for Papers: ZFHE 21/2

Posted on 2025-11-05

Call for Papers ZFHE 21/2

European University Alliances in Action

Editors: Martin Ebner, Channa van der Brug, Elena Wilhelm

Starting point

With the European Universities Initiative (EUI), the European Commission has been pursuing the goal of establishing transnational higher education alliances as universities of the future since 2019. These alliances are intended to structurally deepen cooperation between European universities in education, research, and innovation, facilitate the mobility of students and teachers, and develop joint, student-centered curricula and research strategies. At the same time, the initiative aims to strengthen European values and the continent's competitiveness, thereby making a significant contribution to the integration of the European Higher Education Area (European Commission, 2023).

According to an analysis by the European Parliamentary Research Service, by early 2025, 65 alliances in 35 countries with over 570 universities and around 11 million students will already be active. This impressive momentum not only marks a new stage in European higher education policy, but also raises fundamental questions: How do governance structures, organizational cultures, and epistemic orders change when universities are integrated into such far-reaching transnational alliances? What tensions arise between European control logics and national claims to autonomy? What ideas of science, education, and identity shape the emerging field of European university alliances?

While the European Commission's political agenda focuses on integration, efficiency, and coherence, research increasingly points to the ambivalence of this development. On the one hand, new spaces for institutional cooperation are opening up, but on the other hand, there is a threat of homogenization, underfunding, standardization, and hierarchization, which could marginalize smaller or non-university higher education institutions in particular (Vukasovic & Stensaker, 2018) . The EU can thus be understood as both a testing ground and a zone of conflict: a space in which questions of power, difference, governance, and cultural identity are being renegotiated in the European higher education area.

Objective of this issue

The planned issue of the Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung invites readers to examine European university alliances not primarily as political or administrative programs, but as institutional, social, and cultural phenomena. The focus is on contributions that critically reflect on the diverse dynamics of alliance formation between integration and difference and open up both empirically and theoretically grounded perspectives.

The aim is not only to highlight organizational and legal challenges, but also to examine the epistemic, normative, and symbolic dimensions of these new forms of cooperation. The aim is to broaden the discourse on European higher education cooperation by adding analytical, discursive, and power-critical perspectives, thereby contributing to a nuanced understanding of European higher education governance in the 21st century.

Space will also be given to the perspectives of individual universities regarding their positioning, responsibilities, and roles, as well as new opportunities and challenges.

Contributions that establish links between theory and practice are particularly welcome:

  • analyses that place institutional action in alliances in the context of European science policy;
  • case studies that offer insights into concrete experiences, negotiation processes, or conflicts;
  • theoretical-conceptual works that interpret European alliance formation as an expression of deeper transformations in higher education organization and academic culture.

Possible thematic approaches

Contributions could take the following perspectives, among others, but are not limited to:

  1. Governance and power: How are decision-making, control, and accountability structures negotiated in European alliances? What new forms of multilateral governance are emerging from the interplay of European politics, national higher education legislation, and institutional autonomy (Pinheiro et al., 2024; Maassen et al., 2023)?
  2. Identity and difference: What narratives and values shape the self-description of European alliances? How is “Europeanism” discursively and organizationally constructed, and what forms of exclusion or hierarchization accompany it (de Boer & Huisman, 2020)?
  3. Strategy and organization: What new roles, professions, and forms of interaction arise when teaching, research, and administration are to be integrated across national borders? How can the alliance's strategy serve as a lever for the partners' existing digitization and internationalization strategies?
  4. Everyday implementation practice: Administration, teaching, and learning: Which everyday processes are fundamental to cooperation in the areas of administration and teaching, and how are and were these resolved? Which (interoperable) solutions are being developed or are necessary to support teaching in the long term? How can joint programs be implemented and promoted? How can everyday practices, tensions, and learning processes within such alliances be observed?

This list is not exhaustive. Contributions that examine the symbolic and epistemic implications of European higher education cooperation from a cultural, educational, or social theory perspective are also welcome—for example, with regard to language, space, belonging, or collective imaginations of the future.

Literature

European Commission (2023). European Universities Initiative – Building the universities of the future. Brussels. https://education.ec.europa.eu/education-levels/higher-education/european-universities-initiative

European Commission (2025): Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, PPMI, Grumbinaitė, I., Colus, F., & Buitrago Carvajal, H., Report on the outcomes and transformational potential of the European Universities initiative, Publications Office of the European Union, 2025, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2766/32313?

De Boer, H. F., & Huisman, J. (2020). Governance Trends in European Higher Education. In G. Capano, & D. Jarvis (Eds.), Convergence and Diversity in the Governance of Higher education: Comparative Perspectives (pp. 333-354) . (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Public Policy). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108669429.013

Maassen, P., Stensaker, B., & Rosso, A. (2023). The European university alliances – an examination of organizational potentials and perils. Higher Education, 86(4), 953–968.

Pinheiro, R., Gänzle, S., Klenk, T., & Trondal, J. (2024). Unpacking strategic alliances in European higher education. Tertiary Education and Management, 30(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11233-024-09133-6

Vukasovic, M., & Stensaker, B. (2018). University alliances in the Europe of knowledge: Positions, agendas and practices in policy processes. European Educational Research Journal, 17(3), 349–364.

European Commission: Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, Deloitte, EDEN, German Academic Exchange Service, Knowledge Innovation Centre (KIC), Stifterverband and SURF, An analysis of the state of interoperability across higher education systems in Europe (synthesis report) – European higher education interoperability framework, Publications Office of the European Union, 2025, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2766/556601

About the journal

The ZFHE is a peer-reviewed online journal for scientific articles with practical relevance to current issues in higher education development. The focus is on didactic, structural, and cultural developments in teaching and learning. In particular, the journal addresses topics that are innovative and still open in terms of their design options.

The ZFHE is published by a consortium of European scientists. Further information: https://www.zfhe.at.

Information on submission

Contributions can be submitted in three different formats in German or English:

A research contribution should meet the following criteria:

  • addresses a systematic question in trans-, inter- or disciplinary contexts;
  • has a research gap as its starting point;
  • is extensively embedded in scientific discourse;
  • has a robust methodological approach;
  • includes a reflection on the author's own work;
  • presents the research methodology;
  • uses a method that is well suited to answering the research question;
  • presents the scientific discourse in a reflective manner;
  • offers clearly recognizable added value or contribution to answering the research question or to the research discussion;
  • consistently follows relevant citation rules (APA style, current edition);
  • comprises between 20,000 and 33,000 characters (including spaces and cover page; bibliography and author information).

A research-led development contribution should meet the following criteria:

  • offers a university development perspective with a sound research basis;
  • discusses and differentiates a systematic problem of teaching development;
  • is a scientifically reflective “institutional research” contribution;
  • is supported by a literature review;
  • clearly addresses the communication between science and practice and/or the connection between the two poles of “research and development”;
  • consistently follows relevant citation rules (APA style, current edition);
  • comprises between 20,000 and 33,000 characters (including spaces and cover page; literature and author references).

The development contribution should meet the following criteria:

  • addresses a specific problem of university development in the (own) university;
  • practical desideratum;
  • is embedded in scientific discussion and literature (but without claiming to provide an overview of the literature);
  • offers suggestions for teaching and university development, with recommendations for action where appropriate;
  • follows a systematic and transparent presentation (e.g., no incomprehensible references to specifics and details in a field of practice);
  • elaborates on generalizable aspects and factors in the sense of theory formation;
  • clear transfer considerations;
  • research desiderata are named
  • Follows relevant citation rules consistently (APA style, current edition);
  • comprises between 20,000 and 33,000 characters (including spaces and cover page; Bibliography and author information).

Schedule

February 15, 2026 – Deadline for submission of the complete article: Please upload your contributions in anonymized form to the ZFHE journal system (https://www.zfhe.at) under the appropriate heading (research contribution, research-led development contribution, development contribution) of issue 21/2; to do so, you must first register as an “author” in the system.

Mid/end of March 2026 – Feedback/reviews: All contributions will be evaluated in a double-blind process (see below).

Mid/end of April 2026 – Revision deadline: If necessary, contributions can be revised by the authors by this date in accordance with the criticism and recommendations from the reviews.

June 2026 – Publication: In June 2026, the finalized contributions will be published at https://www.zfhe.at and will also be available as a print publication.

Review process

All submitted contributions will be reviewed for scientific quality in a double-blind peer review process. The editors of each issue will propose reviewers for the respective thematic focus and assign the individual contributions to the reviewers; they will also decide on the acceptance of the contributions. The selection of reviewers and the review process will be supervised by a member of the editorial board for each thematic issue.

Formatting and submission

In order to save valuable time when formatting articles, we would like to ask all authors to use the style template available for download on the ZFHE website from the outset:

https://www.zfhe.at/userupload/ZFHE_20-3_TEMPLATE_de.docx

https://www.zfhe.at/userupload/ZFHE_20-3_TEMPLATE_en.docx

Texts must be editable and available in formats such as Microsoft Word (.doc), Office Open XML (.docx), Open Document Text (.odt), or plain text (.txt); please do not submit PDF files. Contributions must first be submitted in anonymized form to ensure the double-blind review process. To do this, please remove all references to the authors from the document (including in the document properties!). Once the review has been approved, this information can be reinserted.

Any questions?

If you have any questions regarding content, please contact

Martin Ebner (martin.ebner@tugraz.at), Channa van der Brug (channa.vanderbrug@stifterverband.de), or Elena Wilhelm (elena.wilhelm@zhdk.ch). For technical and organizational questions, please contact Alessandro Barberi (office@zfhe.at).

We look forward to receiving your submission!

Martin Ebner, Channa van der Brug, Elena Wilhelm, and Alessandro Barberi