This international text with contributions from Europe, the United States, South America, Africa and Australia brings together a unique collection of both experienced and new writers examining the relationship between popular and higher education. It shows how university-based teachers and researchers can use their work to support and resource popular struggles for democracy, equality and social justice - at a time when all the demands being made upon them are towards institutional disengagement from social and political action. Exploring how many of the current trends in intellectual and institutional life can be challenged and changed, the book considers amongst other themes, the hegemony of technical rationality and the new managerialism, the construction of higher education as a competitive market place and the dominance of individualised models and modes of learning and achievement.