Negotiating curriculum change in the French university: the case of ‘regionalising ’ social scientific knowledge

This paper focuses on the curricular change in French universities that has taken place over the last two decades and especially since the implementation of the LMD Reform in 2002. Curricula tend to become ‘regionalised-knowledge’ courses, by regrouping disciplinary knowledge and looking forward to economic and social needs. The article aims at analysing the process of producing this change. The first proposition is to show that change is not a linear process, but an ongoing process of negotiation undertaken by a wide range of institutions, social groups and agents, who operate in different institutional levels (European-level, State-level, university/local-level or pedagogic/local-level). The second proposition is that these negotiation procedures mask the differences in the social basis of each one of these discourses and, thus, mask conflict and struggle over social control in higher education reforms