Rūta Petkutė-Budre

Rūta Petkutė completed her Ph.D. in Social Sciences at Tallinn University in 2022. In her doctoral thesis, “The Instrumentalization of Academic Lifeworlds, Knowledge, and Education: Lithuanian Academics’ Responses to the European Higher Education Policy of Curriculum Restructuring,” she uses a sociological perspective to explore the implications of the European Bologna reforms of higher education in Lithuania.

Dr. Petkutė argues that the neoliberal reforms in Europe signify a problematic cultural shift from the continental idea of the university as a site for pursuing different kinds of knowledge toward a more instrumental Anglo-American notion of the university as a source of immediately applicable knowledge. She finds that academics tend not to internalize the change and implement it only formally. They resist the reform, seeing it not as an educational, but as a prescribed economically-driven project that steers academic life towards instrumental ends.

At Yale Dr. Petkutė will work on a book “Exchanging Tyrannies: The Human Implications of Neoliberal Policies in a Post-Soviet Country,” which presents the thesis of exchanging tyrannies as a way of exploring the social and human consequences of neoliberal politics in the context of post-Soviet Lithuania. In this book she is collaborating with British sociologist Ivor Goodson.