Round up of recent publications: judgment, redistribution, and history

My first book, Universities and the Purpose of Higher Education launched earlier in January and I'm running a number of blogs and bits and pieces around it:

• 22/01/2026: Blog: How we understand the purpose of education, Edge Foundation

• 09/02/2026: Blog: How did skills take over higher education? One short history, HEPI

• The book launch will be hosted by SKOPE at the University of Oxford on Monday 2 March 2026, see here for further details.

• See the banner above for 20% off from routledge.com with code 26ESA1 until July.

I've also had a piece published with Cultural and Social History, in a special issue on 'Researching Student Lives: Methodological and Theoretical Perspectives'.

• Patel, J. (2026). Afterword: Why Histories of Students Matter Now. Cultural and Social History, 23(1), 115–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2026.2618313

Both the journal piece and the HEPI piece are sort of codas so the argument of the book, with HEPI outlining the limitations on public judgment skills discourse indicates constrains thinking on distribution, and the CASH journal piece struggling with how histories of students might contribute to providing us with a broader assessment the relationship of the investment in higher education with common good.