ABSTRACT
The present chapter offers a historical and political overview of the trend of marketization affecting the higher education (HE) fields of Italy and England over the last thirty years. More notably, sections two and four illustrate the main transformations that occurred in the higher education sectors of Italy and England, respectively, as triggered by several waves of reforms over the last thirty years. Bearing in mind the relational strategic framework of the book, these sections also offer a detailed description of the resistances to such reform waves. Sections three and five present in detail the most recent round of higher education reforms, both in Italy and England, which constituted the triggering factors of the student mobilizations under investigation. The sixth and concluding section of the chapter compares the HE transformations of Italy and England by providing an explanation of their different paces of implementation.
