Neoliberal Academia Research Articles

Academic careers and parenting: identity, performance and surveillance

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the experiences and perceptions of parent academics and their colleagues, and argues that in the absence of institutional support and guidance, self and peer assessment of academic identity in relation to performance becomes a measure against which academics assess their own academic careers and the academic careers of others. The context of the study is contemporary neoliberal academia in which competition is encouraged, driving individuals to actively self-manage their own academic careers. In-depth interviews were conducted with 32 senior lecturers and associate professors, both parents and non-parents. Three distinct social identity groups were found among the participants: those who placed parenthood ahead of their career; parents who performed ‘despite’ their children, and a third group of ‘surveillers’ of other academic parents and their careers. Perceptions of parenthood as detrimental to academic careers was enforced through these identity groups, particularly the ‘surveillance’ of academic parents by their colleagues.

Reflections on being a civilian researcher in an ex-military world: expanding horizons?

ABSTRACTThis paper provides a series of critical reflections on the tensions involved in researching the lives of military veterans. In particular, tensions arising when civilian researchers attempt to speak on behalf of veterans, combined with problematic attempts to achieve an academic ‘understanding’ of veterans’ lives, generate concerns regarding the potential misrepresentation of their unique experiences. Following recent examples in critical military studies, these issues are brought to the fore through dialogue and critical debate with colleagues and research participants. The paper first introduces a theoretical backdrop to the tensions being debated. Following Gadamer, the concept of ‘horizons of understanding’ is then introduced to suggest how we might usefully consider and address these tensions. Horizons comprise that which we are able to understand based on prior knowing. It is argued that ‘dialogical’ research constitutes one possible means of expanding our horizons in work with veterans. Challenges to dialogical research are discussed in light of prevailing conditions within and beyond neoliberal academia, before concluding with practical suggestions of how dialogical research might generate more productive and responsible research with military veterans.

Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia

This paper refers to the context of British universities and tackles the relation between macro-organisation, the institutional practices undergoing major changes and the affective embodied experiences of academics today. Based on various fragments from daily academic life collected over a period of one year, the analy sis emphasizes the new forms of precariousness, the intensification and the extensification of academic work. The author reveals how the new academic labour processes imply various forms of emotions ranging from exhaustion, stress, insomnia, anxieties to toxic shame which remain largely secret and silenced in the public discourse of the academy. By focusing on experience and pointing to some of the »hidden injuries« of academic life, the author recalls us that after making them visible the next challenge is how we might begin to resist.

The Ambivalences of Becoming a Professor in Neoliberal Academia

The article is a mode of drifting of experiences of an academically young critical scholar, a woman who recently became a tenure track professor of social justice and equality in education in a Nordic “model country of equality.” The concept of experience in this article is not used in the sense of individuals having experiences; rather, it is about an academic subject, a young academic professor, who constitutes herself and is constituted as an experiencing subject. She wanted to write about the process of seeing what framed her seeing. As a critical scholar, she wanted to understand more about how we come to think of, and recognize, particular statements and affects as belonging to certain discourses, and how we maintain but also challenge and change these discourses.

Succumbing, surviving, succeeding? Women managers in academia

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to address an under-explored and under-theorised aspect of gender work in UK academia in that it looks at the professional lives of middle and senior women managers and leaders who are responsible for initial teacher training in their institutions. As Maguire (2002) and Murray (2002, 2006) point out, within academia, teacher trainers occupy a particularly under-researched space despite some recent interest (Korthagen and Vasalos, 2005; Thompson, 2007).Design/methodology/approach– This research draws on a larger study which explored how 22 middle and senior managers and leaders in ten institutions in England try to come to terms with carrying out their roles in the education marketplace. In-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with these women and data were also collected from field notes from participant observation undertaken at three of the institutions.Findings– Whereas some women are moving into positions of authority in the education marketplace, some existing women managers are being marginalised within new internally differentiated layers of managerial structures. Simultaneously, many women who manage teacher training are engaged in a struggle for survival individually and professionally. Those who succeed have managed to re-invent themselves to endorse neo-liberal discourses.Originality/value– Original empirical research which sheds new light on previous discourses related to women managers in neo-liberal academia.

Academic perceptions of higher education assessment processes in neoliberal academia

Neoliberal higher education reforms in relation to quality assurance, managerialist practices, accountability and performativity are receiving increasing attention and criticism. In this article, I will address student assessment as part of the technologies that increasingly govern academics and their work in universities. I will draw on Foucault’s theories of governmentality and subjectification, and discourse analysis that have framed the research conducted with 16 academics in one university in the UK. While academics in the study expressed frustration with neoliberal reforms in general, and assessment policies in particular, they tended not to demonstrate overt resistance within their university systems. The reasons for this will be questioned and analysed in relation to a neoliberal mode of government where power relations shaping academic subjectivities are diffuse and pervasive. I will discuss the ways in which academics understand and act within these power relations, and I will also demonstrate a variety of covert practices that academics tend to apply when coping with the neoliberal technologies of government such as assessment.

Conducting commissioned research in neoliberal academia: The conditions evaluations impose on research practice

The article deals with the unease we experience during various commissioned research projects. On the one hand, as social scientists, we feel committed to conducting ‘good research’ that acknowledges quality criteria such as flexibility and transparency and in particular allows for musing and reflexivity to ‘discover’ new aspects of our research topic. On the other hand, we are situated in the context of present-day neoliberal academia. This means that our work is assessed according to a culture of audit characteristic for neoliberal management of universities that values publication indexes and fundamental research. At the same time, universities strive increasingly for third-party funding that favors commissioned research. This article discusses how commissioned research conditions our evaluations and research practice and how these conditions might conflict with the ‘good research’ we hope to conduct.

What’s Love Got to Do with it? Precarious Academic Labour Forces and the Role of Passion in Italian Universities

This article examines the role of passion among precarious labour force in the Italian academia. By relying on C. Wright Mill’s distinction between “passion as a reason” of action and “passion as a motive” to represent and discuss one’s employment condition, the article concludes that the symbolic strength of passion is correlated to its applicability both as a tool to govern recruitment in neo-liberal academia and as a strategy to fit recruitment criteria and “become employable”. The article is based on more than four-year long documentation and participant observation in political initiatives and campaigns organised by precarious, non-tenured research staff in Italian universities.

Om vikten av att känna sig otillräcklig

The article explore the operations of emotions of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and ambivalence in the context of the neoliberal academia of today and it’s focus on excellence, competition and constant self-evaluations. Maria Jönsson and Anna Rådström investigate what these “negative” emotions do (Ahmed 2004) in relation to a concept such as “excellence”. They discuss how these “doings” can be understood and how they relate to questions of power and hierarchy. Jönsson and Rådström suggest that emotions of vulnerability and inadequacy in research should not be seen as something to be overcome, but rather as something to engage with and pay attention to. These emotions provide us with a sensitivity to research as an open process, open to the unexpected and the “not-yet” (Sedgwick 2003) instead of producing “knowingness” (Scheman 2011) and sovereign research subjects. Jönsson and Rådström utilize the theoretical work of Hélène Cixous and of Judith Butler (2003) in order to discuss how vulnerability and ambivalence can be used in self-reflexive and critical work in academia.

What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities

What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities

If You're So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management

Although universities have undergone changes since the dawn of their existence, the speed of change started to accelerate remarkably in the 1960s. Spectacular growth in the number of students and faculty was immediately followed by administrative reforms aimed at managing this growth and managing the demands of students for democratic reform and societal relevance. Since the 1980s, however, an entirely different wind has been blowing along the academic corridors. The fiscal crisis of the welfare states and the neoliberal course of the Reagan and Thatcher governments made the battle against budget deficits and against government spending into a political priority. Education, together with social security and health care, were targeted directly. As the eighties went on, the neoliberal agenda became more radical—smaller state and bigger market—attacking the public sector itself through efforts to systematically reduce public expenditure by privatizing public services and introducing market incentives. At the

Work and wonder at the weekend: on emotions in feminist geographical praxis

This article explores intersections between academic work and emotional work at a feminist geography reading weekend held by the Women and Geography Study Group of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers in the UK in 2006. It points to the importance of the fleeting, often unreported, spaces of feminist geographical praxis and of inserting these in our disciplinary histories. Using a performative textual strategy it offers a poly-vocal reflection on the complex, challenging and productive experiences of this kind of academic workspace. In so doing it contributes to feminist engagements with the practices of neo-liberal academia, to debates about the emotional geographies of feminist geographical work, and to discussions of the value of activities outside the norms of academia in providing potentially supportive and creative spaces for geographical praxis.