Neoliberal University Research Articles

Motherscholars Traversing the Educational Pipeline through Moments of Sacred Pause

By focusing on three Chicana Motherscholars pláticas, traversing the Educational Pipeline, I conceptualize sacred pauses as moments of joy, gratitude, and love (Tuck, 2009) as resistance and refusal. Sacred pauses refute the neoliberal university indoctrination of hyper-productivity (Hidalgo et al., 2022). This paper expands on the complex journeys of the academic bridges to what Gloria Anzaldúa (2002) calls 'passageways, conduits, and connectors' to illustrate the sacred journeys of overcoming barriers traversed through the Educational Pipeline towards doctoral degree completion for Chicana/e and Latina/e Motherscholars with children. The Motherscholar narratives characterize the potential of reciprocity and healing in bridge makers in Parents of and Women of Color.

Curious care: tacit knowledge and self-trust in doctoral training

ABSTRACT Building on recent literature on supervision practice that has turned away from previous efforts to construct typologies, and towards ‘dialogic’ models that emphasise iterative feedback processes between students and supervisors in situ , this article examines how the curiosity of the supervisor expressed in supervision meetings can both model a relationship to scholarship and collegiality and support the development of confidence and self-trust in the doctoral candidate. Drawing on a qualitative study of video-recorded supervision meetings across multiple Australian universities, this article examines the entanglements of scholarly discourse, interpersonal conviviality, and curiosity within supervision relationships. To understand this, we adopt a ‘post-critical’ approach to doctoral training and borrow the concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ to consider the role of trust, conviviality, and informal ‘know-how’ in the development of formalised expertise. Analysis of exchanges within supervision meetings encourages the consideration of care as a relational structure linked to practices of curiosity and the sharing of tacit knowledge. We argue that although institutional pressures may continue to reshape doctoral candidatures in the neoliberal university, supervision meetings offer important sites for developing doctoral candidates’ intellectual self-trust, including through the expression of curiosity by their supervisors.

In, Against, and Beyond the Ivory: Dreams of Belonging Otherwise through Wonder and Embodied Poetry

In this article, the authors navigate how equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) projects tether us to the neoliberal university in seductive and ultimately, limited ways. The topical triad of EDI, explored through the Canadian Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences’ “Igniting Change: Final Report and Recommendations,” holds important stories about how disability, race, and broadly speaking, normalcy, matter to academic institutions. How is disability storied within the neoliberal university? How are we called to belong within, and be members of, the university through the promise of progress? A poetic engagement creates space for wonder, simultaneously effacing stories that claim to know disability, race, and other forms of being-in-the-world codified as non-normal. As an expression of feeling as freedom, embodied poetry is a creative response to white-settler hegemonic interests that foreclose possibilities for meanings of disability and race; embodied poetry potentiates dreams of living otherwise within, against, and beyond the ivory.

Reflections and Refractions of Black Radicalism

This article discusses collaborative Black study that entails dialogical engagement with a range of texts and podcasts about Black radicalism and is further informed by participation in anti-capitalist, anti-colonial activism. The authors describe their process of examining Black radical thought during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which Black radicalism has been and is now being imagined across contexts. Following the work of Cedric Robinson, the authors understand the Black radical tradition as a negation of Western civilization from within Western society, placing it in hostile relation to the neoliberal university. They discuss Black radicalism as anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, feminist, communally oriented, and opposed to neo/liberal ideologies. They address a range of Black socialist traditions, including those labeled communist, Black anarchist, abolitionist, and antifascist to attend to an ongoing critical-creative practice of Black resistance and collective life-making capable of adapting to and challenging the changing conditions of late capitalism.

Is This the End?

Abstract: In the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon called for both a new start to knowledge production and a reconsideration of its ends. In the reorganization of knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment, disciplines were conceived as having particular purposes as well as a point at which their projects would be complete. This essay revisits this foundational question at another inflection point in its long history: four hundred years after his Great Instauration , as we face the new era that will emerge from the coalescent crises of COVID-19, climate disaster, the right-wing war on education, and the precarity of the neoliberal university. We believe the time has come again for knowledge producers across fields and disciplines to reorient their work around the question of "ends." As scholars and disciplines pursue their individual knowledge projects, they must be able to answer the questions: why do we do what we do, and how could we know that we were done?

Woke

The word ‘woke’ which originated with Black resistance movements in the United States, has in the last few years been weaponized by the right, in the same way that ‘political correctness’ has been in the 1980s and 90s. That weaponization has made it impossible to distinguish critical scholarship from dogma, indeed it has conflated the two. If there is censoriousness on the left, it is nothing to compare with the legal power of the authoritarian right. This censoriousness has to be understood not as something inherent in leftist thought, but as the product of the neoliberal university context from which it emerges.

Being Too Asian: Migrant Student Time and Resistance within the Canadian University

Asian international students in Canadian higher education have long caused anxiety and predicament for domestic (white) students, faculty, and staff. This article considers the contending and multiple timelines in and against which international students (Chinese, South Asians, or otherwise) operate. In particular, this article considers how these students time-trick the neoliberal university by examining reports and advocacy around three temporal events: extensions, cheating and suicide. Ultimately, the authors seek to problematize the moral panic over decreasing admission standards and academic integrity associated with the admission of Asian international students within the Canadian higher education system.

Science as an ‘object of love’ – affective milieus in the neoliberal university

This study examines the affective milieus in the neoliberal university. Previous studies have demonstrated that, despite harsh neoliberal realities, academics still express a love for academic work. This study uses love as its conceptual tool to analyse the different forms of love that academics attach to science. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theoretisations of affect, this study shows that emotions play a crucial role in organising social order. Emotions work to divide academia into separate ingroups that have different visions of the virtues of science that represent the object of love for its proponents. While analysing higher education magazines with affective-discursive reading, the results of this study show that the neoliberal university favours the forms of love in which the individual ethos and competition are highly valued, while those forms of love that highlight collegial and emancipatory values are on trial. Overall, this study contributes to critical discussions of the neoliberal university by demonstrating the power of emotions in the construction of conflicting, intersecting and overlapping ways of othering and the complex assemblage of affective milieus that exist in today’s academia.

Exploring the Textual and Tactile Weave of Academic Subjectivities:

Within the neoliberal university, academics become positioned around market-driven managerialist ideologies and the techniques enacting those principles. Audit cultures actively and continuously measure and shape academic subjectivities defined by a specific kind of success. The market-driven individualistic model can conflict with ethical ideals and longings for self-expression, while the mismatch between institutional goals and personal values creates an academic self that is pulled in conflicting directions. We become subjects of the discourse but we can limit our subjectivity and develop authentic insight. In this paper, we engage in a process of embodied making. We create textual and tactile self-portraits as a way of pushing back at neoliberal subjectivities, and to make visible our multiple selves. Although we recognize that we are always a part of what we resist, we use making as a way to create micro-resistances for our own renewal. Our self-portrait assemblages and stories are ambiguous and fluid but capture a view of selves hidden beneath the professional self. We are reminded that we are creative beings, and that there is room within neoliberalism to open intentional spaces. We may not always succeed in seeing our contradictory identities, yet we are able to occasionally capture glimpses of our shifting selves.

“It can be very easy to feel uncomfortable”: Socio-spatial constructions of campus safety among university students and administrators

Research about campus safety focuses primarily on identifying problematic student behaviours (i.e., toxic partying, sexual violence) and institutional infrastructure (i.e., lighting, emergency services), to the exclusion of how safety, as an idea and embodied experience, is constructed. Using qualitive interview data from a participatory action research study conducted at Western University, this article uses a critical feminist lens to examine how undergraduate students (n = 23) and administrators (n = 7) spoke about campus safety as well as spatial vulnerability. Study participants shed compelling light on the “uncomfortable” feelings that pervade their movement across and within the university campus. Often presumed to be a spatially distinct place of privilege for all who work and attend classes within its reach, this is not always the case. Participants experienced this space as one of precarious privilege that reflects, reproduces, and sometimes protects hegemonic systems of white, male, cis-gender institutional power. This glimpse into the emotional geography of the campus sheds new light on safety culture and allied feminist research, specifically that which relates to the interplay between contested notions of safety as well as spatial vulnerability for two stakeholder communities in the neoliberal university.

The precarious academic: professional development and academic identity in the neoliberal university

ABSTRACT Academics are constantly undergoing identity shifts in response to globalisation, marketisation and the impact of technology on academic work. This study investigates the impact of a Graduate Certificate of Higher Education (GCHE) on academic identity development in an Australian University. GCHE graduates and their educators were interviewed to examine whether such extended and reflective professional development might support the negotiation of complex identity shifts. Findings indicated that academic identity development was enabled through this professional development by re-engaging individual academics in the diverse, traditional components of teaching, research and administration, working against the neoliberal trend of role-compartmentalisation for efficiency.

Slow Scholarship: Medieval Research and the Neoliberal University. Edited by Catherine E.Karkov. The English Association Essays and Studies. xiii + 168 pp. Boydell and Brewer, 2019. £40 Hardback.

Slow Scholarship: Medieval Research and the Neoliberal University. Edited by Catherine E.Karkov. The English Association Essays and Studies. xiii + 168 pp. Boydell and Brewer, 2019. £40 Hardback.

Emotional distance, detachment, compassion and care: The affective milieu of academic management in the neoliberal university

Based on interviews with Finnish deans, this study examines the affective milieu of academia. The neoliberalisation process in universities has strengthened centralised leadership and increased the power of managers. Simultaneously, the market-driven competitive ethos has deepened the binary between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ at all levels of academia, giving rise to an affectively tense atmosphere. Due to their increased power, managers play a key role in shaping the affective milieu of academia. By using an affective-discursive approach, I analyse what kind of emotions deans rely on while constructing their relation to employees. This study traces three management discourses: strong, paternalistic and collegial. Together, these discourses with their affective orientations construct a polarised affective milieu. On the one hand, the deans’ affective relationships with employees embody gentleness, care and compassion; on the other hand, affective relationships manifest the inducement of guilt, sternness, conventionality, distance and detachment of employees. I argue that current neoliberal academia leaves little space for deans to demonstrate compassionate collegial management.

Women academics experiences of maternity leave in the neoliberal university: Unmasking governmentality

AbstractAddressing a paucity of large‐scale studies about women academics maternity experiences of leave in academia and under‐theorizing the influence of neoliberalism on this phenomenon, this research provides one of the largest studies of women's experiences of maternity leave in the academic sector. Secondary analysis of a subset of data from a global online mixed method survey with 553 women academics (82% UK, 18% international) was undertaken to explore experiences and implications of maternity leave for women. The findings reveal that women academics continued to undertake core academic work duties during maternity leave such as writing grant applications and journal articles, supervising doctoral students, teaching, and responding to emails. We document four distinct orientations adopted by women during maternity leave that characterize neoliberal subjectivity and use Foucauldian governmentality to unmask the inculcation of such norms. Our analysis shows how neoliberal ideology has gained a hegemonic position in academia that leaves little space for maternity leave, resulting in many women effectively relinquishing their maternity rights to sustain academic productivity. We argue that neoliberalism and new managerialism within the academy undermine policies to support women's maternity rights. The findings of this study will be of interest to scholars and Human Resources professionals, academic mothers, managers, and policymakers who are championing change in the sector.

Markers of entanglement: Survival strategies within the neoliberal university and the promise of carceral futures

Within the neoliberal era, the university's form and function have shifted. These shifts necessitate an unraveling of the synergies of institutions of higher education with carceral institutions. Building from the scholarship of the “college-prison nexus” and the “academic-prison symbiosis,” this paper converges on the criminology department's role within these synergies. Based on an analysis of department websites and the introductory course syllabi of English-speaking criminology departments in Canada (n = 50), I interrogate the methods used to advertise to students. I identify six markers of entanglement that are part of how departments market themselves in the neoliberal era to the student–consumer. These markers include career prospects, field placements, faculty research, pracademics, job training, and dual/bridging degrees. Utilizing these markers as a departure point, I analyze these indicators of relationships that exist between the university and the carceral apparatus. In doing so, I interrogate how these relationships can (re)produce carceral logics and systems and offer the university an articulated pathway of survival through carceral intrenchment.

Work or Alienation? A Conceptual Understanding of Academic Labour Process in Neo-liberal University System

In recent years, universities in Nigeria, and indeed elsewhere, have continued to face challenges on how to deliver more quality services to the stakeholders; both within and outside the University’s communities. These challenges have had to do with the ways in which Universities are funded and managed which consequently have implications on how the Universities organise and control academic work i.e. teaching, administration and research. These main responsibilities for academic staff in the Universities are conceptualised as academic labour process. Within a more generic understanding of Higher Education’s (HE) Management, Universities are therefore expected to device more efficient means of managing, and organising academic work process. In this context, “quality” has come to convey improved processes which define the performance of Universities. However, these are not without implications on leadership roles, work experiences, quality of work-life balance, and employability of the academics. The Paper provides a conceptual review and theoretical understanding of academic labour process in the universities. It evaluates the normative assumptions, and the implications of academic labour process on the lived-work experience of academics.

Being women scholar-activists: Tensions between the neoliberal university and grassroots housing movements

Research rarely unpicks the variety of experiences that exist between activists at different intersections. Our paper attends to this shortfall in literature, firstly through the lens of gendered experiences of labour in housing movements, and secondly through the lens of casualised gendered labour as scholar-activists in the neoliberal university. How we, and others, negotiate these everyday politics will be analysed to offer a more complete understanding of the nuances and tensions at play even in the most progressive movements in Britain. By combining our own experiences with those gleaned from interviews with fellow activists, we develop a framework for understanding what we term ‘activist housework’ - often carried out by those of us who are not cis men - and how this shapes our capacity as organisers and researchers. This framework identifies mundane, everyday and behind-the-scenes labour of activism, which too often goes unseen in favour of focus on more emergent, organic and direct forms of resistance (Pain, 2019). Doing so, we consider, allows reflection on where and how resistance can and must change to maintain the welcome growth in housing activism in Britain.

No time to read? How precarity is shaping learning and teaching in the humanities

Humanities educators are frequently frustrated by students’ poor engagement in reading. The contemporary student experience is characterised by disruption and precarity. Similarly, is that of teachers who work in casual employment. This discussion is located within broader conversations around the neoliberal university, but aims to make more visible ways that teaching and learning are increasingly shaped by precarity, and consequences for the humanities. It describes what precarity in higher education looks like and considers the kinds of strategies that students and their teachers are positioned to develop by virtue of engaging in education under such conditions, amid chaos, making these meaningful through the learning theory of connectivism. This discussion points to some examples of humanities-based pedagogical innovations that seek to strengthen reading skills, while also acknowledging the changing circumstances of students to point towards avenues for ongoing consideration, reflection, and innovation in the humanities.

‘Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things’: the ‘low value’ arts degree and the neoliberal university

ABSTRACT Departments of Arts and Humanities globally face increasing financial threat from falling enrolment, rising costs, and ‘strategic realignment’ at university level. In the UK, in particular, cuts to the Arts and Humanities sector are becoming endemic, with complex ramifications for prospective students as well as academic and professional staff. In light of these structural and ideological challenges, this paper proposes a revisiting of the philosophical work of Richard Rorty. Rorty has argued compellingly for the morally educative importance of the arts as well as the distinct gift of a liberal education more generally. Ultimately, however, we argue that Rorty’s liberal ideals are radically threatened in the present context of neoliberalism and that they have been particularly problematised in philosophical and literary work since Rorty’s death in 2007. The theoretical writings of Lauren Berlant as well as the literary fiction of Nicole Flattery and Natasha Brown are our key exemplars here. Through our analysis of these texts, we interrogate what we might desire of education beyond the liberal paradigm underpinning Rorty’s thought; and we sketch a framework for the Arts and Humanities perhaps more responsive to the crises of our contemporary age.

‘Maybe one way forward’: Forging collective collegiality in the neoliberal academy

Tension between individual and communal interests is endemic in neoliberal universities. As a group of 10 academics from a Business School in an Australian University, we employed the collective research method of memory-work to investigate how collegiality is experienced and learnt by academics. Although collegiality is employed to enable productivity and efficiency in the neoliberal university, our diverse yet intersecting experiences of collegiality diverged from this institutional construct. We shared and explored our memories of collegiality together during the COVID-19 pandemic and learnt how collegiality emerges through acts of care which produce feelings of support, visibility, and equality, thereby improving our wellbeing at work. We propose the concept of ‘collective collegiality’ as sitting alongside institutionalised notions of collegiality, representing a ‘counter space’ to performative notions of collegiality and enabling us to learn from each other how to navigate, survive, and even thrive, in the neoliberal academy. By enacting the lived experience of collective collegiality, we bring to light alternatives to neoliberal workplace ideals which may foster more organic, flexible workplaces and ways of working together.