Neoliberal University Research Articles

Invisible Laborers: A storied love letter to other working-class mothers in academia

This paper began from my own desire to see the words of other working-class mothers in academia, to find the proof of our existence. I use autoethnography, or scholarly personal narrative, to nest my own stories of being a working-class mother within earlier scholars’ (Leeb, 2004) observations of the particular ways classism targets working-class women in academia. I also draw from Tiffe’s (2014) observations of the strengths of working-class people, in our abilities to disrupt the neoliberal university’s relationships to time, care, and bodies, and consider how working-class mothers in academia enact these disruptions through our presence.

"Get on with it. Cope." The compassion-experience during COVID-19 in UK universities.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused major disruption to all sectors including higher education during the years of 2020 and 2021, thus providing a window into how different types of suffering can combine and the role of compassion in alleviating pain. Higher education within the United Kingdom provides a case example in this study, but the lessons about compassion are transferable to other contexts, particularly those in the neoliberal public sector. The impact of the pandemic period on teaching in universities has been well documented but there has been far less written about the wider experiences of staff who worked through this period, their suffering and the extent of compassion within their work lives. 29 interviews were conducted and individuals were invited to talk through the story of their pandemic experiences from March 2020 to the interview date of December 2021. Storytelling is a common method in organization studies and, although research into compassion in organizations is nascent, this method has been used in other studies. Previous research has examined organizational compassion in short periods of crisis and this study therefore provides a contrasting perspective on how compassion shifts over a longer period of suffering. A distinction is drawn in this study for the first time between "formalized" compassion processes in the organization which structurally prioritized compassion for students over that of staff, and "informal" compassion shown between staff to each other and between students and staff. The more that formalized compassion was evident, the less apparent it was in interpersonal interactions due to staff wellbeing being compromised and a systemic failure to recognize the dependence of student compassion on the wellbeing of staff. The findings therefore lead to theorizing that although neoliberal universities are perceived as being full of organizational neglect, compassion was structurally embedded for students but at the expense of staff.

Only We Can Protect Us: Labor and Anti-Harassment Organizing within the Neoliberal University

This special issue has called for scholars to critically evaluate how we can better connect with community activists to address gender-based violence (GBV). We seek to complicate this by instead positing the following: scholars and community activists should be one in the same. The authors reflect on their experiences combining their anti-GBV and labor organizing to take on the neoliberal university. We detail our experiences organizing graduate workers around anti-harassment and discrimination, what we have learned, and make recommendations to other scholar-activists working in their communities. We end with a toolkit that is meant to be widely produced and shared within the community for a helpful guide to work towards direct actions to address gender-based violence.

Introduction to the Special Issue

This Special Issue emerged as a reaction to changes in the organisation of academic work that authors variously refer to as the managerial university (e.g., Laiho et al. 2022; Lea 2011), the McUniversity (e.g., Nadolny and Ryan 2015; Parker and Jary 1995), the neoliberal university (e.g., Davies et al. 2006), the corporate university (e.g., Angus 2007) or the entrepreneurial university (e.g., Marginson and Considine 2000; Slaughter and Leslie 1997). Following the neoliberal idea of a smaller state and more market in conjunction with New Public Management ideology, universities are increasingly managed along the lines of marketisation, hierarchising, measurement, auditing and control. In that regard it is powerful external stakeholders (e.g., politicians, industry, media, general public) and internal stakeholders (e.g., management and administration) rather than academics that debate and decide the legitimacy of higher education or make various claims about the purposes and the preferred outcomes of academic work (Weik et al. 2022). At the same time, the perspective on academic work has shifted from a validation and certification by peers (Huff 2000) towards a validation focusing on the practical usability of academic knowledge production (Grey 2001; Gulati 2007; Learmonth et al. 2012).

Civil Discourse and Social Change: A University-wide, Faculty-led Social Justice Initiative within the Neoliberal University

Civil Discourse and Social Change: A University-wide, Faculty-led Social Justice Initiative within the Neoliberal University

Embodied and Immersed Is the New Professional - Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Edited by Sven Dupré, Anna Harris, Julia Kursell, Patricia Lulof, and Maartje Stols-Witlox. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020; 298 pp. €124.00 cloth, e-book available. - Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Edited by Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik. Durham, NC:

Three recent anthologies in science and technology studies show how standards for scholarly professionalization are changing. Such changes may facilitate new alliances for theatre faculty plagued by old feuds and the increasingly neoliberal university.

Universities, imperialism and the collective work ahead.

Universities, imperialism and the collective work ahead.

Episodic disability in the neoliberal university: Stories from the Canadian context

AbstractThis article explores how episodic disability (ED) is created and intensified by, present within, and pushed out of the neoliberalized academy in Canada. ED is an umbrella term for a range of physical, mental, and neurological conditions characterized by fluctuation and unpredictability. Over two million working‐age Canadians are affected by ED, with women more likely to be impacted. To consider how ED interacts with post‐secondary education, we put feminist disability theories of embodied precarity, crip time, and disability justice into conversation with multimedia stories created by post‐secondary women workers with EDs, with story‐makers contextualizing and theorizing their creations, and revealing their complex embodied and embedded experiences. We chose these from stories generated in two research projects focused on transforming negative concepts of disability to serve as an “archivy” of embodied precarity that challenges ED's erasure in the academy. We think with the stories to analyze power and resistance in and on gendered and raced academic bodies along three overlapping themes: debility and vulnerability in the neoliberal university; fault‐lines of neoliberal time and embodied time; and EDs as produced in, and pushed out of, the neoliberal academy. Considering interrelations between ED and post‐secondary education under neoliberalism, we argue that feminist disability theory and justice praxis challenge debilitating and exclusionary expectations that harm people with EDs in and outside of the academy.

Subtle activism: Heterotopic principles for unsettling contemporary academia from within

Research on academic activism tends to foreground vociferous and explicit forms of activism that pursue predefined political agendas. Against this backdrop, this article proposes that academic activism can take more subtle forms. Writing as an academic activist collective, we unpack what subtle activism might look like within the context of contemporary academia. We use Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to argue that subtle activism can expand the space of what is possible in academia today by experimenting with quietly unsettling norms rather than overtly opposing or rejecting them. We offer a set of principles that might underpin a subtle activist agenda, extrapolated from practices from colleagues and from own activist collective. We hope that these principles may serve to inspire other academics wishing to engage in subtle activism by unsettling everyday practices that discreetly challenge the status quo, thereby contributing to gently shifting the agenda for how it is possible to conduct intellectual work in the contemporary neoliberal university context.

The Necessity of Pursuing Feminist Pedagogy in Economics

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to characterize feminist pedagogy within the context of economics instruction in the US and to contribute to the development of this paradigm by charting out a research agenda for feminist pedagogy in economics. Our argument proceeds in two parts. First, we answer the question, what is feminist pedagogy in economics (FPiE)? This section sets out a working definition and contextualizes FPiE within the broader pedagogy literature, within the pedagogy literature specific to economics, and within the practice of economics teaching today. Next, we explore new directions for research and practice in FPiE by discussing post-positivist epistemologies, resisting the depoliticization of economics education, and effective responses to diversity in the neoliberal university.

Exclusionary Logics: Constructing Disability and Disadvantaging Disabled Academics in the Neoliberal University

Contemporary academia features managerialism and neoliberal thinking, consequent of an increasingly dominant market logic. This article draws on interviews with disabled academics, line managers, human resources professionals, estates staff, health and safety staff, and trade union representatives, alongside university policy documents, to discuss the impact of this logic on the experiences of disabled academics. Understandings of disability across professional groups were divorced from institutional rhetoric of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, aligning more clearly with market logic, manifest in performance management and idealised notions of academic work. Unlike students, disabled academics are required to navigate hostile policies and procedures. Their diagnoses are used in points of dispute relating to performance, or as an obstruction to dismissal tolerated out of legal obligation. This article illustrates the need for a change in university institutional logics to undo the damaging limitations of following market models of education.

Review: Zoe Hope Bulaitis, Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance

Review: Zoe Hope Bulaitis, Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance

Breaking isolation: Consciousness-raising as a methodology for academic activism

In this essay we argue that one way to combat the depressing creep of the neoliberal university is to recuperate and re-use consciousness raising (CR) in teaching, administration, research, and engagement. Consciousness-raising can be roughly characterised as first, an apprehending of one’s place in a system, and second, feeling inspired to do something about that system. We propose that CR is an especially helpful way to think about our work in contexts where more structural changes to advance social justice agendas appear to have stalled, or even to have taken a step backwards. There may be potential to co-opt the increasing dominance of individualism in our worlds, by revisiting the role that individual reflection and development plays in social change, as conceptualised within CR. Through examples drawn from our own experiences, we demonstrate how CR happens in our day-to-day interactions, reigniting a sense of meaning in our working lives whilst potentially creating ripples of positive change. We thus call not just for revisiting, but also for reconceptualising and reframing CR rooted in feminist and intersectional praxis as a methodology for academic activism in the contemporary business school.

Dewey, Implementation, and Creating a Democratic Civic University

Dewey, Implementation, and Creating a Democratic Civic University

“There Is a Real Generational Problem in This Country”: Haitian Intellectual Exile and Academic Diaspora Returns

AbstractBased on a series of life‐history interviews conducted between 2013 and 2018, this article examines the generational aspects of homecomings, or how location and temporality affect intellectual return and reintegration. The article specifically explores the returns of Haitian intellectual exiles (jenerasyon 86) and the young academic diaspora (jenn doktè) at two would‐be moments of social transformation in Haiti: post‐Duvalier (after 1986) and post‐earthquake (after 2010). First, it discusses how populism and political uprooting (dechoukaj) led to the internal exile or social displacement of jenerasyon 86. Next, it examines academic diaspora returns in the era of the neoliberal university and outlines the intergenerational struggles that emerged between jenerasyon 86 and the jenn doktè. This article argues that generation as both social position and sociohistorical context created divergent experiences of placelessness for returnees and that the lack of intellectual friendship among returnees contributed to their inability to realize their aspirations of social change.

Using teaching and learning regimes in the international classroom to encourage student re-subjectification

This paper addresses one of the pedagogical challenges that followed the presence of increasingly multinational student groups, particularly the increased diversity of academic backgrounds among students. Theoretically, this challenge can be understood as an encounter between different teaching and learning regimes (TLRs). TLR, coined by Trowler and Cooper (2002), implies a constellation of assumptions, rules, relationships, and practices regarding the conduct of higher education that colours academic staff members’ performance in their profession. It has become a widely used heuristic tool in the reflection process among university staff. It is shown in this paper that TLRs are not only a heuristic tool that can be applied in teacher reflection but may also be fruitfully applied in the classroom in student-teacher interaction. Consequently, we decided to bring the TLR into the classroom. The written student reflections constitute the empirical material that this analysis is based on. We approach these reflections as expressions of confessions of the Self, as laid out by Michel Foucault. We conclude that it is useful for the students to reflect upon TLR’s, but simultaneously, such an approach runs the risk of enhancing pedagogical and epistemological conformism at the neoliberal university.

You Have the Right to Remain Silent: How Social Work Academics Cope with the Neoliberal University

Abstract In recent years, a vast and sprawling body of literature has shown that academic institutions have adopted market principles and practices. Scholars have commonly called these processes “the neoliberalization of higher education’ or ‘academic capitalism’. Yet, studies have given less attention to the neoliberalisation of higher education from the bottom-up, reflecting the views of faculty. The discipline of social work, which represents social values and objectives that are incompatible with the neoliberal transformation of higher education, offers a valuable case in point. The current study examines how social work academics experience and confront the ongoing neoliberalisation of higher education. We address this question by drawing on in-depth interviews with thirteen social work faculty members in all five universities across Israel. Findings highlight three main themes: (i) perceptions of the academy and higher education; ii) the tension between freedom and discipline in everyday academic life; and (iii) coping strategies with the neoliberal university. Findings indicate that social work academics’ opposition to the economisation of higher education is marginal and, in most cases, non-existent. We draw on Foucault’s concepts of ‘technologies of domination’ and ‘technologies of the self’ to illuminate our findings regarding neoliberal dynamics in higher education.

The systemic neoliberal colonisation of higher education: a critical analysis of the obliteration of academic practice

Within the neoliberal university, scholarship, education, students, academic staff, and practices are subordinated to managerial imperatives. University educators are denigrated and displaced by colonising neoliberal practices that systemically invalidate and invisibilise academic work. The present article provides an example of this by critically analysing the corrosive and Orwellian operations of neoliberal managerialism in higher education through the prism of my own experience of applying for ‘recognition of leadership’ in relation to teaching. I use a narrative ethnographic approach to generate new insights into the obliteration of academic practice in contemporary university contexts and to produce a counter-hegemonic discourse for understanding these processes. Following Habermas inter alia, it is argued that without radical reform, the uncoupling of the ethical and substantive dimensions of the (educational) lifeworld from systemic (neoliberal managerial) strategising will leave higher education in a state of paralysis. The analysis highlights the urgent need for resistance and provides a critical framework for academics to recognise and contest similar colonising processes occurring in their own experiences and contexts.

Publish or perish

The purpose of this paper is to share a poem I wrote as I seek to publish findings from my PhD. The poem, which can be considered as a form of evocative autoethnography, expresses trauma incurred during childhood triggered by feedback accompanying a desk reject. The poem echoes internalised judgement but also seeks to provide hope that achievement is possible even in the face of what feels insurmountable. The backdrop of the poem is the neo-liberal university, the emotive and perilous demand to publish or perish, as well as patriarchal mansplaining.

Feminist Pedagogy in the Neoliberal University: The Limits of Precarious Labour

In recent years, feminist pedagogy has been advanced as a strategy for disrupting the neoliberal corporatization of the university classroom. In this paper, we both recognize and trouble this disruptive potential, examining how the working conditions faced by adjunct instructors affect our ability to put our commitments to feminist pedagogy into practice. Based on our own experiences as sessional instructors, we argue that conditions such as heavy workloads, alongside limited access to institutional resources and community, contribute to faculty burn-out and hinder our ability to build and maintain feminist student-instructor relationships. Drawing on existing scholarship on feminist pedagogy, and emerging work exploring the challenges of teaching within the neoliberal university, we argue for the need to extend and complicate dominant understandings of feminist pedagogy as a series of values and practices that individual instructors can implement, and to recognize how its enactment is limited by the adjunctification of higher education. This paper pertains to instructors, particularly those in feminist departments, seeking to apply feminist pedagogy across the university.