Affective Capitalism in Academia: Revealing Public Secrets 9781447357865

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Affective Capitalismin Academia: Revealing Public Secrets
Copyright information
Table of contents
Notes on contributors
1 Introduction: academic capitalism and the affective organisation of academic labour
Reconsidering academic capitalism
Academic capitalism and affective labour in academia
Affective capitalism in academia
Revealing public secrets with affective subjectivation
Structure of the book
Conclusion: where to go from here?
References
Part I Structures
2 Affective labour pains of academic capitalism in crisis
Introduction: conceptualising the connections between affect, capitalism, and academia1
Logic of capital: a commodified use-value/exchange-value tension
Logic of capital: the necessity of structural inequality among labourers in fields of capital-accumulating production
University sectors as capitalising fields: Bourdieu’s expanded ‘capitals’
Australian university restructures: imperilling the cultural-symbolic logic
Habitus in hysteresis: affective dissonances
Breaking academic agency: violent affects from ‘above’
Capitalising on dire academic affects
Conclusion: resowing academic fields for use-valued life ahead?
Note
References
3 Deepened coloniality, heightened structuralism: implications for intellectual thought and praxis in the Caribbean
Introduction
Neoliberalism, (post)structuralism and the academy
Plantation society, coloniality and the intellectual traditions
Deepened coloniality and intellectual advances
Critical pedagogy, post-coloniality and the public intellectual
Conclusion
Note
References
4 Academic patriarchal (post)liberal capitalism
Introduction
‘We do not measure, we classify’
The Greek university against historical-materialist thinking
‘I fear that nobody is going to take us very seriously if we continue to suggest that war is imminent because fathers hate their sons and want to kill them’3
(Post)liberalism – patriarchal psychic normality and academia
The ‘Great Capitalist Reset’
Conclusion: decolonising academia
Notes
References
Part II Relationships
5 The storytelling and storyselling of neoliberal academic work
Introduction
The 10 commandments of A-cademics
Academic storyselling in the ‘moral concentration camp’
Academic storytelling in the ‘public library’
Imaginary realism
The heart and the darkness
References
6 Exploring the academic and affective leadership in academia
Introduction
Academia and leadership on the market
Data and analysis
Becoming a leader: the messy journey begins
Becoming a gendered leader in the academy
How to rethink the academic leadership: the end of the ‘messy’ journey
Conclusion
References
7 Friendship in academia: the moral economy of academic work
Introduction
Theoretical framework
Networking and friendship at work
Gift exchanges and relational work
Approach and methods
The meaning and making of friendship
Boundaries and categories
Thick situations and invisible gift giving
Conclusion
References
8 What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker: an uncanny story of contemporary academic life1
Introduction
I am not my CV
Here I go again: that uncanny feeling
Revisiting the closet: an uncanny neoliberal trope
Don’t fuck the help: academic labour (in) the corporate university
So what have I learned from all of this?
Note
References
Part III Performance
9 Academy in my flesh: affective athleticism and performative writing
Introduction
Affective athleticism and managing self-managing
Practices shaping academic athleticism
Vignette 1
Vignette 2
Post-..vignette 2: wearing the wrong collars?
Post-..vignettes: affective athleticism in the era of COVID-19
And now? How can I conclude this chapter?
Notes
References
10 Getting texts done: affective rhythms of reading in quantified academia
Introduction
From jottings to collaborative autoethnography
What counts in quantified academia?
Insufficiency (drowning in text)
Jumpiness (getting distracted)
Hastiness (reading ‘efficiently’)
From discordant rhythms to appropriated time
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
11 Performance management: Western universities, Chinese entrepreneurs and students on stage
Entrepreneurial students as academic commodities
‘Tell me about yourself’
Imagining confident students
Dancing on dreams
Captured ideals
Notes
References
12 What’s the point? A few thoughts instead of a conclusion
Introduction: writing about academic capitalism
Scholarship as a process of meaning-making
Academic capitalism and the decline of meaning
So, what’s the point?
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

AFFECTIVE CAPITALISM IN ACADEMIA REVEALING PUBLIC SECRETS

EDITED BY DANIEL NEHRING AND KRISTIINA BRUNILA

AFFECTIVE CAPITALISM IN ACADEMIA Revealing Public Secrets Edited by Daniel Nehring and Kristiina Brunila

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 374 6645 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press, excluding chapter 9 © Silvia Gherardi, Michela Cozza and Magnus Hoppe, 2023 The digital PDF and EPUB versions of Chapter 9 are available Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits reproduction and distribution for non-commercial use without further permission provided the original work is attributed. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4473-5784-1 hardcover ISBN 978-1-4473-5785-8 ePub ISBN 978-1-4473-5786-5 ePdf The right of Daniel Nehring and Kristiina Brunila to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editors and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press and Policy Press work to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Robin Hawes Front cover image: iStock/izusek Bristol University Press and Policy Press use environmentally responsible print partners. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents Notes on contributors 1

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Introduction: academic capitalism and the affective organisation of academic labour Kristiina Brunila and Daniel Nehring

PART I Structures 2 Affective labour pains of academic capitalism in crisis Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan 3 Deepened coloniality, heightened structuralism: implications for intellectual thought and praxis in the Caribbean Talia Esnard 4 Academic patriarchal (post)liberal capitalism Demetra Tzanaki PART II Relationships 5 The storytelling and storyselling of neoliberal academic work Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Paola Valero 6 Exploring the academic and affective leadership in academia Kristiina Brunila 7 Friendship in academia: the moral economy of academic work Erika Andersson Cederholm, Carina Sjöholm and Dianne Dredge 8 What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker: an uncanny story of contemporary academic life Mark Vicars PART III Performance 9 Academy in my flesh: affective athleticism and performative writing Silvia Gherardi, Michela Cozza and Magnus Hoppe 10 Getting texts done: affective rhythms of reading in quantified academia Juhana Venäläinen 11 Performance management: Western universities, Chinese entrepreneurs and students on stage Amir Hampel 12 What’s the point? A few thoughts instead of a conclusion Daniel Nehring and Kristiina Brunila Index

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Notes on contributors Erika Andersson Cederholm is Professor of Service Studies at the Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Lund University, and Associate Professor of Working Life Studies at Kristianstad University College in Sweden. Her research embraces areas such as rural lifestyle entrepreneurship, tourism and hospitality, service work, administrative work and creative labour. Theoretically, she works in the fields of economic sociology, cultural sociology and working life studies, with an interest in the intersections between professional, commercial and personal spheres of life, such as friendship and gift exchanges in networks and in workplaces. She is currently working with Carina Sjöholm on the project ‘Friendship at work –​Reciprocity and relational work in the academic workplace’. Formally retired since early 2016, Marie Brennan is an Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of South Australia, and remains active in research and doctoral supervision. She is also an Extraordinary Professor in Education Policy at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, a Life Member of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) and a Distinguished Member of the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA). Her research, scholarship and activism include a focus on diverse sectors of education, significantly concerned with issues of social injustice and environmental activism. She chaired the AARE Working Party ‘Protecting and extending research in education in Australia’, 2018–​21, and was lead author of its major report. She has attracted major grants and has published widely on education policy, curriculum, teacher education and higher education. The latter focus includes co-​editing Re-​Positioning University Governance and Academic Work (with Jill Blackmore and Lew Zipin; Sense Publications, 2010), Politics and Policy in Teacher Education: International Perspectives (with John Furlong and Marilyn Cochran-​Smith; Routledge, 2009), while her interest in curriculum is represented in Curriculum Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing World: Transnational Perspectives on Curriculum Inquiry (co-​edited with Bill Green and Phil Roberts; Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and she has contributed articles and chapters to other edited collections, including to Catherine Manathunga and Dorothy Bottrell’s important two-​volume set Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education, Volume II: Prising Open the Cracks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Kristiina Brunila is Professor of Social Justice and Equality in Education in the University of Helsinki, where she directs the research centre AGORA for the Study of Social Justice and Equality in Education. Her research interests relate to global and local changes in education governance, marketisation, v

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inequalities, psychologisation and therapeutic ethos in education, power relations, differences and agency. She has published several books and has written many articles for acclaimed academic journals. She has also received awards and nominations for promoting equality and equity in her research and teaching. Michela Cozza is Associate Professor and member of the New Organization and Management Practices (NOMP) group at the School of Business, Society and Engineering (EST) at Mälardalen University, Sweden. In her work she has developed an interdisciplinary research agenda that mainly combines concepts and theories from Science Technology Studies (in particular feminist technoscience and post-​humanism), and organisation studies (with regards to practice-​based studies). She is interested in applying and exploring qualitative methodologies, art-​based methods and design techniques. In her recent work, she critically analyses processes linked to the digitalisation of care as well as aspects related to the commodification and marketisation of academic work. Dianne Dredge is a happy ex-​professor and founder and director of two Australian-​based social enterprises –​The Tourism CoLab and Designing Tourism. Originally trained as an environmental and urban planner, her early career focused on tourism, planning and policy. She spent 25 years in higher education, gathering a wealth of experience in Canada, Mexico, China and Denmark, and has held guest professorships at Lund University in Sweden and Federation University in Australia. This global perspective and intercultural experience give her unique insights into friendship, collegiality and collaboration. She has provided policy analysis and advice on digitalisation and collaborative economy to international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission, and at local levels delivering dozens of projects at local government level. She is a creative systems thinker, and her expertise includes planning, policy analysis, organisational design, place activation, design thinking, community engagement and education. Talia Esnard, PhD, is Senior Lecturer and current Head/​Chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus, Trinidad and Tobago. Her research advances intersectional and constructivist perspectives of work and organisations, with particular assessments of the tenure process across the US and the Caribbean, diversity in higher education, mothering and entrepreneurship, as well as on equity and inclusion in the Caribbean. Some of her work has been published in the Journal of Motherhood Initiative, Women, Gender and Families of Color, Journal of vi

Notes on contributors

Cases in Educational Leadership, Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning and NASPA Journal about Women in Higher Education. Silvia Gherardi is Senior Professor of Sociology of Organization at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Italy, where she founded the Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics (www.unitn.it/​r uc​ola). She is also Professor II at the School of Business, Society and Engineering, Mӓlardalen University, Sweden. She received the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from Roskilde University (2005), East Finland University (2010) and St Andrews University (2014). Silvia’s research interests include: feminist new materialism, entrepreneurship, epistemology of practice and post-​qualitative methodologies in organisation studies. She has had two books published with Edward Elgar on practice-​based studies: How to Conduct Practice-​Based Studies (2019) and Learning and Knowing in Practice-​Based Studies (2012), co-​ authored with Antonio Strati. Several articles have been published in journals such as Organization, Management Learning, Gender, Work and Organization, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship and Academy of Management Review. Amir Hampel is Clinical Assistant Professor of Global China Studies at New York University Shanghai. Amir has conducted ethnographic and textual research on self-help psychology in China, focusing on social skills training programs that are popular with young urban professionals. By studying young adults who are trying to change their personalities, this research analyses identity, social class, moral subjectivity and mental health in contemporary China, as well as the transnational flow of psychological expertise. Amir’s research has also traced how Chinese psychotherapists and cultural critics are translating ‘social skills’, such as empathy and assertiveness, into discourses about constructing a self-consciously modern, entrepreneurial and confident nation. Amir is now conducting research on the use of Chinese medicine to treat children diagnosed with developmental disorders, particularly ADHD and autism. By focusing on this rapidly emerging field of paediatric therapies, this project is investigating how psychiatric concepts are being translated into Chinese medicine; how clinicians produce knowledge through embodied practices including diagnosis, acupuncture and medical massage; and the anxieties of parenting in contemporary China. Magnus Hoppe is Associate Professor in Business Administration at Mälardalen University, Sweden. His research concerns both private and public organisations and spans intelligence, entrepreneurship and innovation. A special research interest lies in questioning dominating perspectives that bind our understanding of specific topics, where he aims at establishing new vii

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ways of talking and thinking about innovation. Current research projects encompass service design in the public sector including the establishment of Living Labs for the creation of new collaborations between different stakeholders for accomplishing societal sustainability and thus new public values. Magnus is part of several networks for supporting collaborative research methods, and is a board member of the Swedish Interactive Research Association (SIRA). Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen is Professor of Organization Studies at the Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University, Sweden. He is the director of the Master’s programme ‘Leadership and Organization: Societal Challenges and Organizational Changes’. He teaches leadership and organisation in regard to sustainability, inclusion and technology. He researches storytelling, ethics and power in organisations. Daniel Nehring is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Swansea University in the UK. Originally from Germany, he studied Sociology at the University of Essex in the UK. His research has taken him to many societies around the world, such as Mexico, Argentina, South Korea and China. He is the author of, among other books, Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-​Help Industry (with Emmanuel Alvarado, Eric Hendricks and Dylan Kerrigan; Palgrave, 2016), Therapeutic Worlds (with Dylan Kerrigan; Routledge, 2019) and Imagining Society (with Dylan Kerrigan; Routledge, 2020). He is a convenor of an international academic network on therapeutic cultures (see https://selfhelpculture. weebly.com/) and an editor of the Routledge book series Therapeutic Cultures and the Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures (2020). His research has been published in a range of academic journals, such as Sociology, The British Journal of Sociology, Sociology of Health and Illness, International Sociology and Consumption Markets & Culture. Carina Sjöholm is Associate Professor of Ethnology at the Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Lund University, Sweden. Her previous research is concerned with spatial aspects of popular culture and experience economy, as well as lifestyle entrepreneurship in tourism and hospitality. She is adopting a cultural analysis framework and has more specifically centred on social relations, identity formation, commodification of places and materiality. She has since long been interested in the university as a workplace, for students as well as for employees, and as an arena for informal and social learning where the academic craft is managed. She is currently working with Erika Andersson Cederholm in the project ‘Friendship at work –​Reciprocity and relational work in the academic workplace’. viii

Notes on contributors

Demetra Tzanaki is a historian and political scientist with research interests in biopolitics, gender, sexuality and issues of epistemic knowledge. History and theory of gender and sexuality constitute central components of her theoretical and methodological approach in the genealogy of madness, psychiatry, forensic medicine, criminology, eugenics, psychoanalysis, sexology and genetics. She studied Political Science at the University of Athens, achieved her MA degree in Balkan History at the University of London and her PhD in Modern History at the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College). As a postdoctorate researcher (2019–2021), she taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the Faculty of Political Science and Public Administration and as an Academic Specialist at Lifelong Learning for All (LLFA) at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (KUA). She is the seminar coordinator of the ‘Gender, Sexuality, Science and Biopolitics’ series of lectures (LLFA, KUA). She has published extensively in acclaimed academic journals. She is the author of six books, four focusing mainly on gender, sexuality, power and science and two on women and nationalism. Her current research includes a historical and political study of intersex history in the biomedical (post-​)modern Western European discourse. Paola Valero is Professor of Mathematics Education at the Department of Teaching and Learning, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research explores the significance of mathematics education as a field where power relations are actualised in producing subjectivities and generating inclusion/​ exclusion of different types of people. Juhana Venäläinen is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. His research interests revolve around the societal transformations and cultural interpretations of work and the economy, including concepts such as the sharing economy, the platform economy and the gig economy. Juhana has published articles and edited books and special issues about affective capitalism, the affects of precarious work, popular economic thought, alternative socio-​economic formations and the urban commons. Following 24 years of working in education in several countries, with 15 of those in higher education, Mark Vicars is Associate Professor at Victoria University, Melbourne, and Honorary Adjunct Professor, Research Institute for Languages and Culture of Asia (RILCA), Mahidol Univerity, Thailand. has extensive international, multi-​sector experience of teaching and learning, embodied, blended and online, as well as a solid track record of team and curriculum leadership. He is highly experienced in developing international strategy on teaching and learning in Australia, Asia and the UK, generating ix

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international opportunities for collaborative partnerships focused on the teaching–​research nexus. He has developed research affiliations and education partnerships internationally to deliver educational workplace training and research. Mark’s philosophy of praxis is underpinned by principles of social justice, and he has proven success in leadership in tertiary educative contexts and has substantial experience in providing quality and innovation in learning. As a scholar, researcher and teacher Mark is dedicated, innovative and passionate about creative, research-​oriented professional journeys and community engagement. He is intrinsically motivated and enjoys working collaboratively in dynamic, creative environments. Mark’s teaching is highly evaluated, based on a commitment to working with students from diverse countries, cultures, socio-​economic and educational backgrounds. Throughout his career, Mark has produced an integrated body of work that has fundamentally been focused on engaging with teacher-​learners through a transformative student experience. Lew Zipin is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in Education Futures at the University of South Australia, and Extraordinary Professor in Education Policy at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. In his employed career across three Australian universities from 2000 to 2016, Lew was a National Tertiary Education Union activist and researcher on academic workloads. During that time, and since, he has published articles and book chapters on university governance and ethics, including in a book collection, Repositioning University Governance and Academic Work, which he co-​edited (with Jill Blackmore and Marie Brennan, Sense Publications, 2010). Lew has also been active in pushing the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) to extend its operations beyond hosting research conferences and workshops, into advocacy and pro-​action, to reclaim a healthy portion of teaching-​ and-​research academics from workforce restructures that are diminishing the teaching-​and-​research nexus. In recent publications, he has argued the urgent need for, and ways to go about, repurposing universities towards teaching-​ and-​research that capacitates citizenries to act knowledgeably on emergent local–​global crises of the present and verging futures. A related domain of Lew’s research and scholarship is development of school curriculum and pedagogy that capacitates academic engagement and success among students from power-​marginalised social positions. In three major projects funded by the Australian Research Council, he has collaborated with students, their parents, other community members, teachers and academic colleagues to connect school subject knowledge to community-​based funds of knowledge through curriculum units in which students, as action-​researchers, bring diverse knowledges to bear on problems that matter in their life-​world locales.

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Introduction: academic capitalism and the affective organisation of academic labour Kristiina Brunila and Daniel Nehring

Reconsidering academic capitalism Universities today leave nothing to chance when it comes to their public presentation. Their websites, among other marketing and advertising material, speak to this preoccupation, as they are one of the primary means by which universities communicate a desirable image to the wider world. The results of these marketing efforts are carefully curated ensembles of web pages, of individual academics, departments, faculties, administrative departments and universities as a whole, that document great academic accomplishments, distinguished scholarly reputations, innovative degree programmes, outstanding facilities, and so forth. Notably, these websites go to great lengths to portray the texture of feeling involved in studying or working at a given university. So, for example, University X plays up its location in a student city: But what really sets [this city] apart are the independent businesses in stunning locations that you can’t find in every city, from bars in 16th-​ century Tudor houses, to burger joints under the railway arches, and pub gardens on the riverbank. There’s also a lively street market every Saturday that offers hidden treasures in everything from artisan foods to vintage goods. In turn, marketing its ‘student experience’, University Y highlights both a friendly and scholarly environment and the strength of its services and facilities: The student experience ... [City Y] is small enough to feel warm and friendly, with Wellbeing Advisers in both University residences and academic schools to support our students, personal tutors and additional support services. It’s also big enough to provide outstanding 1

Affective Capitalism in Academia

extracurricular opportunities, including a host of clubs, sporting activities and community and volunteering. We continually invest in new and existing facilities, training and technology. Libraries, IT facilities and informal study spaces keep students connected and support independent learning. We have a comprehensive network of support services to ensure that our students can get help and advice on all aspects of university life –​academic, personal, financial and practical –​if and when they need it. Through such marketing materials, universities demonstrate a keen attentiveness to the emotional and affective dimensions of academic labour, as it concerns prospective students or future employees, for example. University websites thus make great efforts to construct coherent images of spaces charged with positive feeling. We would argue that this coherence in universities’ public presentation of self tends to overshadow a much rougher and more uneven affective terrain. The preceding quotations could have been taken from the website of almost any university, at a time of rising uncertainty for both academics and students, occasioned by far-​reaching structural transformations of higher education and the sharp, profound shock of the COVID-​19 pandemic. Taken together, they hint at institutional processes central to higher education systems around the world, in terms of the marketisation of universities. Simply put, ‘marketisation’ in the present context refers to the introduction of market forces into education (Ball, 1994), via the creation of policy logics and governance structures aimed at the creation of market-​like structures in education systems (Hogan and Thompson, 2021). This shift is bound up, first, with the privatisation of universities, through the at least partial withdrawal of the state from their funding and governance, and conversely, through the expanding involvement of private and commercial actors in their financing and operations. As a central dimension of the marketisation of higher education, privatisation also refers to a transformation of its ethos, away from shared public goods (such as the pursuit of Bildung, or the formation of citizens with the capabilities and motivation required to play an active role in democratic politics in liberal democracies), and towards private outcomes (such as graduates’ post-​study success in securing jobs and incomes and the opportunity for employers to recruit from a suitable skilled workforce). Second, the marketisation of universities is closely associated with its commercialisation by way of the expansion of the role of financial or quasi-​financial transactions in their operations: increased tuition fees required to enrol, study and obtain a degree, the concomitant demand on universities to market an exciting ‘student experience’, the emergence of research grants from external funders as a paramount criterion by which universities assess academics’ performance, and so forth. 2

Introduction

The marketisation of higher education has been discussed extensively across the social sciences, and there is now a voluminous body of relevant cross-​disciplinary scholarship, combining the perspectives of a diverse range of fields in the social sciences and humanities. Nonetheless, scholars have so far devoted scant attention to the ways in which marketisation has remade the affective textures of belonging to a university and performing academic labour. It is these affective dynamics of academic labour that we explore in this book. As editors and authors of this book, we have both individually and with other colleagues studied changes in education including academia for several years, while we have also experienced these changes ourselves. Before joining forces to work on this book, we analysed cognitive, academic and knowledge capitalism in education (Brunila and Hannukainen, 2017), as well as neoliberalism and marketisation within and beyond (higher) education (Brunila et al, 2020; Nehring and Kerrigan, 2020), and we have become more sensitive towards power and its productive nature. We have come to believe that actors in academia do not stand apart from prevailing norms and conflicting power relations. Accordingly, while no form of power relation has to be deterministic, and while becoming objects of the forms of power, people still become active subjects. We decided that it was this process of active and affective becoming that would need more understanding. The changes that academia has gone through in neoliberal and market-​ oriented times around the world are extensive. By coining the term ‘academic capitalism’, derived from research in Anglo-​Saxon countries, Slaughter and Leslie (1997) famously defined the reality of the environment of public research universities, an environment full of contradictions, in which academic and professional staff expend their human capital stocks increasingly in competitive situations. By bringing together topics such as undergraduate and graduate education, teaching and research, student aid policies and federal research policies, the authors aimed to understand the global reach of change and how it plays out in higher education and research policies. In these situations, they argued, university employees are simultaneously employed by the public sector, but are increasingly autonomous from it. They are academics who act as capitalists from within the public sector: they are state-​subsidised entrepreneurs. They also argued how these changes towards the market are complex and most clearly seen at the increasingly permeable boundaries between the research university, its workforce and the world outside the academy (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; see also Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). Much of critical work theorised from different perspectives has been inspired by their work (see, for example, Münch, 2020 and Cantwell and Kauppinen, 2014, who brought academic capitalism and globalisation into much needed joint analysis; and Jessop, 2008, who expanded the idea to predatory academic capitalism; see also 3

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Marginson, 2022). The concept of academic capitalism, despite criticism related to its fuzziness (see Jessop, 2008; Schulze-​Cleven and Olson, 2017) and lack of national divergence of varieties of capitalism, has helped in our understanding of the alliance of public authorities, enhancement of performance criteria and private economy’s processes, especially profit-​ oriented entrepreneurial practices. Jessop has further analysed three major sources of academic capitalism. These are the influence of the knowledge-​ based economy paradigm; financialisation and the rise of finance-​dominated economic regimes enabled by neoliberalism; and fisco-​financial crises’ demands for public spending cuts (Jessop, 2008). Today, when academia is harnessed for the purposes of economic efficiency and productivity, it is even more important to understand how people involved with academia are affected as a form of labour, and how they utilise and are utilised by affect in becoming academic scholars. This book focuses on affective capitalism in academia in various national and international contexts, showing with a concrete, curiosity-​driven and bottom-​up approach what is happening in the neoliberally driven ethos, and exploring what can be done about it. To this end, the collection of original studies critically reflects the socio-​cultural organisation of affect in academia and among academic scholars. As a political rationality (Brown, 2015), neoliberalism casts the market as the model for the university, shapes and constrains academics’ conduct, while undermining collectivity and democratic forms of participation. Because of the pervasiveness of the rationality in daily practices, it is sometimes hard or nearly impossible to find room for political imaginary outside the market and a market metrics, which tend to colonise all spheres of academic life, including the private domain. We have a vast amount of international research showing how this pervasiveness has developed. Universities, including their research and teaching, have become major sites of knowledge economies, demonstrating tightening connections between economisation and knowledge (Davies and Bansel, 2010; Holmwood, 2014; Etzkowitz, 2016b; Gantman and Contreras, 2016; Brunila et al, 2020). The economisation of academic life has had significant consequences for the organisation of academic labour and for scholars’ experiences of identity, both professional and personal (Davies and Petersen, 2005; Gill, 2009; Petersen, 2009; Holmwood, 2016, 2017; Bottrell and Manathunga, 2019). The meaning of scholarship is being redefined on a global scale, through the progressive precaritisation of academic employment, the regulation of scholarship through comprehensive performance management regimes, the reorganisation of universities according to the organisational, cognitive and emotional standards of for-​profit business, and the mobilisation of scholars as entrepreneurs. Thus, new forms of instrumental rationality may increasingly lie at the heart of contemporary scholarly identities (Dzisah, 2010). 4

Introduction

While there is a mass of critical literature related to the effects of the changes in academia, it is surprising how little critical analysis there is about how academics are therefore deeply entangled with these changes, and how the structures, activities, modes of production and social relationships have been affected by these changes.

Academic capitalism and affective labour in academia With this book we have sought to expand the dialogue between research on academic capitalism and scholarship on the affective dimensions of work and social interaction in the workplace. In doing so, we enter complex conceptual terrain that has taken shape in four decades of scholarly debates. It seems useful to briefly map this terrain, to clarify the contributions that this book might make to it. This Introduction and the chapters that follow consider the marketisation of higher education at the international level through the conceptual lens of academic capitalism. This has gained considerable currency in academic debates over the past four decades or so, building on Sheila Slaughter’s and Larry Leslie’s influential Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (1997). Academic capitalism departs from the assumption that the marketisation of higher education has been ‘framed by opportunities created by the rise of the neoliberal state, the knowledge economy, globalisation, and the growth of transnational capitalism’ (Slaughter, 2014: vii). In a much-​cited theorisation of the term, Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades define academic capitalism in terms of the constitution of an ‘academic capitalist knowledge/​learning regime’: The theory of academic capitalism focuses on networks –​new circuits of knowledge, interstitial organizational emergence, networks that intermediate between public and private sector, extended managerial capacity –​that link institutions as well as faculty, administrators, academic professionals and students to the new economy. New investment, marketing and consumption behaviors on the part of members of the university community also link them to the new economy. Together these mechanisms and behaviors constitute an academic capitalist knowledge/​learning regime. (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004: 15) In other words, debates about academic capitalism are concerned with the incorporation of higher education policy, of universities, of academic labour and of scholarship broadly understood, into the sphere of economic activity, from which they had remained largely discrete until the 1980s. In yet other words, the recent and ongoing period of commodification and marketisation of universities coincides with the political success and ultimate 5

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rise to socio-​cultural hegemony of neoliberalism from the 1980s onwards (Harvey, 1997). Current debates on academic capitalism are therefore prefaced by earlier critiques of the weakening of universities’ autonomy and their progression towards privatisation and marketisation in societies at the forefront of neoliberal reform efforts (Dickson, 1988; Edwards, 1989). The contemporary usefulness of the concept lies in its versatility in accounting for the relationships between higher education policy and governance and the structuration of contemporary universities (Kauppinen and Kaidesoja, 2013; Kezar, 2016), between this structuration and the politics, processes, allocation of resources and inequalities of academic labour (Amâncio, 2016; Anderson and Warren, 2011; Cantwell, 2014), including gender equality and between everyday experiences of scholarly labour and culturally situated understandings of scholarship and scholarly identities (Brunila, 2015; Bozeman and Boardman, 2016; Veijola and Jokinen, 2018), at the local, national and transnational level (Amaral et al, 2011; Kauppinen, 2013; Kim, 2017). Moreover, academic capitalism has the potential for critical intellectual engagement that equally widely cited terms, such as the ‘entrepreneurial university’ (Etzkowitz, 2013, 2016b), arguably lack. Furthermore, academic capitalism has offered a way to focus on the struggles for excellence between universities in a globalised academic field (Münch, 2020).

Affective capitalism in academia In recent years, affect has become a much-​debated and much-​used concept across the humanities, cultural studies and the social sciences (see, for example, Ahmed, 2004; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2015). We can talk about affect theory deriving from a range of social, linguistic, psychoanalytic and other theories, and emphasising the political aspects of affect, affective, emotions and emotional, as well as affective science deriving from cognitive science and comprising theories of emotion (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2015; Hogan, 2016). Affect has raised wide interest among research strategies and methodologies (Knudsen and Stage, 2016; Åhäll, 2018). While becoming more influential it has also faced criticism, for example related to its vagueness and easy solutionism towards complex societal, cultural and political problems (see, for example, Hemmings, 2005; Leys, 2011). Tero Karppi and colleagues further summarise the strands of these debates as follows: Some of the strands approach affect more pragmatically –​and may even offer an explicit definition of it –​while others do not try to specify affect, but understand it rather as modes of intensification, movement, and capacities. The latter notion of ‘affect’ is based on the above-​mentioned idea –​the bodily capacities to affect and become 6

Introduction

affected. In this view, affect is not so much a property of a subject or a body, confined to subjective human or non-​human experiences, but rather an active, moving relation, and a collectively formed and circulated capacity. (Karppi et al, 2016: 3) While affect theory has added much to the analysis of contemporary capitalism, it has had curiously little to say about contemporary universities and the origins, consequences and social, cultural and political implications of their sweeping marketisation and privatisation across the past four decades. In response to this lacuna in extant scholarship, this book interrogates the affective dynamics of contemporary academic capitalism. In other words, we have sought to bring into dialogue academic debates on the marketisation and commodification of higher education with conversations about the subjectivation, institutional uses and politics of affect. This seems analytically useful because scholarship on academic capitalism has tended to foreground the structural dimensions of institutional changes in higher education (Filippakou and Williams, 2014; Collini, 2017). However, to make sense of the patterns of domination, contestation and resistance that emerge from the contemporary unmaking and remaking of the university, it is necessary to make sense of the everyday forms of practice, encounters, attachments, engagements, desires and modes of subjectivation that characterise contemporary academic labour (Räsänen, 2014; Rhoades, 2014). We argue that affect plays a pivotal role in these forms of practice and modes of subjectivation. We therefore tie the affective to capitalism in a particular context, in the field of higher education, as we believe the concept of affect is useful for understanding some of the highly affective power relations of the neoliberal rationality of academia and academic labour. This way we also create encounters between affect studies and debates about the field of education and cognitive/​knowledge capitalism (Brunila et al, 2015; Slaughter and Leslie, 2016). We understand affective capitalism as both a cognitive and non-​cognitive power relation in the process of becoming in the neoliberal political rationality, as something that is tempting and seductive, making academics act, know and feel in a certain way while reducing human condition to human capital. Affective capitalism also affects a change in the psychic reality of academia. Our argument draws on the characterisation of affective capitalism by Tero Karppi and colleagues, in an important recent contribution to affect theory: If affect has the potential to arouse the body beyond rationality and activate us as subjects, it is no wonder that its powers have been subject of capture and capitalisation. What we call affective capitalism in this special issue, was already formulated by Massumi (2002: 45): ‘The ability 7

Affective Capitalism in Academia

of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is itself a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late-​capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory’. There are a number of industries that invest in affect production from reality TV shows to social media sites, from celebrity blogs to the credit industry and lending businesses. (Karppi et al, 2016: 2) This book is timely because the conceptual lens of affect brings to the fore the ways in which large-​scale structural shifts in universities, higher education systems and public life at the international level are bound up with profound transformations of academic labour, scholarship and scholarly identities (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010). Attendant issues have been discussed extensively and controversially in academic research in recent years (Giroux, 2011; Delanty, 2016; Etzkowitz, 2016a). However, the conceptual perspective of the sociology of affect has largely been absent from this conversation.

Revealing public secrets with affective subjectivation In the context of academic capitalism and the structures of managerial governance it has created, it has become relevant to study affective politics (Massumi, 2015) for the social, cultural and political organising of academic labour and their experiences. We understand affective capitalism as a form of public secret (IPC, 2014), as something that everyone involved with academia is aware of in one way or another but does not necessarily talk about. As a public secret, it takes place as a secret and in secret because secrecy secures that no one can he held accountable and everything can be justified. In more or less subtle ways, it causes collectivity, critical thinking and resistance to be weakened or to even vanish. We approach affective capitalism with the idea of affective subjectivation (Valero et al, 2019), which describes the processes by which academics are inclined to turn themselves into manageable subjects within academic life. In other words, affective subjectivation is the effect of a way of governing that fabricates subjectivities prone to operate productively in terms of neoliberal ideals. As a form of subjectivation academic capitalism shapes not only our bodies and emotions, but also the way we think and feel about things and know in particular ways (Valero et al, 2019). In terms of affective subjectivation in academia, becoming is both conditioned by and dependent on the prevailing norms, and at the same time is needed for finding one’s way politically, ethically and responsibly. In the Western language, the dual nature of subjection is easily interpreted in the binary structure as necessarily either submission or mastery, but not both. So, when trying to understand how affective subjectivation as a form of becoming works, it is the paradoxical simultaneity of submission and mastery, and the related affective ambivalence, which should be further 8

Introduction

explored and understood. We also argue that the conditions of possibility for becoming require both. The negotiations need not be an either/​or dilemma, but rather both/​and. We believe that by scrutinising and refusing affective capitalism asks for becoming more informed of affective power relations. This, we believe, could offer a condition of possibility against the homo economicus and for the homo politicus (Brown, 2015) to be constituted as well as room for more collective and critical thinking with a chance of unpredictability and a possibility of change. There is yet another reason why this book is important, which relates to both the crisis of education and of human subjectivity. Some scholars have argued that we are experiencing a crisis of rationality and a rationalist, Cartesian vision of a stable, rational and coherent subjectivity. Rosi Braidotti has famously argued how at times of crisis, every culture tends to turn to its ‘others’, to become feminised in the sense of having to face its limitations and deficiencies (Braidotti, 1991). As a way of more efficient governance of becoming, affective turn has had the potential to turn the focus on ‘the other’ in a dualistic order of things (reason/​emotion, cognitive/​affective, mind/​body). Because of this turn, the neoliberal political rationality seems to have found yet another pervasive way to harness the whole person for its use, by focusing on affective and emotional dimensions of academic capitalism in order to shape a properly flexible and adjustable subjectivity. Affective capitalism works towards strengthening the Cartesian idea of essential, malleable and potential subjectivity in which one can discover oneself through practising self-​searching and self-​control. The ideal narrative is to recognise and then get rid of psychic and emotional chains and vulnerabilities to become self-​disciplinary, becoming a scholar with similar kinds of feelings, hopes and dreams waiting to be recognised and fulfilled to their highest potential. However, the narrative is an example of a form of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) –​not to reach this aim but to live in constant waiting and false hoping, being constantly aware of one’s own deficiencies. If this kind of rationality remains untouched, academic labour and academic subjectivities are affectively shaped and retooled to conform to it without using force by enabling academics to realise what is supposedly good for them. Becoming an academic subject is paved with constant parallel ambivalences (Brunila, 2015), and it is a ‘sweaty desire’, as Eva Bendix Petersen (2008) has written. The problem prevails if we stay within the dualistic order of subjectivity. In this book we ask questions about the relationship between subject(ivity) and politics because we argue that there is a call for alternative perspectives to the dualistic order and how it comes into existence through affective subjectivation. We also need more understanding of how affective power relations related to academic capitalism take hold of the subjectivity and its capacities and hopes by enhancing some forms of being and disregarding 9

Affective Capitalism in Academia

others. We believe that affective capitalism is a controlled process of repetition taking place in the neoliberal political rationality, and when understood in this way it also means that there is a possibility to repeat it differently. As Paola Valero and colleagues (2019) argued before, if affective capitalism continues to work as a public secret, it is able to shape and retool academics to conform to it without using force or domination. In this way, affective capitalism means constant and parallel ambivalences of pride and shame, social isolation, heightened anxiety, flexibility and self-​responsibility as well as limited opportunities to speak and to be heard by ensuring that one implicitly learns to find mistakes in, and blame only, oneself. In this book we address the public secret from several angles, and by doing so we aim to mobilise academics to collective thinking and resistance (see also Brunila and Valero, 2018). Looking at academic labour from the perspective of affect allows us to bring into focus the ways in which the marketisation, privatisation and commercialisation of higher education organises affective experiences and relationships in higher education. Second, it draws attention to the roles that affect may play in the production of commodified scholarship in marketised universities. Third, it considers affect as a central dimension of the politics of academic labour, the ways in which it could be integral to the contestation and reinforcement of academic capitalism. In the following, we approach these three concerns from an international and comparative perspective. We account for structural shifts in higher education systems that account for the production and reproduction of academic capitalism, we critically interrogate the culturally situated and affectively charged discourses that underpin its legitimacy, and we analyse the everyday affective relationships between participants in higher education, including academics, students, administrators and managers. Drawing on these debates for conceptual points of reference, it seems important to interrogate the affective dynamics of contemporary academic capitalism critically, and to offer a more sociological analysis of affective culture and encounters of academia (see Illouz, 2007). Affect is more than an emotion or a relation as it is always associated with power. Alongside some of the recent developments in the field of education governance related to marketisation, privatisation, commercialisation, digitalisation, datafication, learnification, precision education and neuroliberalism, affect becomes an effective tool of profit making, data mining and more efficient personalised and individualised behaviourism. In this context, we pursue three concerns: 1. We ask how the marketisation of higher education structures experiences and social relationships in higher education. 2. We question how affect may be implicated in the production of commodified scholarship in marketised universities.

10

Introduction

3. We look at affect as a central dimension of the politics of academic labour, and use this position as a point of departure to examine how academic capitalism may be taken for granted, reinforced, challenged and subverted in contemporary universities. By scrutinising the ways in which academia is now continually in a process of production/​construction, and how academics are entangled in these complex changes, an opportunity is offered to create room for more collective thinking which, at its best in the presence of others there is a chance of unpredictability and a chance for change.

Structure of the book The chapters in this book draw on a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches to explore the diverse dimensions of academic capitalism in academia. In recent years, affect has emerged as a major analytical lens of social and cultural research, but it has rarely been used on universities and on their transition towards marketised organisational structures, social relationships and discourses of cultural and political legitimation. In other words, while scholarship is an affectively highly charged form of professional practice, affect has nonetheless hardly been considered in explanations of its contemporary marketisation. With this book, we offer a point of departure, working towards closing this gap. We do so through an anthology of 10 chapters, divided into three parts and bookended by this introduction and a concluding chapter. An array of shared themes cuts across the chapters, generating dialogue with each other: the affective textures of academic life, modes of subjectivation while inhabiting academia, attendant professional and personal relationships, ways of performing academia, ways of managing such performances and organisational structures and their affective charges seem notable to us, and have informed how we have arranged the chapters. We suggest that this arrangement and its three-​part structure might be read as tentative, and they should not distract from exploring conceptual, methodological and interpretive relationships that cut across the 10 texts. Arranged under the title ‘Structures’, the three chapters in Part 1 consider the organisation and the dynamics of affective capitalism in academia in their wider socio-​political context. In Chapter 2, Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan theorise the connections between the key concepts of this book: capitalism, academia and affect. They analyse how the affective tensions in academia are embedded in broader contradictions and crises of capitalism. Discussing empirical research on Australian academics’ experiences of academic labour and higher education management, they point to the affective turmoil

11

Affective Capitalism in Academia

inherent in authoritarian management techniques, academics’ loss of autonomy and the precarisation of academic work. In Chapter 3, Talia Esnard continues the critical analysis of structural challenges inherent in contemporary academic labour, with a particular focus on the Caribbean. The chapter highlights global structures of powers within the context of academic capitalism through which power structures tend to deepen experiences of coloniality, accountability and performativity. Through the examinations of radical theorists, the chapter centres some of the structural challenges related to global economic relations, racialised subjectivities, political action and Caribbean theorisations. In Chapter 4, Demetra Tzanaki then elaborates on the ways in which this affective-​eugenic patriarchal discourse is structured and unfolds by taking the Greek case as a point of reference. The chapter argues for an academy open to society like a library, where knowledge as the common good is for all, regardless of sex, class, race, disability, sexuality and gender. Using this model of knowledge as a central point of reference, Tzanaki engages in the analysis and critique of the neoliberal transformation of higher education and higher education governance in Greece, in the context of broader socio-​political shifts in Greek society. Arranged under the title ‘Relationships’, to a significant degree, the four chapters in Part 2 are all about modes of subject formation and attendant interpersonal and affective relationships, encounters, engagements, hierarchies and silences in academia. Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Paola Valero focus on some of the tensions between academic capitalism and ethical subjectivation in universities, in Chapter 5. These tensions are discussed through the contrast of two very different and contradictory types of stories and forces about the university: the university as a ‘moral concentration camp’ and the university as ‘a public library’. They argue that these two contradictory forces are simultaneously present in the work of the self on the self by which academics manage and organise their professional work lives. In Chapter 6, Kristiina Brunila’s aim is to rethink the idea of subjectivity in relation to academic leadership and in performing the leading subject. The chapter shows that despite good intentions, the leading subject cannot simply choose to construct themself or doings differently. This is because choosing is also an effect of power, and the main challenge is linked to the individualist idea of subjectivity and, in parallel, the neglect of tackling questions of societal differences, inequalities, hierarchies and ethics. In Chapter 7, Erika Andersson Cederholm, Carina Sjöholm and Dianne Dredge look at academic labour through the lens of friendship, with an analytical focus on the tension between various forms of social exchange and how the marketisation of higher education influences affective experiences and relationships in this realm. The authors focus on more subtle forms of tension, such as misalignment, non-​reciprocated gifts and disappointments 12

Introduction

rather than on open conflicts, which are more ambivalent and difficult to pin down. Mark Vicars takes an autoethnographic approach to theorising about the embodied and affective dimensions of being an academic worker in the neoliberalising university in Chapter 8, by tracing the troubling effects of neoliberalism through the author’s experienced psychological and physiological vulnerabilities. The chapter also questions some of the normative masculinist ideals favouring Anglo-​Australian, heterosexual, able-​ bodied, middle-​class ideals. Arranged under the title ‘Performance’, the three chapters in Part 3 consider the disciplinary regimes of academic performance management and the ways in which people ‘do’ or ‘perform’ academia in relation to these. Silvia Gherardi, Michela Cozza and Magnus Hoppe (Chapter 9) explore and experiment in collaborative writing and in turns, some of the affective dynamics of academic capitalism and changes in academia, by offering the concept of academic affective athleticism and asking what affect does rather than what affect is. In Chapter 10, Juhana Venäläinen focuses on some of the transformations in the academic working rhythms, especially the affective dynamics of quantification through a particular subset of scholarly work, namely, academic reading and how it contributes to reshaping the academic working subject. The chapter reminds us how reading is fundamental to scholarly work, but also increasingly marginalised by a metric assemblage that emphasises writing (and publishing) as the primary academic ‘output’. Amir Hampel, in Chapter 11, explores how Chinese university students are subjected to frameworks for self-​marketing that are not only economic, but also require familiarity with liberal understandings of the self and society. The chapter examines how students learn to perform neoliberal and entrepreneurial ideals, and how affects of confidence and passion are embedded within cultural scripts for self-​presentation, and that proficiency in these affective scripts is a form of cultural capital. Finally, in the concluding Chapter 12, Daniel Nehring and Kristiina Brunila assess this book’s contributions to broader debates about academic capitalism and the future of higher education. Against the backdrop of four years of critical writing about the effects of academic capitalism, they raise the question how, if at all, one more book on the topic might make a difference. In this context, they highlight the importance of persistently pointing to inconvenient truths, as a hopeful starting point for change.

Conclusion: where to go from here? Like any academic book, this present volume can be read as a contribution to a particular field of debate. It therefore adds to interdisciplinary conversations 13

Affective Capitalism in Academia

about academic capitalism, about management and transformations of labour in contemporary universities, and about the affective textures of being a student or a scholar in academia today. We suggest that this is an important contribution in its own right, given that so far affect theory has only rarely been brought to bear on debates in these areas. Each of the chapters in this book opens up a different vista on affective capitalism in academia, in broadly heterogeneous settings, grounded in a diverse range of methodologies, and written in an innovative and, in some cases, experimental style. This might take scholarship on academic capitalism in new directions. Beyond its academic impact, there is the question of how this book might contribute to positive transformations of academic life and challenges to the more problematic features of academic capitalism. Academic capitalism and the marketisation of higher education have long been subject to analysis and critiques from across the social sciences (Edwards, 1989; Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Kauppinen and Kaidesoja, 2013; Holmwood, 2017). While the marketisation of higher education has progressed steadily across these decades, transforming higher education around the world (Zhou and Peng, 2008; Georgiadis, 2011; Hao and Zabielskis, 2020), this publication forms part of an important tradition in the social sciences of ‘speaking truth to power’. With this book, we hope to have contributed to this endeavour. References Åhäll, L. (2018) ‘Affect and methodology: feminism and the politics of emotion’, International Political Sociology, 12(1): 36–​52. Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and Routledge. Amâncio, L. (2016) ‘Reflections on science as a gendered endeavour: changes and continuities’, Social Science Information, 44(1): 65–​83. Amaral, M., Ferreira, A. and Teodoro, P. (2011) ‘Building an entrepreneurial university in Brazil’, Industry and Higher Education, 25(5): 383–​95. Anderson, A.R. and Warren, L. (2011) ‘The entrepreneur as hero and jester: enacting the entrepreneurial discourse’, International Small Business Journal: Researching Entrepreneurship, 29(6): 589–​609. Ball, S. (1994) Education Reform, Buckingham: Open University Press. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bottrell, D. and Manathunga, C. (eds) (2019) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education (2 vols), Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Bozeman, B. and Boardman, C. (2016) ‘Academic faculty in university research centers: neither capitalism’s slaves nor teaching fugitives’, The Journal of Higher Education, 84(1): 88–​120. Braidotti, R. (1991) Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women and Contemporary Philosophy, Cambridge: Polity.

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Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone Books. Brunila, K. (2015) ‘The ambivalences of becoming a professor in neoliberal academia’, Qualitative Inquiry, 22(5): 386–​94. Brunila, K. and Hannukainen, K. (2017) ‘Academic researchers on the project market in the ethos of knowledge capitalism’, European Educational Research Journal, 16(6): 907–​20. Brunila, K. and Valero, P. (2018) ‘Anxiety and the making of research(ing) subjects in neo-​liberal academia’, Subjectivity. International Journal of Critical Psychology, 11(1): 74–​89. Brunila, K., Onnismaa, J. and Pasanen, H. (2015) Koko elämä töihin: Koulutus tietokykykapitalismissa [Whole Life to Work: Education in the Cognitive Capitalism], Tampere: Vastapaino. Brunila, K., Ikävalko, E., Honkasilta, J. and Isopahkala-​Bouret, U. (2020) ‘Enhancing criticality and resistance through teaching in the neoliberal academy’, Subjectivity, 13: 200–​16. Cantwell, B. (2014) ‘Laboratory management, academic production, and the building blocks of academic capitalism’, Higher Education, 70(3): 487–​502. Cantwell, B. and Kauppinen, I. (2014) Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Collini, S. (2017) Speaking of Universities, London: Verso. Davies, B. and Petersen, E.B. (2005) ‘Intellectual workers (un)doing neoliberal discourse’, International Journal of Critical Psychology, 13: 32–​54. Davies, B. and Bansel, P. (2010) ‘Governmentality and academic work: shaping the hearts and minds of academic workers’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 26(3): 5–20. Delanty, G. (2016) ‘The university in the knowledge society’, Organization, 8(2): 149–​53. Dickson, D. (1988) ‘Law weakens tenure, university autonomy’, Science, 241(4866): 652ff. https://g​ o.gale.com/p​ s/a​ nonym​ous?id=​GALE%7CA65​ 7477​4and​sid=​google​Scho​lara​ndv=​2.1an​dit=​ran​dlin​kacc​ess=​abs​andi​ssn=​ 00368​075a​ndp=​AONEan​dsw=​w Dzisah, J. (2010) ‘Capitalizing knowledge: the mind-​set of academic scientists’, Critical Sociology, 36(4): 555–​73. Edwards, R. (1989) ‘Margaret Thatcher, Thatcherism and education’, McGill Journal of Education, 24(2): 203–​14. Etzkowitz, H. (2013) ‘Anatomy of the entrepreneurial university’, Social Science Information, 52(3): 486–​511. Etzkowitz, H. (2016a) ‘The entrepreneurial university: vision and metrics’, Industry and Higher Education, 30(2): 83–​97. Etzkowitz, H. (2016b) ‘Innovation in innovation: the triple helix of university–​industry–​government relations’, Social Science Information, 42(3): 293–​337. 15

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Filippakou, O. and Williams, G. (2014) ‘Academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities as a new paradigm of “development” ’, Open Review of Educational Research, 1(1): 70–​83. Gantman, E. and Contreras, M. (2016) ‘Argentine universities in the age of the knowledge society’, Organization, 8(2): 243–​50. Georgiadis, N.M. (2011) ‘Greek university: the road to marketization’, Research in Comparative and International Education, 6(2): 201–​21. Gill, R. (2009) ‘Breaking the silence: the hidden injuries of neo-​liberal academia’, in R. Ryan-​Flood and R. Gill (eds) Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, London: Routledge, Chapter 2. Giroux, H.A. (2011) ‘The disappearing intellectual in the age of economic Darwinism’, Policy Futures in Education, 9(2): 163–​71. Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G.J. (2010) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hao, Z. and Zabielskis, P. (2020) Academic Freedom Under Siege: Higher Education in East Asia, the US and Australia, Cham: Springer. Harvey, D. (1997) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, New York: Oxford University Press. Hemmings, C. (2005) ‘Invoking affect: cultural theory and the ontological turn’, Cultural Studies, 19(5): 548–​67. Hogan, A. and Thompson, G. (2021) Privatisation and Commercialisation in Public Education: How the Public Nature of Schooling is Changing, London and New York: Routledge. Holmwood, J. (2014) ‘From social rights to the market: neoliberalism and the knowledge economy’, International Journal of Lifelong Education, 33(1): 62–​76. Holmwood, J. (2016) ‘The university, democracy and the public sphere’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(7): 927–​42. Holmwood, J. (2017) ‘ “The turn of the screw”: marketization and higher education in England’, Prometheus, 34(1): 63–​72. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. IPC (Institute of Precarious Consciousness) (2014) ‘Anxiety, affective struggle, and precarity consciousness-​raising’, Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements, 6(2): 271–​300. Jessop, B. (2008) ‘On academic capitalism’, Critical Policy Studies, 12(1): 104–​9. Karppi, T., Kähkönen, L., Mannevuo, M., Pajala, M. and Sihvonen, T. (2016) ’Affective capitalism: investments and investigations’, ephemera, 16(4): 1–​13. Kauppinen, I. (2013) ‘Towards a theory of transnational academic capitalism’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(2): 336–​53. Kauppinen, I. and Kaidesoja, T. (2013) ‘A shift towards academic capitalism in Finland’, Higher Education Policy, 27(1): 23–​41.

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Kezar, A. (2016) ‘Universities in the marketplace, academic capitalism, remaking the American university: market smart and mission centered’, The Journal of Higher Education, 79(4): 473–​81. Kim, T. (2017) ‘Academic mobility, transnational identity capital, and stratification under conditions of academic capitalism’, Higher Education, 73(6): 981–​97. Knudsen, B.T. and Stage, C. (2016) Affective Methodologies: Developing Cultural Research Strategies for the Study of Affect, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Leys, R. (2011) ‘The turn to affect: a critique’, Critical Inquiry, 37(4): 434–​72. Marginson, S. (2022) ‘Globalization in higher education: the good, the bad and the ugly’, in F. Rizvi, B. Lingard and R. Rinne (eds) Reimagining Globalization and Education, London: Routledge, pp 11–​30. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015) The Politics of Affect, Cambridge: Polity. Münch, R. (2020) Academic Capitalism: Universities in the Global Struggle for Excellence, New York: Routledge. Nehring, D. and Kerrigan, D. (2020) Imagining Society, Bristol: Bristol University Press. Petersen, E.B. (2008) ‘Passionately attached: academic subjects of desire’, in B. Davies (ed) Judith Butler in Conversation: Analysing the Texts and Talks of Everyday Life, New York: Routledge, pp 55–68. Petersen, E.B. (2009) ‘Resistance and enrolment in the enterprise university: an ethno-​drama in three acts with appended reading’, Journal of Education Policy, 24(4): 409–​22. Räsänen, K. (2014) ‘Academic capitalism and practical activity: extending the research program’, In B. Cantwell and I. Kauppinen (eds) Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp 94–​112. Rhoades, G. (2014) ‘Extending academic capitalism by foregrounding academic labour’, in B. Cantwell and I. Kauppinen (eds) Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp 113–​34. Schulze-​Cleven, T. and Olson, J.R. (2017) ‘Worlds of higher education transformed: toward varieties of academic capitalism’, Higher Education, 73: 813–​31. Slaughter, S. (2014) ‘Foreword’, in B. Cantwell and I. Kauppinen (eds) Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp vii–​x. Slaughter, S. and Leslie L.L. (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L.L. (2016) ‘Expanding and elaborating the concept of academic capitalism’, Organization, 8(2): 154–​61. 17

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Slaughter, S. and Rhoades, G. (2004) Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Valero, P., Jørgensen, K.M. and Brunila, K. (2019) ‘Affective subjectivation in the precarious neoliberal academia’, in D. Bottrell and C. Manathunga (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Seeing through the Cracks, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 135–​54. Veijola, S. and Jokinen, E. (2018) ‘Coding gender in academic capitalism’, ephemera, 18(3): 527–​49. Zhou, C. and Peng, X.M. (2008) ‘The entrepreneurial university in China: nonlinear paths’, Science and Public Policy, 35(9): 637–​46.

18

PART I

Structures

2

Affective labour pains of academic capitalism in crisis Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan

Introduction: conceptualising the connections between affect, capitalism, and academia1 Around the globe, we see university sectors in crisis, involving restructures of academic labour and much affective turmoil. In this book on ‘affective capitalism in academia’, our chapter takes on the tasks of clarifying the connections between the concepts affect, capitalism and academia, and situating their dynamics in an historic crisis context. We see complex linkages, calling for careful conceptual scaffolding across chapter sections. To begin, we draw on Marx to outline two key logics of capitalism. First is that institutions, in the fields of market competition, exploit use-​values of productive ‘commodities’, especially labour, to create exchange-​value that accumulates profit-​as-​capital to invest in further production. Second is a structural necessity to value labour unequally, to accord ‘high’ worth to the labour of relatively few, compared to many whose labours are significantly exploited to build profit. Marx applied these logics to fields where institutions compete to accumulate capital in economic form, but universities, in national sectors, do not compete for economic capital. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s extension of Marxian logics to further ‘forms of capital’, we conceive universities as competing for prestige –​symbolic capital –​that accumulates power to confer ‘legitimate’ credentials. Yet sustaining symbolic reputation requires basis in a more substantive form: cultural capital in scholarly modes. University fields thus reward prestigious scholarly production as ‘high value’ (while academics who mostly teach gain lesser reward), which attracts academics who embody dispositions –​or habitus –​for scholarly labours. Marxifying Bourdieu’s habitus concept, we argue that dispositions embody a tension between use and exchange purposes, which academics struggle to balance in their labours. We then diagnose the Australian university sector as a field of accelerating workforce restructures that throw academic dispositions out of balance and into the affective turmoils of what Bourdieu calls hysteresis. Drawing on qualitative data from how Australian education-​research academics’ 21

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experience field restructures, we analyse how university senior-​level governors, in steering these restructures, diminish substantive research and, with it, the field’s historically hard-​won relative autonomy. We highlight affective dissonances and sufferings expressed in academics’ commentaries, including senses of lost social use-​purpose for their labours. Turning our focus to affects, we diagnose a relational dynamic across academic and governance levels. At senior governance level, we locate affects that Australian universities now reward as affective capital, which we analyse as exertions of what Simon Marginson identifies as a will to ‘break the power’ of academics in their labours. We trace how, from senior-​level distance, this violent wilfulness infuses academic workspaces via line management chains and auxiliary offices such as Human Resources (HR). Relationally, we profile a range of ‘abject emotions’, at varied academic levels, that express what Lynn Worsham analyses as widespread ‘affective crisis’ across ‘late capitalist’ workspaces. In concluding, we argue that the viral spread of dire affects in university fields is symptomatic of a wider crisis of capitalism at an historic tipping-​ point into unsustainability. Crisis times, we argue, call for ethico-​emotively driven labours to build citizen-​capacities for living the present into viable futures. We thus foreground a question that, in prior sections, we teased at but left hanging: can academics ‘decolonise’ exchange-​value habits, to free use-​potentials for their labours? Given the formidable constraints that our chapter chronicles, we gesture towards fleshing out this question that must remain hanging for imagination and praxis to come. With Marx, we now move to begin elaborating how, within capitalism, a use-​exchange tension abides in dispositions among those who labour.

Logic of capital: a commodified use-​value/​exchange-​value tension We start with a passage from Marx (1969 [1863]: 495–​6): [T]‌he destruction of capital through crises means the depreciation of values which prevents them from later renewing their reproduction process as capital on the same scale. This is the ruinous effect of the fall in the prices of commodities. It does not cause the destruction of any use-​ values. What one loses, the other gains. … [A] large part of the nominal capital of the society, ie of the exchange-​value of the existing capital, is once for all destroyed, although this very destruction, since it does not affect the use-​value, may very much expedite the new reproduction. We begin parsing this passage with the concept commodities –​resources put to use, involving production and consumption senses of ‘use’, that, within 22

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a capitalising frame, contain a value-​motive tension. Capital-​investing producers put resources to use to make goods and services (henceforth ‘goods’) for profit accumulation through market-​exchange. Produced goods in turn become market commodities that consumers buy to meet life-​based needs and desires. We note that investors in production never ‘own’ all the resources needed to produce goods, especially labour; and so they, too, buy marketed commodities, including labour, for production purposes. However, most consumers buy goods to meet life-​based needs and desires. From the standpoint of investors in capitalist production, then, use of resources is from the motive to accumulate surplus value in market-​exchange. This capital-​accumulation motive is ever-​expansive: a true capitalist intent is to accumulate surplus profit in order to reinvest it, as financial capital, along with the capital of materials and labour –​so as to accumulate yet more capital. Accumulated profit is properly called ‘capital’ only when investors reinvest it to capitalise further; thus the inexorable ‘growth’ momentum of capitalism expands apace. Yet, while investors produce and advertise goods with profitable exchange-​ value as the prime motive, they must keep in mind consumer needs for those goods to offer use-​value. Commodities put into production as ‘raw materials’, and commodified products for market-​sale, must elicit the needs/​ desires of consumers who can afford to buy at profit-​yielding prices. Use-​ and exchange-​value thus coexist, within commodities, at both production and consumption stages. However, they coexist in an unresolvable tension, involving contrary value-​motives and logics. We highlight ‘potentials’ to meet use-​values –​in the plural –​to underscore a further key aspect of the use/​exchange tension: a qualitative/​quantitative divergence. As Fredric Jameson (2011: 19) argues, from reading Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, ‘use value and exchange value [should] engage us at once’, in signifying ‘the great opposition between Quality and Quantity’. Jameson further argues that ‘quality’ holds the positive valence in this opposition, and ‘Use value is therefore quality; it is the life of the body, of existential or phenomenological experience, of the consumption of physical products, but also the very texture of physical work. ... Quality is human time itself, whether in labor or in the life outside of labor’. That is, resources put to use, in producing and consuming, hold a qualitative multiplicity of potential use-​values across diverse people and groups who labour and consume. Use-​values are not all ‘basic’, such as the need to drink water; many emerge, phenomenologically, in social use-​ relations. However, in capitalist exchange relations, notes Jameson, ‘the seller of the commodity has no interest in its use value’ (2011: 19), and so, ‘if use leads us in the direction of quality defined as human time and the existential, exchange leads us in that of the abstractions of mathematics’ (20). In the exchange-​for-​profit process, potential qualitative diversities in value-​for-​use 23

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greatly narrow to uses serving the quantitative logic of investor interest to accumulate value-​as-​amount. Regarding Marx’s crises of depreciated exchange-​value, capitalists in competition press each other to produce at lower costs, leading to crashes in the profitability of market-​exchange. We highlight Marx’s point that use-​value potentials, coexistent in commodities, are not lost in exchange-​ value crashes, but are freed for new putting-​to-​work. Marx addresses cycles through which crashes allow exchange-​value motives to prevail because use-​ potentials, freed by crashes, in turn expedite new productive investments that recapture them within narrow limits of motive to accumulate profit. However, might use-​potentials gain release for social purposes other and better than capitalising? For now, we defer this question, and ask readers to hold in mind the tense coexistence of use-​and exchange-​values within commodities put to work to produce goods, as motivated by capital-​accumulating intents, as we turn to a vital ‘commodity’ in such production: people’s labours. The next section outlines how, in fields of capitalist enterprise, an accumulation logic necessitates relations of structural inequality within workforces that produce the goods of given fields (including the academic workforce, as we conceptualise in the following sections).

Logic of capital: the necessity of structural inequality among labourers in fields of capital-​accumulating production Marx analyses how, as enterprises in given fields of production compete to accumulate profit at consumer-​affordable prices, accumulation capacity concentrates in fewer, more massive, ‘hands’: ‘[There] is concentration of capitals … [in the] expropriation of capitalist by capitalist. ... Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand because it has in another place been lost by many’ (Marx, 1967: 686). Yet, however many enterprises remain competitive, surplus profit requires exploiting a most generative production resource: labour. This requires concentrating shares of gain not just in fewer investing hands, but also in fewer labouring hands, compelling most to accept weak reward for work, as Marx articulates (1967: 644): The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-​power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases … in proportion to the active labour army, [and so] the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. ... This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation … modified in its working by many circumstances. (Original emphasis) 24

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Here Marx addresses structurally broad-​based inequality across two categories of labour position –​in reserve, and actively employed –​that together comprise a ‘proletariat’. As ‘army’ signifies, they are (de)valued to ground-​ ‘troop’ workers who have ‘only labour to sell’, thus deserving only low wages if/​when employed. That is, production costs cannot allow capital accumulation to expand apace unless active workers are kept in a low-​wage position, played against the reserve army. We move now to structuring workforce inequality within the specific fields of production (as we work towards university fields). We reiterate that capitalism employs people as production commodities in the range of labours that make market-​consumption commodities, and, like other productive commodities, labourers embody the tension in which use-​value potentials are exploited and narrowed in being harnessed to capital-​accumulating purposes. Moreover, unlike commodities such as raw materials and tools, human workers embody dispositions and associated capacities (henceforth ‘dispositions’) that involve living impulse, in their labours, to actualise meaningful use-​value potentials. We argue that, whether consciously or subconsciously, all workers embody impulses to realise qualitative use-​value potentials –​not all of which, however, fit narrow quantitative valuing of what labour dispositions hold ‘high capital worth’. Capitalist enterprises must, then, tame use-​value impulses in order to harness labours to profit-​accumulating purposes. We suggest that, across the workforce span, from low-​level ‘armies’ to ‘middle’ and ‘higher’ levels, taming ranges from repressive to cooptative, through a relational structure of unequal reward for diverse labours. We here expand on Marx’s diagnosis (cited earlier) that workers experience ‘misery … in inverse ratio to the amount of torture [they have] to undergo in the form of labour’. That is, along with low wages, ground-​level worker impulses to realise use-​potentials through their labour are greatly repressed, a double-​misery that can induce alienated and abject feelings (‘affects’). In contrast, those in upper-​level work positions are often coopted to an enterprise’s capital-​accumulating incentives through high wage reward and recognition of embodied dispositions –​what we will call embodied capital –​as of ‘high worth’ to enterprise profitability. Workers at ‘middle’ levels may be coopted by relative degrees of wage and dispositional reward, encouraging hopes to mobilise upward in the reward structure by building their stock of embodied capital to suit enterprise purposes. We are now ready to conceptualise university sectors as capitalising fields in which the use/​exchange tension inhabits academic dispositions.

University sectors as capitalising fields: Bourdieu’s expanded ‘capitals’ Our use of the term field, within a Marxian framework, indicates a domain in which enterprises compete to win consumers to similarly definable 25

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products as they all pursue accumulation of economic capital. ‘Field’ thus defines a specifiable ‘market’ terrain of competitive production and sale –​ say, Apple, IBM and other enterprises competing to win the computer (etc) market. However, ‘economic’ defines something larger: the form of capital that enterprises in many fields of quite diverse products strive to accumulate. In ways we see as consistent with Marxian logics, Bourdieu (1986) expands to three further ‘forms of capital’ –​social, cultural and symbolic, along with economic –​that, in turn, expand what we can understand as ‘fields of production’, including universities, that do not prioritise economic accumulation. Nor do they function simply as satellites of economic capitalising. Rather, they prioritise accumulation of other forms of capital. Each form of capital takes an evolvingly complex definition across Bourdieu’s texts. Rather than summarise abstractly, we will let the forms take working definitions as, through a Bourdieuian lens, we view universities as capitalising fields. Before doing so, we here emphasise that Bourdieu’s multiplication of forms changes the common denominator of capital-​accumulation: from economic-​amassment to power-​amassment –​ that is, all four forms are, most fundamentally, power-​accumulations. We also note that any capital-​accumulating field relies on varied labours that, at the level of worker-​embodied dispositions, span all four capital forms. Questions of analytic importance for addressing enterprise and field levels, then, are: (1) Which forms gain priority, in labour-​reward structures, as holding embodied capital value? (2) How does such valuation pertain to which forms of capital hold accumulation priority at the field level? Regarding the field level, Bourdieu, in equating ‘fields’ metaphorically to a card game, observes: ‘there are cards that are valid, efficacious in all fields –​these are the fundamental species [forms] of capital –​but their relative value as trump cards is determined by each field and even by the successive states of the same field’ (1992: 98). Historically, universities emerged centuries before capitalism, and, over time, built teaching, research and other labours around religious, philosophical, literary, sociological, political-​economic and other knowledge domains. As economic capitalism arose and spread from the 16th century, its powerful incentives and logics inevitably intertwined with university endeavours. Yet, as institutions within nation-​state sectors –​the field level to which we give analytic focus –​universities do not put prize value on economic accumulation. Seeking fiscal balance, but not economic profit, universities compete most primarily to accumulate symbolic capital. Bourdieu (1989: 17) defines ‘symbolic capital’ as ‘the form that the various species of capital assume when they are perceived and recognized as legitimate’, that is, as legitimately capital. For example, circumstances from early life on dispose most people to meet needs and desires through social networks: a use-​value impulse that, in 26

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most cases, does not accumulate as investible capital. However, few are born into structural positions of family access to social-​power networks, wherein they embody dispositions to keep building that power. Those inheriting such social capital usually also inherit economic wealth, and often (although not always) cultural ways of knowing and acting that match selective codes of cultural capital to win school competitions and enter elite universities where capitals build further and gain certified credibility. Over time, universities have colonised the credentialing of capitals among those passing through them on paths to labour in varied fields of production (Collins, 1979). At the field level, then, universities, especially elite ones, compete to accumulate symbolic prestige and thus power to legitimate all capital forms. Even if authorities within other fields might wish for certification based more on ‘professional’ judgement, inciting what Bourdieu (1993: 24) calls ‘ambivalent relations between producers and scholastic authority’, he notes that ‘producers cannot fail to pay attention to the judgements of university institutions’ nor ‘ignore the fact that it is these who will have the last word’, as ‘ultimate consecration can only be accorded them by an authority’ of concentrated symbolic power. Within national sectors, university institutions compete to accumulate symbolic capital in wars of position that only a few win big. Sectors thus have their ‘Ivy League’ (USA), ‘Sandstones’ (in Australia), and so on. Yet symbolic reputation can appear empty without other capital to substantiate the symbolism. In university fields, we argue, such capital has been of cultural species, in scholarly modes. Thus, if symbolic capital is the accumulation trump card at field level, it is bolstered by scholarly cultural capital at the workforce level. We do not mean that most academic labour is ‘high scholarly’: if so, it would not hold reward status ‘in few hands’. In many university programmes –​teacher education, nurse education and more –​ universities rely on academic staff of ‘professional’ as much or more than ‘scholarly’ disposition. Yet scholarly achievement has operated as the high-​ value card that, in Bourdieu’s words (1992: 98), warrants player ‘investment in the game’ as ‘worth playing … and this collusion is the very basis of their competition’ (original emphasis). A symbolic-​cultural capital combination thus characterises what Bourdieu (1993: 140) calls ‘fields of cultural production’ with ‘social relations obeying a specific logic’: that of a ‘field of restricted production [which] closes in upon itself and affirms itself capable of organizing its production by reference to its own internal norms’. In university fields, scholarly products mainly are consumed, and evaluated for quality, by other academic producers. This relative autonomy of the field –​ upheld by restricted scholarly workforce subsets –​enables it to sustain prestige while drawing consumers of its professional degrees and other products that employ a range of labour dispositions. 27

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So long as a specific logic holds that workforce relations are structured to accord high-​capital value to scholarly labours, universities will draw good numbers of academic staff embodying scholarly dispositions. Across our discussions of Marx’s and Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘capital’, we have invoked dispositions as a key element of embodied labour power, and it is a keyword in Bourdieu’s lexicon, defining his concept of habitus: ‘The word disposition seems particularly suited to express what is covered by the concept of habitus (defined as a system of dispositions). ... [It] designates a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body) and in particular, a predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 214; original emphasis). Dispositions that come to inhabit a person, as habitus, begin to form at a pre-​verbal level that Bourdieu (1977) calls ‘bodily hexis’, as an infant absorbs tacit senses of self-​as-​positioned in practices and relations of early-​life social habitats, loosely coupled to social-​structural positions of classed, raced, gendered and other power relations. This deeply embodied matrix for perceiving and acting in social settings forms a systemic core –​a primary habitus (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977) –​into which secondary overlays weave as the person moves across social-​institutional spaces of a life trajectory. In those later situations, unfamiliar codes of practice and relation can jar the complex coherence forged in primary habitus, raising cognitive dissonance and self-​transforming possibility. More typical, however, is subconscious improvisation that, self-​cohesively, weaves secondary threads into habitus, if fairly consonant with core dispositions, but fends them off as ‘not me’ if too dissonant. As biographic life moves to fields of work, dispositions are attracted to fields where labours seem to fit them. Yet field and habitus are too complex for perfect fits, inducing dynamics of challenge to adapt, as ‘the embodied social forces that operate from within us’ engage ‘forces of the field in which we evolve’ (Bourdieu, 1992: 198). Ways and degrees to which field adaptation may induce affective ‘torture … in the form of labour’, as Marx puts it (cited earlier), has much to do with how well habitus finds fit within workforce reward structures. Nor does fit simply entail ‘high-​capital’ valuation of one’s dispositions to labour, we argue, but also feelings of possibility to actualise use-​value potentials. The need to navigate this use/​exchange tension abides not just at ‘low’ levels of workforce hierarchy, we argue, but also ‘higher up’. Bourdieu, we note, does not delve into use-​value as a dispositional element; we here Marxify ‘habitus’. We also join Michalinos Zembylas’ (2007: 446) reading that ‘habitus –​understood as a socially constituted system of dispositions –​provides the link between emotions, affect and embodiment’ (emphasis added). That is, embodied dispositions include an affective dimension that actualises in labour activity. We have argued that fields accord high-​capital value to dispositions among only a small workforce portion. Yet the specific logic of university fields, we argue, had for some time –​and until recently –​sustained a relatively 28

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thick middle-​to-​high range of academic positions that attract scholarly dispositions. While few held research-​only/​mainly positions, reasonable numbers inhabited teaching-​and-​research positions, many with critical-​ analytic dispositions that involve a conscious impulse to labour for use-​value purposes. Moreover, habitus could navigate embodied use/​exchange tensions in reasonable affective comfort, as the field’s symbolic-​cultural combination supported sympatico across academic and governance levels. That is, while senior managers focused on institutional accumulation of symbolic capital, often they came from academic ranks and brought cultural-​intellectual dispositions to their leadership positions. Of late, however, the field-​specific logic is losing hold, inducing affective discomfiture and turmoil at ‘middle-​to-​high’ bandwidths, where academic numbers are thinning through workforce restructures.

Australian university restructures: imperilling the cultural-​symbolic logic Over centuries, notes Bourdieu (2001: 67), literary, artistic, scientific and other cultural fields evolved as ‘largely emancipated, at least in their most autonomous sectors, from the rule of money and interest’; yet in just a few decades, this relative autonomy declined markedly under pressures of ideo-​logics by which ‘prophets of the new neoliberal gospel profess that, in cultural matters as elsewhere, the logic of the market can bring nothing but boons’. In actual effect, he argues, what is currently happening to the universes of artistic [and scholarly] production throughout the developed world is entirely novel and without precedent: the hard-​won independence of cultural production and circulation … is being threatened, in its very principle, by the intrusion of commercial logic at every stage of the production and circulation of cultural goods. (Bourdieu, 2001: 67) Since the late 1980s, loss of relative autonomy to intruding commercial logics has spread across the Australian university sector. Simon Marginson and Mark Considine (2000), in researching Australian university governance, identify an institutional shape-​shift, ‘the Enterprise University’. As Marginson (2002: 13) characterises it: ‘The hallmark of the Enterprise University is a reactive, pragmatic, business-​like style of engagement, where the overriding objective is not knowledge, community service [or] national development … but the prestige and competitiveness of the university as an end in itself’ (original emphasis). We do not see Marginson (or Bourdieu) suggesting that universities now compete to accumulate economic capital. As before, they seek to balance 29

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budgets while competing for symbolic capital. Yet, under new stresses, Australian university senior managers vacate value-​investment in scholarship, community service or other academic labours that give substantive basis to symbolic prestige. We read ‘business-​like style of engagement’ to signify senior-​level habitus shifts that, in new ways and degrees, distance institutional decisions and actions from sympatico with academic dispositions that sustained the field’s specific logic. Academics can then feel abandoned by senior ‘leaders’: “[I]‌feel that senior management … does not at all understand the nature of education research, scholarship, teaching and community and professional engagement and service.” This comment is from a project conducted by a Working Party, including this chapter’s authors (Brennan et al, 2020), auspiced by the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE). We investigated how AARE members, who, by definition, value research and scholarly labours, experience conditions for those labours in their universities. Our data derives from two of that project’s sources: a workshop at the AARE 2018 annual conference and a 2019 members survey that drew a wide response. AARE member comments in this chapter – cited hereafter as ‘AARE Research’ – tell an experiential-​analytical story of university workforce restructures and their effects on academic labours. We preface by noting reduced funding to the sector by federal governments that tout ‘industry partnerships’ to compensate. Thus, former federal Education Minister Alan Tudge, at a Universities Australia conference (2021), pushed ‘translating research down the commercialisation path’, affirming university–​industry collaborations as ‘the bedrock for innovation and commercialisation’. He also defined the purpose of university teaching as ‘ensur[ing] future graduates are work-​ready’, and announced a commission, led by two retired vice-​chancellors, to build university–​ industry collaboration around this agenda. Such rhetoric has been pushed for many years by government external to universities, yet industries barely come to the table. Even so, governance internal to universities adapts to this intruding commercial logic. Such ceding of the relative autonomy of a university field’s specific logic was flagged in members’ comments: “It is astonishing that most universities seem to simply fall in line with the agenda of the government of the day, rather than working together to set that agenda more proactively” (AARE Research). Indeed, federal government compels alignment to policy agendas by tying them to distribution of ever-​scarcer funding to universities that, in Australia, are not well endowed by industries, alumni or other sources. Thus, in a ‘pragmatic, business-​like’ reaction, senior managers began casualising the workforce from the mid-​1990s: “Budgetary constraints are leading to increased casualisation of academic work and this is of grave concern. Short-​ term contracts and casual positions … [are becoming] the only option for entry to academia” (AARE Research). 30

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Short-​term and casual positions are lower paid and mostly teaching-​only. In the wake of their hiring, permanent staff in teaching-​and-​research positions came into jeopardy, and research projects faced new limits of budgetarian governmentality (Zipin and Brennan, 2003), channelled down the managerial line via Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): ‘Heads of school and deans are now lashed to KPIs that have metrics and they chase those metrics at any cost. We have had all support cut (eg. conference funds) and entirely tied to metrics of grant applications.’ (AARE Research) Heads/​deans, when middle managers in school/​faculty domains of academic work, had both ‘upward’ responsibilities to senior level and ‘duties of care’ to staff that included ‘managing up’ if decisions ‘above’ harmed work conditions and quality (Brennan, 2010). Now compelled to restructure loyalties upward, they can seem to academic staff as re(dis)positioned foot-​soldiers of a growingly distant senior level: ‘In our place, very few people are reading … [or] research active. ... So the work to keep an active field … –​so necessary for teaching and for research –​is reducing. ... Heads of schools and deans around the country are not educational leaders for the field, but institutional factotums for the senior management decisions. It is not looking good.’ (AARE Research) Federal agendas then led to narrowing which research gains institutional support: ‘The term “blue sky research” now means “your focus doesn’t fit with our stated research goals” … it is not about impactful research, but research that fits current government policy preferences and funding opportunities.’ (AARE Research) Managers further drain teaching-​and-​research academics of research-​cultural vitality through an intensified workload that effectively reduces them to teaching-​only. A commenter who entered the sector at an earlier time, and achieved teaching-​and-​research satisfaction, suggested why more early-​to-​ middle-​career colleagues lack such possibility: ‘Many had drawers full of data from practitioner projects that they had never found time to turn into papers for publication. Nor, in reality, did the university want them to be more than teachers. ... Management and council restructuring of academic work … and the 31

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games played with workload models, intensified invisible workload for most staff … to a degree that my de facto teaching-​only colleagues lost satisfactions of feeling they were even able to do good quality teaching, let alone scholarship.’ (AARE Research) Thus an intensifying workload in teaching (and teaching-​related administration) –​in the process, axing research-​and-​scholarship time –​kills use-​valued satisfaction in both teaching and research, with worrying emotional and physical health consequences: ‘It is only through the donation of massive voluntary hours by academics that the essential work is being done. This leads to burn-​ out and illness and high stress among academics, but senior managers do not care. … The whole research machine … is built on academics’ sacrifice.’ (AARE Research) That is, ‘research machines’ split off increasingly fewer from the many who, while dispositionally called to research, are not chosen: ‘There is a strong movement away from expectations of universal participation in both research and teaching by all academics, toward a research elite managed and supported separately from teaching-​focused.’ (AARE Research) Moving beyond workload means to make many teaching-​and-​research academics effectively teaching-​o nly, senior managers invoked ‘lack of research production’ –​caused by their restructures, a self-​fulfilling prophecy –​to justify purging the workforce of more costly teaching-​and-​ research academics: ‘Senior management and council undertook further restructures that mobilised a blame-​the-​victim discourse to find most of my hard-​working … colleagues as having “not produced” in scholarship sufficiently to warrant a teaching-​and-​research salary. Many were declared “surplus to requirements” and forced to take “voluntary” redundancy packages.’ (AARE Research) It was then a hop step to designate fewer remaining ‘research stars’ as research-​only –​whom universities compete to hire, so as to sustain their ‘reputation’ –​while also officially relegating more and more to teaching-​only: ‘Researchers have been appointed to enhance the university’s research profile while existing staff have been denied opportunities and … 32

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dissuaded from doing research as a result of all the roadblocks. … Many staff members have been forced to select a teaching-​only pathway as a means of survival.’ (AARE Research) Senior managers then hyped teaching-​only positions as ‘special’. An Australian vice-​chancellor, overseeing a restructure that forced most teaching-​and-​research academics into teaching-​only status (if not purged), told a public radio interviewer: ‘Teaching specialists are a marvellous new opportunity for the very best educators to be in front of our students in our classrooms ensuring our students get the very best education possible’ (Flinders NTEU, 2018). Not only do senior managers pseudo-​glorify teaching-​only ‘specialists’, whose overworked labour they proletarianise, but they also under-​ resource the few who make the research cut, who then also feel exploited and abandoned: ‘The attitude of management in our university is really that education researchers are expected to create a glorious, rich, distinctive, productive garden without seeds, water or fertile soil. Apparently being pissed on occasionally by the DVCR [Deputy Vice-​Chancellor Research] should be enough to make the garden grow all on its own.’ (AARE Research) Research thus loses resourcing for substantive quality even as universities market ‘high quality’ in increasingly empty symbolic claims: ‘There has been a good deal of public crowing by the roosters at the top about improving the quality of publications. … Meanwhile, education research is poorly understood by the university executive, and … at times publicly denigrated by the roosters who make the decisions about which research … receive[s]‌internal support. The social, political and economic significance of education both nationally and internationally is scoffed at when raised.’ (AARE Research) This comment echoes Marginson’s diagnosis that senior executive ‘roosters’ now compete for institution-​level prestige as an end in itself, no longer substantiated by capital-​valuing of most academics’ dispositions for research, let alone use-​valuing of research’s social significance. These AARE member comments register how de-​substantiating a university sector’s specific logic is felt in academic workspaces. As restructures thin positions of comfortable habitability from what had been a relatively thick workforce range, affective dissonances arise within embodied dispositions for academic labour. 33

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Habitus in hysteresis: affective dissonances We have chronicled a habitus-​meets-​field case of what Bourdieu (2000: 160) calls hysteresis: an inertia (or hysteresis) of habitus … [involving a] tendency (based in biology) to perpetuate structures corresponding to their conditions of production [in early-​life biography]. As a result … dispositions are out of line with the field and with the ‘collective expectations’ which are constitutive of its normality. This is the case, in particular, when a field goes through a major crisis and its regularities (even its rules) are profoundly changed. (Original emphasis) As embodied dispositions lose field alignment, adds Bourdieu (2000: 161), ‘often those who were best adapted to the previous state of the game, have difficulty adjusting to the new established order. Their dispositions become dysfunctional, and the efforts they make to perpetuate them plunge them deeper into failure’. It follows that habitus is ‘torn by contradiction and internal division, generating suffering’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 160). AARE member comments thus indicate affective suffering from dispositions in dissonance with field. We conceive affect as an (e)motivating dimension of dispositional embodiment, notable in comments below from or about early-​career academics with dispositions to be ‘early-​career researchers’. Indeed, it was not so long ago that early-​career researchers could reasonably anticipate inhabiting teaching-​and-​research positions and growing in research as their careers evolved. Residual imaginaries of a field still sympatico with research-​ oriented dispositions thus continue to draw early-​career researchers, who then encounter affective shocks of field shift. As a later-​career commentator observed: ‘My colleagues that are early-​career researchers are finding it impossible to gain traction research-​wise and end up teaching 80%–​90% of their workload, and it creates a cycle where they don’t get a chance to conduct research or even join research teams. It is not fair or sustainable, and creates a competitive work environment.’ (AARE Research) The thinning out of teaching-​and-​research positions puts early-​career researchers in competition, working against collegiality, as research becomes a prize for the chosen few. With intensive teaching workloads, and lives beyond academia, early-​career researchers must somehow publish voluminously and network into teams with ‘elite’ researchers who can win funded projects, all within a few years, or land on a scrap heap of 34

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interminable casual or fixed-​term teaching-​only work. The great likelihood of the latter feels acutely disillusioning, as this early-​career researcher indicates: ‘I fit [research] into out-​of-​hours time at the expense of sleep and family/​friend activities! This is not sustainable so I am currently wondering if academic work is for me.’ (AARE Research) In search of workable strategies to get beyond water-​treading and sinking, early-​career researchers are apt to be ‘torn by contradiction’ (Bourdieu, 2000) as paths into research futures evaporate: ‘The bar for research keeps shifting –​it’s shifting so fast nobody knows how to plan or respond in their research trajectory. In some cases the bar is being applied retrospectively, with devastating consequences for some.’ (AARE Research) Mid-​career academics, in teaching-​and-​research positions now made precarious, are apt to feel de-v​ alued amidst shifts and quakes of field restructures: ‘Some staff have been faced with total rejection and denial of any of the value they have brought to the university in order to make room for new appointees.’ (AARE Research) ‘Denial of value’ recalls Marx’s use/​exchange tension within labour as a capital-​producing commodity, which we apply to embodied dispositions for labour. In the relational structure of newly unequal reward, dispositions to teach-​and-​research lose: (a) capital-​value as contributing to institutional accumulation; and (b) room to actualise use-​value potentials. An early-​career researcher lamented the loss of the latter: ‘This is very dissatisfying as an ECR [early-​career researcher] who believes in the power of research to affect social change and who sought a role in a university so as to honour the scholarship side of the work.’ (AARE Research) Early-​career researchers, we suggest, are apt to feel disturbed if sensing no room for use-​potentials, as they are not yet immersed in institution-​and field-​level incentives that coopt use-​impulses to exchange-​purposes. And even among most later-​stage academics, we argue, use-​valued senses of purpose for their labours remain embodied, especially in having been drawn to what they understood as a field of cultural production. We re-​ quote Marx: ‘destruction of capital [exchange-​value] through crises … does not cause the destruction of any use-​values’. Yet, in a field that loses 35

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cultural-​scholastic logic to restructures that thin out teaching-​and-​research possibility –​and damage quality in both work dimensions –​we discern new ways and degrees of affective discomfiture in struggles to balance the embodied use/​exchange tension. Some experience acutely alienated feelings of demotion into a proletarianised academic ‘army’: ‘I am not shown any loyalty by the university in terms of more secure work, so I don’t feel any loyalty to the university, nor to my supervisors.’ (AARE Research) We again tease the question: might the hysteresis of habitus-​in-​crisis liberate academic use-​potentials, not for capitalist re-​exploitation, but for better-​ than-​capitalising purposes? And again, we defer this question for now. At this juncture, focusing on affect as a dimension of embodied dispositions, we address the question: how might affect be understood as embodied capital? We here recall that proletarian-​level labours, while exploited by capitalisers, do not accrue value-​as-​capital to those whose labours are thus exploited. Hysteresis-​based affects –​in sensing oneself sinking to ‘lower’ positions in workforce reward structures –​are thus not properly conceived as ‘affective capital’. We suggest that pushing many in the mid-​to-​high range of academic positions downward accrues capital-​value increasingly to dispositions further up, beyond levels of academic labour. That is, as cultural-​scholastic dispositions are de-​valued, dispositions and associated affects among those who build careers around accumulating the institution’s symbolic prestige gain capital-​ value. In search, then, of affects to which a restructured university sector accords greatest value as capital, we now look ‘upward’ to senior level.

Breaking academic agency: violent affects from ‘above’ As restructures thin teaching-​and-​research ranks, staffing fattens in domains of non-​academic university labour. This relational shift involves two elements of what Lew Zipin (2019) calls ‘council-​management governance’ (CMG), a senior level that includes senior managers and council members, and line managers and auxiliary domains that serve senior agendas. Council members, totalling between 10 and 22, include: the university vice-​chancellor (as lead senior manager); state government appointees –​a chancellor who chairs the council, and others from corporate and political fields; council appointees from outside the university; the academic who chairs the university academic board; and a few academics, professional staff and/​or student members, elected by their constituencies, who, under threat of removal from the council, are mandated to act not in constituency interests but in ‘whole-​of-​institution’ terms (read: aligned to senior-​level agendas). 36

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The council sets KPIs for the vice-​chancellor, with a business-​minded majority stressing budget savings and institutional reputation. Senior managers and non-​elected council members comprise a small senior-​level elite. While line managers add to the CMG apparatus, most CMG fattening is in auxiliary domains –​Finance, Marketing, HR and more –​ where non-​academic staff work ‘at the pleasure’ of the senior level. A driver of auxiliary burgeoning is that, as the substantive basis weakens for claims of quality teaching and research, senior-​level steerage of institutional competition for symbolic ‘prestige’ shifts the staffing budget to labours that produce market-​ performative images of ‘quality’. According to Zipin (2006: 28): ‘images of “achieved quality” gain precedence over substantive achievement as VCs, PVCs [pro vice-​chancellors], Deans, and down the managerial chain, learn to respond to impossible-​to-​meet “quality performance” criteria by producing performative fabrications’ (original emphasis). If performative labours swell Marketing and associated domains, HR fattens in labours that oversee institutional policies, dictated at senior level, to discipline academics. As our Working Party data illustrate, many academics embody critical-​analytic dispositions, valued by universities when applied to study of fields outside universities, but which, amid crises of hysteresis, can articulate in reflexive-​sociological critique (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) of trends in universities where they work. Such a challenge to senior-​level agendas can evoke power-​impulses to tame critique. Thus Marginson and Considine (2000: 75), in interviewing senior actors in ‘Enterprise Universities’, discerned ‘strikingly similar deployments of executive authority across the sector. All the VCs we interviewed, and most of the other senior staff who described the imperatives of the senior role for us, pointed towards a certain will to power, expressed as a singularity … and a relative detachment’ (original emphasis). We take ‘relative detachment’ to mean senior level’s relational distance from direct interaction with most academics, while mediating disciplinary power through line managers, HR and other staff, whom Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers –​in their book Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2011: 31) –​call minions: The labour of many … hard-​working minions produces … [what] imposes itself with the self-​evidence of unavoidable alternatives … [that] drive one to despair … [but] are well policed … it is perhaps all these ‘minions’ who put us on the right path, who tell us how to name capitalism … [although] they do not think of themselves, as ‘in the service of capitalism’. We see university minions policing academics along the ‘right paths’ of no alternative to senior-​level agendas, muting voices of critical despair and knowledge about effects on labour quality. AARE member comments 37

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show insight that minions channel a senior level will-​to-​power. They also address power shuffles on academic boards –​official governing bodies where academics from a range of disciplines, representing colleagues who elected them, once had agency to decide directions for academic work but are now out-​manoeuvred by managers and non-​academic others who follow managerial ‘leads’ (Rowlands, 2015). An AARE member noted: ‘Spurious “consultation” comes after management has made up its “mind” what to do. Even [the] academic board has a majority of non-​academics on it, so this is no longer a venue for debating research.’ Another member noted a general ‘reduction of opportunities for academics to participate in the governing of their own work’. Marginson (2002) infers senior-​level motives to reduce academics’ agency to govern labours in which they are knowledgeable, and that supposedly define ‘core work’ in a university field: as the executive leader sees it, to secure institutional flexibility and responsiveness he/​she must break the power of the disciplines in university governance. And because … the power of the disciplines in governance was tied to the traditional academic structures derived from their constitution as fields of knowledge, the executive leader feels impelled to weaken or break the power of the disciplines in teaching and research. (Marginson, 2002: 128; emphasis added) The impulse to break academic power suggests affective fuel in senior level will-​ to-​power that, however ‘detached’, violently forces compliance with institutional responses to governance powers acting on universities from beyond. Zipin (2010) draws on Marginson to hypothesise that, relational to affective turmoil among academics, disturbed emotive dynamics also inhabit the senior level: Marginson’s insights suggest that academics face new passionate intensities of … managerial urgenc[y]‌. … [I]n a psychodynamic sense, … such power moves may express latently felt urges to compensate for self-​ disturbance in overseeing the diminishment of university powers in relation to external political-​economic sectors. … At the same time, they may become psychically possessed by a heady compensatory egoism in commanding unprecedented governance powers internal to universities. (Zipin, 2010: 157; original emphasis) We see labours across the CMG apparatus, enforcing unprecedented senior-​ level power, as unhealthy for university sector futures –​especially if violent affects, (dis)positionally embodied at senior level, draw reward as affective capital. An AARE member at the 2018 conference workshop told an illustrative story of the arrival of a new dean of education who, in a first meeting with staff, 38

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just after a restructure that had purged many education academics, said to survivors mourning lost colleagues: ‘Now that we have drained the swamp, we can get on with the work.’ (Dis)positionally, this dean was not a middle manager who felt duties to care for staff. Rather, the dean angled ‘upward’, and within a year was promoted to a vice president position. In effect, the dean’s dispositional cruelty, expressed toward staff in Trumpian mimicry, drew reward as affective capital.

Capitalising on dire academic affects Having explored affects embodied at senior level that carry value-​as-​capital, we turn now, relationally, to a range of affects that, across academic levels, constitute dimensions of commodified labour that university capital-​ accumulating systems exploit. In doing so, we draw on Worsham’s (2001) diagnosis of rising workplace violence broadly –​not applied to specific fields –​which we apply to universities. Against the psychological attribution of ‘senseless’ acts by ‘deranged’ individuals, Worsham develops a sociological framing ‘to wrest from senselessness a sense of something unprecedented in labor history’ (2001: 229). That is, at subjective levels ‘beyond the horizon of semantic availability’ (2001: 240), workers sense historic shifts in labour relations, linked to deeper social-​structural relations via ‘a braid of affect and judgment, socially and historically constructed and bodily lived, through which the symbolic takes hold of and binds the individual, in complex and contradictory ways, to the social order and its structure’ (2001: 232). In conceiving how livingly embodied affect braids with social-​structural ordering, Worsham draws on Jameson’s (1984) argument that particular historic eras, defined by social-​structural (re)formations, ground distinctive cultural logics and associated emotions. Worsham agrees with Jameson that a current ‘late-​capitalist’ formation grounds emotions within workplace labours. However, she contests his generalised concept of ‘a whole new emotional ground tone’ (Worsham, 2001: 246) in which ‘waning of affect’ –​manifesting a ‘condition of alienation that coincides with the extension of commodity fetishism to the human subject’ (247) –​occurs across labour positions. Worsham does not dismiss subjectivities wherein affects flatten, but argues they do not typify all who labour; rather, a newly ‘marginalized white man who has lost his economic position and cultural authority’, yet for whom ‘emotion remains reason’s [inferior] other and [so he] is relatively dissatisfied with … a more feminized identity’ (Worsham, 2001: 248). Placing this view of class/​gender/​ethnic-​relational differences in a Bourdieuian frame, and applying it to academia, we see valuation of ‘reason’ over ‘emotion’ persisting in the unequal reward structures of university fields, and in habitus structures of many white male academics. Moreover, in the period of relatively thick 39

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teaching-​and-​research plus ‘higher’ research-​only academic levels, inhabitation of those levels was largely white male. As an AARE member noted: ‘Teaching-​focused or only positions … creates an underclass of overburdened teachers, and these roles have been shown time and time again to be heavily gendered.’ (AARE Research) Another opined: ‘Nice women will continue to do the work regardless.’ (AARE Research) For white men, however, felt devaluation of scholarly dispositions, in sinking ‘down’ to teaching-​only (‘feminised’) positions, is apt to spur hysteresis affects; yet, if still disposed to value reason over emotion, they are also apt to struggle subjectively to flatten those affects. Relational to professional-​class white males, argues Worsham, ‘those who have been othered’ in social-​structures of unequal power ‘are less likely to recognize themselves in [Jameson’s] postmodern subject’ (2001: 249) (‘postmodernism’ is Jameson’s ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’), as ‘emotions are organized and practiced differently across differences of race, class, gender, age, and sexuality’ (253). Citing Julia Kristeva, that people are socialised by ‘pedagogies of emotion’ (Worsham, 2001: 233) from birth –​ we might say, in the ‘pedagogic’ constitution of primary habitus –​Worsham argues that, for marginalised ‘others’, abject emotions that take early-​life subjective hold are aggravated, in late-​capitalist workplaces, into ‘affective crises of abjection’ (244). She names a spectrum of abject emotions: Grief, hatred, bitterness, anger, rage, terror, and apathy as well as emotions of self-​assessment such as pride, guilt, and shame –​these form the core of the hidden curriculum for the vast majority of people living and learning in a highly stratified capitalist society. This curriculum holds most of us so deeply and intimately and yet differently within its logic. (Worsham, 2001: 233) Worsham clearly links differences in affective embodiment to gendered, raced, classed and further structural positions, such that ‘the crisis of abjection is not, precisely speaking, a crisis of identity but of position and location: the decisive question is not “who am I?” but “where am I”?’ (2001: 244) –​applying to multiple intersecting axes of power-​asymmetry. Worsham’s focus on workplace labour dynamics fairly warrants emphasising structural logics of a ‘highly stratified capitalist society’, as does our chapter in a book on ‘affective capitalism in academia’. However, we want to make 40

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clear that we do not see workplace power relations in universities or other fields as reducible to singularly capitalist logics. As to affective crises of ‘where am I?’ in university workforces, for the moment we keep attention on academics coping with hysteresis in sinking from a teaching-​and-​research ‘where’ towards teaching-​only. In Australia we see colleagues (a) take positional demotions to stay employed while managing disappointments as best they can; (b) retire from academia and, if young, seek other fields in hopes for dispositional fit; and (c) strategise to stay in ‘reasonably high’ positional place. In the latter set, some strain to build scholarly capital that wins scarce ‘research star’ positioning. In contrast, some abandon scholarly work for alternative status as academic minions to CMG. This can involve quasi-​managerial roles as ‘supervisors’ –​a rising trend in the Australian sector –​ who still work among colleagues yet also oversee newly intense workloads and other CMG moves to capitalise on academic labours, while reporting disturbed reactions up the managerial chain. Supervisors thus effectively channel senior-​level will ‘to break the power’ of their ‘colleagues’, losing friends in cooptation to CMG servility. In our observations, such realignment induces affective disturbance, both in forsaking dispositions that drew them to a university field, and in haunted conscience that stirs both shame and compensatory violence towards colleagues critical of their ‘betrayals’. But what of academics both ‘low’ in workforce status and from marginalised social-​structural positions? In Australia, low-​paid and work-​loaded casual or fixed-​term academics who only teach, without paths to job security, have mostly been women (often single-​parent), older ‘retirees’ from other fields and some from Indigenous, refugee and immigrant groups (whose numbers in Australian academia are small but slowly rising, with some moving ‘upward’). By Worsham’s prognosis, exploiting their labours can evoke a range of abject emotions. Affects on the ‘bitterness, anger, rage’ side of the spectrum can draw CMG exertions of a ‘dominant pedagogy of emotion in which violence always finds its “appropriate” object in any audacious and insubordinate refusal … [that] threatens position and rule’ (Worsham, 2001: 249–​50). In Australian universities, CMG sanctioning of ‘diversity group’ members shies away from blunt punishment, yet can carry symbolic violence: say, a line manager who is criticised invokes institutional ‘grievance’ policy, placing the academic into assessment processes that deliver a warning not to test lines of power. Such ‘pedagogy’ may induce fear, among a targeted academic’s colleagues, that inhibits showing solidarity, in turn evoking guilt that ties to early-​life ‘lessons’ to self-​regulate by ‘boundary-​ work’, says Worsham, ‘affectively to create a sense of place, orientation, and, ultimately, a sense of self … through what we would call emotions of self-​assessment such as pride, shame and guilt’ (2001: 244). Affective crisis on this self-​assessment side of the abject spectrum is ripe for CMG apparatuses to exploit through remoralising ‘pedagogies’ (note that, in quoting Worsham 41

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below, we substitute ‘manager’ and ‘worker’ for ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ [as per her ‘pedagogy’ metaphor]): The authority that has become disembodied … [in the] bureaucratization of postmodern space is reembodied in the (impersonal) figure of the [manager] … who actively confronts the [worker] … to take a position and defend it. … [This] reassertion of the dominance of emotions of self-​assessment (such as pride, guilt, and shame) … requires submission to the constant examination and assessment of individual adequacy. … The demoralized postmodern subject is, in effect, remoralized … [through] a form of crisis intervention and management in the postmodern age. (Worsham, 2001: 255) We see submitting academics to crisis-​managed emotional labours as part-​ and-​parcel of proletarianising academic labours in late-​capitalist reformations of university fields. Remoralised affects do not accrue capital-​value to those who embody them, but present a dispositional dimension of labour-​ power for CMG apparatuses to tame and harness to institutional capital-​ accumulating agendas. To recap our analysis of ‘affective capitalism in academia’ –​increasingly, • the relative autonomy of a field-​specific logic gives way to commercial logics that empty symbolic accumulation of cultural-​scholastic substance; • proletarianised labours, with associated discomfitures, displace relatively comfortable inhabitation at mid-​to-​higher academic levels; • affect turn dire across: (a) senior-‌level violent will to break academic power; (b) mid/​high academic hysteresis in treading and/​or sinking – and (c) bottom-level crises of abjection. All this spells acute field crisis for university futures. Can it be redressed? At the core of our address to this query is Marx’s argument that qualitative use-value potentials, do not die with the destruction of quantitative exchange-​value. We turn to our teased question: might use-​value impulses, inhering in academic dispositions, find liberation for better-​than-​capitalising purposes: that is, for affect-​fuelled labours that mobilise ethical logics of contribution to sectoral and social futures?

Conclusion: resowing academic fields for use-​valued life ahead? We see university field crises enfolded within a writ-​large crisis of capitalism. Marx, as quoted earlier, analysed cyclical exchange-​value crises that ‘free’ use-​ value potentials of labour and other productive resources for recapture in new capital-​accumulating ventures. Some historians of capitalism argue we are now 42

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at a limit-​point crisis (Wallerstein, 1998, 2013; Harvey, 2011), with growth logics of capital-​accumulation no longer sustainable yet destructively persistent, plunging social futures into a prolonged dark age, without guarantee of better social formations emerging (we have space only to say we agree). Yet a limit-​ point opens the possibility to free use-​values for other-​than-​capitalising aims. While other-​than does not guarantee better-​than, crisis times call for repurposing labour energies, including affects, towards better aims. We have argued that academic dispositions tensely combine impulses to realise use-​value potentials and exchange-​value rewards. We here argue that repurposing academic labours requires decolonising academic capitalism in our habitus. In this vein, we look to academic colleagues who embody primary dispositions to meet use-​needs/​values of communities with which they identify. In Australia’s sector, we see such dispositions most manifest among Indigenous colleagues. As Indigenous academics build presence, more are acquiring PhDs through substantive scholarly and community-​serving labours, on which their institutions capitalise symbolically by marketing ‘our diverse university’ and tasking Indigenous academics with performative ‘duties’ on top of their workload. Yet Tracey Bunda’s (2013) doctoral research shows Indigenous colleagues putting symbolic claims to tests of substance, including challenges to senior level, along the lines: Are universities ‘solid or what’? Do our labours further our communities’ needs and values? Or do they support only ‘shaky bridges’ (Bunda et al, 2012) of frail connection? These challenges carry affects from across Worsham’s spectrum, but mainly as resistance-​to-​rule (not guilt/​ shame) energies that gather collective strength to stand up to CMG’s taming efforts. Our point is that affects that managerial apparatuses exploit as fodder for proletarian remoralising can instead provide dispositional fuel for better-​ than-​capital within sturdy alliances that mobilise around use-​value pursuits. As well as Indigenous academics, diverse ‘others’ prioritise needs and values of refugee, immigrant, female and further power-​marginalised groups with whom they identify. ‘The magnitude of the decolonizing task’, urges Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018), ‘calls for alliances among different social groups’ (271) in ‘countermovement to university capitalism and university colonialism … and patriarchy’ (277). Thus, within university, diversities can ‘build the subversity, a term that captures both the subaltern character of social groups … and the subversive manner’ (de Sousa Santos, 2018: 277). Academics from more privileged structural positions who share social justice orientations can add critical mass. A crucial momentum is for ‘non-​market-​oriented academics … [to] take their struggle to the world outside the university walls and find or forge alliances’ (de Sousa Santos, 2018: 279) that engage academics with community actors, combining their knowledges in new ‘ecologies of knowledge’ around ‘issues that, in spite of having no market value, are socially, politically, and culturally relevant to communities of citizens and social groups’ (280), that is, that put diverse knowledge to use-​valued purposes. 43

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Bringing labours into alliance on issues that matter to local and wider social futures can broaden use-​potentials in dimensions at once cognitive, affective and ethical, the latter entailing mutually responsive care to learn how actions may affect diversely (dis)positioned others. Let us dare to imagine an ‘ideal’ situation in which labours are free of narrow institutional efforts to accumulate capital-​as-​quantity. Even so, qualitative multiplicity of use-​purposes will inevitably bring clashes as well as convergences. A project in which diverse groups seek better river use will elicit differently situated cultural-​historical valuations of ‘better’ waterway use. This calls for participatory-​democratic inclusion of all affected groups in processes of dialogue, decision and action. And real situations –​infused by historical structures of subaltern/​dominant power-​relation –​call for the ethical practice of ‘epistemic privileging’ such that subaltern voices are heard, while participants from relatively powerful positions learn to decolonise habits of dominating dialogue, decision and action. From possibilities that are present, and in some spaces active, within academia, we have sketched an imaginary freeing of use-​potentials for better-​than-​capital purposes. Yet our chapter diagnoses formidable forces in the way. We cannot evade analytic pessimism about extending pockets of use-​potential into field-​level resowings. Still, we face times of social/​ planetary tipping-​points into major crises: climate change; pandemics; aggravated race-​ethnic, gender, class and other stratifications; ‘post’-​colonial injustice; decaying infrastructures for basic life needs; and more –​all entwined, we argue, with late capitalism at a limit-​point. Do we not need new citizen-​capacities for living present crises into better futures? Should not academia be a key field where knowledge, affects and ethics entwine in labours to build those capacities? Can more of us work our troubled affects into fuel for ethical courage, and alliance politics, to face our field-​based ethical dilemma between: (a) ‘cruel optimism’ that stays attached to career paths ‘already not working’ (Berlant, 2011: 263); and (b) risking careers in ‘subversive’ efforts that challenge the cruel affective capital of institution-​ governing agendas? We have here teased the question of use-​liberation into further hanging questions for imagination and praxis to come. Note In the introduction to this chapter we reference, without citation, authors whose texts are then cited in ensuing sections.

1

References Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bourdieu, P. (1986) ‘The forms of capital’, in J. Richardson (ed) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood, pp 241–​58. Bourdieu, P. (1989) ‘Social space and symbolic power’, Sociological Theory, 7(1): 14–​25. Bourdieu, P. (1992) ‘The purpose of reflexive sociology (the Chicago workshop)’, in P. Bourdieu and L. Wacquant (eds) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 62–​215. Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2001) Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market, New York: New Press. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.C. (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London: SAGE. Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992) An Invitation to a Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press. Brennan, M. (2010) ‘Dividing the university: perspectives from the middle’, in J. Blackmore, M. Brennan and L. Zipin (eds) Re-​Positioning University Governance and Academic Work, Rotterdam: Sense Publications, pp 115–​32. Brennan, M., McPherson, A., Zipin, L. Rudolph, S., Rogers, B., Barron, R. and Woods, A. (2020) The Growing Urgency of Attending to the State of Education Research in Australian Higher Education, Report to the AARE Executive and Members from the Working Party, ‘Protecting and Extending Research in Education in Australia’. www.aare.edu.au/​news/​rep​ort-​of-​ the-​work​ing-​party-​on-​sup​port​ing-​educ​atio​nal-​resea​rch-​is-​now-​availa​ble Bunda, T. (2013) ‘The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the university: solid or what!’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of South Australia. Bunda, T., Zipin, L. and Brennan, M. (2012) ‘Negotiating university “equity” from Indigenous standpoints: a shaky bridge’, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16(9): 941–​57. Collins, R. (1979) The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification, New York: Academic Press. de Sousa Santos, B. (2018) The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Flinders NTEU (2018) ‘Fact checking the ABC interview of the VC’, Blog, National Tertiary Education Union, Flinders University, 22 October. www.nteu.org.au/ ​ f lind ​ e rs/ ​ a rti ​ c le/ ​ F act- ​ C heck​ i ng-​ t he-​ A BC-​ I nterv​ iew-​of-​the-​VC-​20997 Harvey, D. (2011) The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, London: Profile Books. 45

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Jameson, F. (1984) ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146: 53–​92. Jameson, F. (2011) Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One, London and New York: Verso. Marginson, S. (2002) ‘Towards a politics of the Enterprise University’, Arena, 17–​18; 109–​36. Marginson, S. and Considine, M. (2000) The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. (1967) Capital, Volume 1, translated by S. Moore and E. Aveling, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1969 [1863]) Capital, Volume 4, Part 2, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Pignarre, P. and Stengers, I. (2011) Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, translated by A. Goffey, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rowlands, J. (2015) ‘Turning collegial governance on its head: symbolic violence, hegemony and the academic board’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(7): 1017–​35. Tudge, A. (2021) ‘Our priorities for strengthening Australia’s universities’, Speech, 3 June. https://​minist​ers.dese.gov.au/​tudge/​our-​pri​orit​ies-​streng​ then​ing-​aus​tral​ias-​unive​rsit​ies Wallerstein, I. (1998) Utopistics or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-​First Century, New York: New Press. Wallerstein, I. (2013) ‘Structural crisis, or why capitalists may no longer find capitalism rewarding’, in I. Wallerstein, R. Collins, M. Mann, G. Derluguian and C. Calhoun (eds) Does Capitalism Have a Future?, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 9–​36. Worsham, L. (2001) ‘Going postal: pedagogic violence and the schooling of emotions’, in H. Giroux and K. Myrsiades (eds) Beyond the Corporate University: Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millennium, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp 229–​65. Zembylas, M. (2007) ‘Emotional capital and education: theoretical insights from Bourdieu’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 55(4): 443–​63. Zipin, L. (2006). ‘Governing Australia’s universities: the managerial strong-​ arming of academic agency’, Social Alternatives, 25(2): 26–​31. Zipin, L. (2010) ‘Situating university governance in the ethico-​emotive ground tone of post/​late times’, in J. Blackmore, M. Brennan and L. Zipin (eds) Re-​Positioning University Governance and Academic Work, Rotterdam: Sense Publications, pp 147–​62. Zipin, L. (2019) ‘How council-​management governance troubles Australian university labours and futures: simplistic assumptions and complex consequences’, Social Alternatives, 38(3): 28–​35. Zipin, L. and Brennan, M. (2003) ‘The suppression of ethical dispositions through managerial governmentality: a habitus crisis in Australian higher education’, International Journal of Leadership in Education, 6(4): 351–​70. 46

3

Deepened coloniality, heightened structuralism: implications for intellectual thought and praxis in the Caribbean Talia Esnard

Introduction Across the globe, neoliberal agendas continue to alter, inter alia, the structures, landscapes and practices within higher education institutions. Bob Jessop’s (2017) work on predatory capitalism, for instance, centres the tendency towards degree mills, profit-​based journal publications (downloads, copyright licences and subscriptions), metrification of academic work and the commercialisation of ideas, as key manifestations or formations of this phenomenon. Yet the augmentation of private financiers or influencers in higher education, and the move towards academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997), also signal a form of self-​corporatisation and cultural transformation that aligns knowledge production and workers with those of market rationality and systems. Barry Bozeman and Craig Boardman (2013) tell us therefore that while we are neither capitalism’s slaves nor teaching fugitives, the expanding nature of university–​industry relations call into question not just the complexity of these relationships, but more so, the boundary-​ spanning university initiatives that continue to alter the thinking and actions of academics within these sites of knowledge production. Understanding the significance of this nexus between knowledge work, workers and institutions requires that we critically interrogate the structural aspects that underpin unfolding relations. This type of analysis renders important historical and contemporary notions of the academically constituted subjects and the key factors that influence their negotiation and/​or resistance to these narratives. In this chapter, I argue therefore that within the context of higher education, these market-​led agendas also influence reconstituted forms of structuralism, with direct implications for deepened forms/​systems of coloniality and for transformative praxis. This element of structuralism presents an important way of assessing the intricacies of socio-​economic and political contexts for the positionality, 47

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ambiguity and criticality of knowledge workers. Catherine Chaput (2010: 6) captures this well in the statement that ‘theorizing neoliberalism demands a structural reorganization in the way we think about political-​economic and cultural practices within capitalism … and a new understanding of rhetoric as continuously moving through and connecting different instantiations within the complex structure’. What emerges in this context of academic capitalism is that of the structural realignment of lived realities and inter-​ subjective dispositions that are socially constituted and/​or embodied through the everyday thinking and actions of academic/​knowledge workers. In Chapter 10 in this book, Juhana Venäläinen also situates affective composition as a structural element of the academic space. This nuanced analysis of structure captures not just a method of inquiry into systems or schemas within broader society, but also a way of thinking about the implications and prospects for critical scholarship and action. In the context of the Caribbean, this heightened state of structuralism within sites of knowledge production creates a deepened sense of coloniality that conditions the intellectual moorings and potential for culturally relevant and transformative praxis. Thus, while there has been a historical attempt to locate the structural proclivities and weaknesses of the region within the theorisation of the plantation society, the contradictions remain. Thus, the ‘paradox is that the actual dependence of Caribbean economies became much more acute in the era of structural adjustment and globalisation of the 1980s and 1990s … [with] heightened indebtedness and the dismantling of trade preferences [which have] increased the economic vulnerabilities of the region’ (Girvan, 2006: 345). While in the contemporary period, exploration of decoloniality and other radical theorisations denote the severity of this heightened structuralism and the contradictions that ensue, there is a need within the contemporary period to contextualise the implications for the contours of thinking, practice and action within institutions of higher education. This chapter therefore represents theoretical explorations of critical thought and action in the Caribbean to situate issues of coloniality, positionality and the politics of academic work. A major contention within the chapter therefore is that while there have been ferments of critical thought and practices of resistance within the region, the legacy of plantation systems fuses with unfolding global market structures to reinforce the existence of dominant yet marginalised realities, and to sustain inherent contradictions that underpin relations of power within that matrix. As a way of demonstrating this, the chapter speaks to the challenges associated with troubling extended patterns of coloniality, particularly in relation to prevailing aspects of and theorisations around post-​colonial plantation societies, the structural and cultural tensions that unfold and the implications for critical scholarship and transformative praxis among knowledge workers.

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Neoliberalism, (post)structuralism and the academy Neoliberalism promotes precarious management as a structural and relational condition of academia that binds and directs the functioning or coherence of systems and practice. At the heart of these structural transformations is the application of new public sector management and neoliberal principles that advance innovative and entrepreneurial agendas within university systems (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). These structures unfold as inflexible hierarchies, fixed wage and career systems, permanent tenure track systems with much more market-​controlled performance-​based systems. At a general level, these hierarchies demarcate lines of authority, decision-​making propensities and performance management systems that guide institutional and scholarly practice. Such dynamics are sufficiently described by Rajani Naidoo (2007), whose work, Higher Education as a Global Commodity, centres the ways in which the ascendance of the knowledge economy increases pressures for commodification and value-​added knowledge production/​ commercialisation. In this context, an argument is that knowledge production and consumption unfold as higher-​order economic activity. A related contention within this literature is that neoliberal ethos works to generate a heightened sense of expendability, disposability and moral failure in people (Berlant, 2011; Butler, 2015). This assertion raises questions of the rise of performance-​based knowledge systems or of the need to account for individual performance, and to describe one’s potential for impact or influence within socio-​political and economic realms. Within this scholarly thread, researchers call attention to academicity as a regulated process of repetition (see Massumi, 2002; Staunaes, 2011) that shifts the responsibility to the individual to perform with the growing lines of competitiveness and quest for his/​her survival as economic agent (Davies and Peterson, 2005). This performance-​based management pattern is often described as part of an affective dimension of late capitalism (Chaput, 2010; Holland and Solomon, 2014; Altomonte, 2020), which mediates between the episteme of rationality, technologies of security and through the negotiation of political economic agency. Guillermina Altomonte (2020) reiterates that these affective dimensions of late capitalism remain palpable in the world of work, particularly where affective labour virtues, contact, proximity and emotional labour are seen as intangible to the knowledge production process. Key points of examination within this body of literature are therefore the fusion of emotions with the technological, social, economic and moral infrastructures of knowing that influence self-​representation and agentic expressions. Within the neoliberal academy, these points of reference raise pertinent questions as to the communicative value of the free market narrative within the late capitalist era, and as is the concern of this chapter, on how academic workers theorise and respond to this rhetoric. 49

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From a post-​structuralist perspective, a major argument has been that these neoliberal patterns of influence produce a growing sense of governmentality as a movement from hierarchy to network, from institutions to process and to self-​organisation (Brown, 2015). No doubt, a key aspect of the discussion within this framework is the significance of this sense of governmentality for how constitutive ideas of identity and productivity unfold for academic workers (Davies and Peterson 2005). In addressing some of these concerns, Paola Valero et al (2018) suggest that affective subjectivation occurs when academics are inclined to turn themselves into manageable subjects within the context of precarious academic life. In Chapter 5 in this book, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Paola Valero demonstrate the significance of academic capitalism for storyselling as an expression of self-​corporatisation. Their use of ‘The 10 commandments of academics’ also situates the key indicators of academic work within this neoliberal thrust. Together, the growing critique of the neoliberal university centres the vulnerability that these patterns of work and measures of assessment bring to the notions of acceptability, performativity and the sustainability of the productive self. Sara Ahmed (2004) also underscores the extent to which such normalisations of productivity are further intensified through the application of fear, institutional authority and structures for compliance. This point on the normalisation of academic labour seems to emerge here as an extension of Michael Hardt’s (1999) work, where the existence of immaterial or problem-​solving labour applications is seen as critical to the production of collective subjectivities and sociality. In this sense, the concept of performativity is expanded to include not just the production of knowledge, but also those of the unfolding processes of labour precarisation, affectivity, creativity and materiality (Bjerg and Staunaes, 2011). The importance of this post-​structural analysis is in the attention that it gives to these expressions of affective capitalism, which serve to reinforce the flexible and self-​disciplined subject, and which works by influencing the productive and fully responsive scholar. Chapter 1 of this volume sets the tone for speaking through the wider connection and relevance between academic capitalism and affective organisation. Where people are increasingly required to prove that they are doing well, then scholars have also centred how these unfolding patterns of precarisation create a growing sense of indistinctiveness between the understanding of and representation of the academically constituted self (Bjerg and Staunaes, 2011; Brunila, 2015). For Helle Bjerg and Dorthe Staunaes (2011), this degree of obscurity serves as the precondition for producing not only self-​ organising/​managing subjects, but also that of self-​improving subjects, who continuously work towards grounding improved versions of self within generalised performative frameworks. Kristina Brunila (2012, 2015) uses the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to portray issues of subjectivity 50

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and flexibility, which enables the subject to see him/​herself as a shifting, constitutive force, within multiple discourses. It is important here to look at what are considered to be strands or adaptations of affectivity, the forms of power that are connected to the politics of performativity and the indecisions that these create along the continuum of confirmativity and resistance. Here, precaritisation is theorised both as a productive and repressive force. The main prepositions are that affects are entwined in the competing markets and emancipatory discourses and counter-​discourses that shape ongoing forms of epistemic violence and cultural constellations of their own. These structures shape the emotions and thinking of academics and the need for individuals to either work closely with main narratives or oppose them. Chapter 6 in this book, by Kristiina Brunila, on academic and affective leaderships in the academy, situates the discussion on the role of political imaginary for building points of dissension and resistance. This is similar to Chapter 8 by Mark Vicars, where we see the discussion of the expanded imaginary as a necessary form of agentic action. The potential for agentic expression or for points of resistance unfold as central aspects of the widening debate on structuration within the contemporary period. Undoubtedly, these treatments of the structure/​agency complex within the academy warrant deeper examinations of institutional and professional leanings, whether as an embodiment or as a contestation of managed subjectivities or as a combination of both within the historical and contemporary period.

Plantation society, coloniality and the intellectual traditions The collective interrogation of the Caribbean experience, using the lenses of plantation society and coloniality of power principle within post-​ colonial studies, offer an instructive radical critique of structuralism, a contextualisation of institutional and intellectual norms and the challenge of transformative agendas. A key aspect of thinking through the concept of the coloniality of power is that of situating the colonial/​modern/​capitalist world system and the complex ways in which it creates entangled subjects and societies within the international division of labour. In capturing the significance of this, radical thinkers in the Global South have located this global relation of power within the post-​Second World War formation of the new world order and the subjectification reinforced through the structure and workings of plantation economies. Within this theorisation, scholars such as George Beckford, Lloyd Best and Keri Levitt underscore the unequal relations of production, exploitative centre–​periphery relations and the structural constraints that these relations add to issues of growth and transformation for Caribbean economies. In this sense, plantation theorists were successful as radical thinkers to critically locate variants of this coloniality within this element of Caribbean 51

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structuralism. This unfolded as an expression of the economic activities, typically characterised vulnerabilities related to high degrees of openness, foreign-​owned businesses in key sectors, small size and an acute sense of fiscal and technological dependence. A key benefit of this analysis therefore is in the visibility that this work gives to shifting structural rigidities within the global capitalist system. It is also in the marginalised positionalities of countries within centralised systems of decision-​making, and the persistent challenges and forms of epistemic violence that these create for the political economies and prospects for change within Caribbean societies (see Beckford, 1972; Beckford and Witter, 1982; Best and Polanyi Levitt, 2007). This scholarship also captures a struggle of new world thinkers within the 1960s and 1970s to critically contest and alter deepening structures of coloniality within Caribbean contexts. The notion of coloniality of power thus problematises racialised constructions and systems of hierarchy. Aníbal Quijano’s (2000) work, for instance, captures the centrality of race and racial identities as instruments of social classifications or constructions, with profound implications for social relations, control, identities and action. In the context of the Caribbean, this line of scholarship unfolds as an extension of critical intellectual thought and teachings on social stratification and segmentation within the region. Such is depicted within the early scholarship of plantation theorists whose work became instrumental in capturing the hierarchical relations within plantation societies, the social rigidities that were sustained based on the primacy of race and ethnic relations, and the negative impacts on the socio-​economic and cultural dynamics within the region. Scholars like M.G. Smith (1960) and Kamau Braithwaite (1971) were also successful in providing seminal work, which critically unpacked the ways in which vestiges of colonialism conditioned complex modes and patterns of the cultural conflict and hegemony, as well as the potential for cultural unity and change within the Caribbean. Yet, it is in his rejection of cultural imperialism and notion of the ‘inner plantation’ as internalised expressions of colonialism that Braithwaite denotes the challenge of resistance and transformation as agentic expressions within the region. Sylvia Wynter’s work (2003) also shows that the search for cultural determination demands the radical alterity of the plantation, a metamorphosis of consciousness and being within the reclaiming and reconstitution of social life within the region. This thematic thread has and continues to form the basis of intellectual tradition that captures the struggle between coloniality, citizenship, freedom and intellectual thought in the Caribbean. The Black Power Movement and the ascendancy of radical scholarship in the Caribbean within the late 1960s and early 1970s also provide significant frames of reference or periods of analysis through which we can begin to historicise the struggle for identity, self-​definition and socio-​political change. A key benefit of such theorisations is that of the provocative questions they offer 52

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for thinking through and contextualising questions of tradition/​coloniality, modernity/​post-​coloniality and the tensions that unfolded within intellectual thought and resistance within the region. The coloniality of power also calls for examinations of knowledge production and representations of being and becoming. Aníbal Quijano (2000), Walter D. Mignolo (2000) and Nelson Maldonado-​Torres (2007) capture the coloniality of knowledge and the challenges for identity formation and being within post-​colonial societies. Such contentions are also captured in the work of Frantz Fanon (1952, 1961), C.L.R James (1964) and George Lamming (1995), to name just a few, who all problematise racialised subjectivities and the challenge for transcending the structures of power and the coloniality of being that underpin them. We also see in the work of Lloyd Best (1971) his own advocacy for independent thought, Caribbean freedoms and intellectual leadership that can limit colonial conditions and forms of control within the Caribbean. Central to this concern was the growing sense of knowledge dependency, epistemic violence and the poverty of knowledge for the region. For Best (1971, 2003), the hope was also for a radical intelligentsia that must be rescued from what could be considered by and large a game of public relations, or what he described as the creation of the ‘sterile technocrat’. For George Beckford (1972), moving beyond the colonial webs of power also requires critical examinations of colonised mindsets, particularly among the higher echelons of the academic community, and for initiations of public agendas or activism as central to scholarly critical transformations within the region. The fundamental issue here is that of examining the scholarship and advocacy with a requirement for influencing public policy and public institutions. Central to a call for public action were acts of resistance, with an affinity for political leadership, commitment and consciousness as quintessential to the process of social change. Lloyd Best (2003), for instance, presented perceptions of academic legitimacy in the region as reflective of the technical competencies that are valued within that institutional space, but with a lack of political commitment and activism to transform the conditions of their own critique. This is also evident in his broad construction of knowledge workers in the region, whose intellectual hiatus remains within the context of the plantation and whose work dually takes on a ‘sterile scientism on the one hand … cheap populism on the other’ (Best, 2003: 23). In making sense of this call for action, therefore, Best (2003) claims that a fundamental task for Caribbean scholars remains that of both defining and producing relevant empirical work that intricately connects the need for change agendas within their societies. A key aspect of such transformation for Best involves the fashioning of Caribbean theories that both render visible the structural, political, and cultural realities of the region, and that provide critical points of reference for relevant action. 53

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On a collective level, the scholarship of these radical thinkers reminds us that universities are bearers of culture that centre on ideological framings of intellectual thought and practice. With a dominant ethos on training, skills acquisition and developing frontiers of knowledge, a central assertion within this radical literature has been that university systems within the region were historically framed to prepare people with technical competencies, but with little relevance or application to address the changing needs of their societies. The push for radical thought, leadership and activism within the Caribbean therefore presented an attempt to redefine the prospects of social change and development within the region. Yet it is through the examination of this scholarship and the inherent challenge experienced within the attempts to extend radical thinking to the development of Pan-​Africanist, socialist and neo-​Marxist traditions in the region that we begin to situate the structures of power that reproduce structuralism and the ongoing forms of dependency that these sustain. These structural impediments unfold therefore as significant aspects of (in)dependent thought and freedom that are both reflected in the scholarship and experience of radicalism within the region. Through this line of scholarship, we also see a call for a new code of social and professional ethics that centres the obligations and responsibilities for academic workers within this context. What unfolds therefore is a line of scholarship that provides critical starting points for academic workers to advance conjectures and refutations on matters related to colonialism, structuralism, intellectualism and activism within the region.

Deepened coloniality and intellectual advances Since 2010, however, global patterns of interconnectedness and competitiveness have not just ushered in shifting landscapes with heightened structuralism, but have also deepened in more qualitative ways, ongoing forms of coloniality. The work of Aníbal Quijano (2000), Walter D. Mignolo (2000), Nelson Maldonado-​Torres (2007) and others therefore capture the unfolding patterns of global domination, neoliberal systems of capital and labour and the implications for institutional and intellectual practices within the contemporary period. On an institutional level, such interrogation requires an examination of the processes and impact of market capitalism and related structures to the workings and framings of university systems and academic labour. In speaking to this, Rajani Naidoo (2007) questions the involvement of international financial institutions within the region, and the processes through which related economic infrastructures position developing countries within this globally competitive space. In the context of higher education, Naidoo’s work casts doubt on the underlining philosophies and mandates of higher 54

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education, particularly as they relate to issues of sovereignty, access, quality, pedagogy, assessments and partnerships that are formed through the process. A key tension for Naidoo, therefore, is within the developmental role of the university and providing access within increasingly interconnected global academic spaces. At best, this discussion problematises related constructions as it relates to the core functions and purpose of higher education systems. Fundamentalism in this sense is captured both in the assumptions of educational institutions and in the ways in which these understandings are universally applied without due consideration to the nuances of culture and the developmental mandates that define these societies. What unfolds within this debate is a tossing of public and private mandates of university systems, with the latter centring on the expectation for working within the logic of market to build the knowledge economy (Forstorp, 2008). These concerns for the philosophical and functional tensions within the contemporary university also surface as key considerations for scholars within the region. As a case in point, Pearlette Louisy’s (2001) examination of ‘Globalization and comparative education’ captures the contradictions for the region, between the potential for global expansion and that of the possibilities for persistent marginalisation within hierarchised systems of ranking for higher education systems across the globe. In evaluating the ambiguities for Caribbean intellectuals, Mark Figueroa (2003) also speaks of the uncritical adoption of international standards, but with an inward twist, to address the gaps in the knowledge of the Caribbean region. Citing the general work of Lloyd Best, Figueroa (2003: 56) also calls attention to the ways in which ‘institutions of learning … [have] become tied up in the most absurd ways with sponsoring institutions’, and on the impact of these globalising trends on the relevance of university systems and scholarship within the contemporary Caribbean. It is also against the analysis of globalising trends and the implications of the neoliberal paradigm within higher education that Didacus Jules (2008) calls for radical educational reform to address the vulnerability of Small Island developing states. The significance of these globalising trends is also encapsulated in the work of Caribbean scholars, who use case study approaches as a way of situating growing patterns of internationalisation within higher education and the tensions that unfold for the developmental mandates of regional institutions (see Green, 2016; Stephenson et al, 2020). At a micro level, other researchers also question the neoliberal university and its effects on academic work, identity and professional trajectory of knowledge workers. Janice Fournillier (2010), in her autoethnographic piece ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’,1 captures the persistent legacies of the plantation system that continue to define institutional or academic life. In her work, we see the narrative of an Afro-​Caribbean scholar, who uses the cultural knowledge from across Caribbean and US contexts to transcend 55

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the isolation within the university system. Laurette Bristol et al (2012: 251) further portray the lived experiences of being and becoming transgressive academics in the following: Rather than locating this intellectual habitus only within the internationalization of the university or within the conditions of our history as colonial, postcolonial, and post-​independence individuals, we prefer to shift the source of our intellectual habitus and relocate it within community. … We recognize that the community cannot be abstracted from the social and political structures that frame it, nor can it be abstracted from the historical conditions within which it sits. Rather, we posit, that our intellectual habitus, located within community, is one that recognizes the limitations of its own conditions but yet constructs new pathways of being and becoming through new ways of saying, doing, and relating with each other in community. A way of academic[ally] unfolding that is critically conscious yet intellectually transgressive. (Emphasis added) Acts of resistance in this sense become embedded within positionality and choice and within a network or community of practice. These possibilities, however, also introduce many doubts on the possibility for institutional change. This is clear in the work of Talia Esnard et al (2017), who highlight the significance of the hierarchical and self-​serving nature of their institutions, the strong sense of individualism, as well as hierarchical classifications and constructions of academic workers. In their work, they acknowledge the ways in which vestiges of colonialism and paternalism complicate the nexus between nationality, gender, age and the professional identities for emerging scholars in the Caribbean. They also draw on the tensions that these produce for the delineation of roles and boundaries, for situating mutually existing ideals of nationalism vis-​à-​vis that of regionalism within the corridors of the academy (Esnard et al, 2017). Similarly, Talia Esnard and Deirdre Cobb-​Roberts (2018) centre on the ways in which the growing infiltration of academic capitalism creates disciplinary biases (based on the closest alignment to the market), and revalue the nature and relevance of academic work. In interrogating the structured and stratified nature of the academy, they draw on the significance of gendered racisms as systemic structures of power that configure the shifting identities for Black women, persistent underrepresentation and marginalisation within academe. In their work, they advance the notion of comparative intersectionality as a theoretical way of thinking through the complexities or peculiarities within the experiences of women academics within the Caribbean, the diaspora and their African American counterparts. These raise pertinent questions of the intricacies related to space, identity, culture and structure that continue to influence imaginings for the Caribbean, and to shape future scholarship in the region. 56

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Critical pedagogy, post-​coloniality and the public intellectual These collective discussions direct questions to the feasibility for taking up critical thought and praxis within Caribbean institutions of higher education. As I have shown in this chapter, critical theory and praxis offers instructive points for departure and response. Within the realm of education, however, critical pedagogy provides an applied framework for moving this agenda forward. As a form of critical praxis, the key benefit of this type of framework is within the construction of educators as public and transformative intellectuals, where the act of teaching moves beyond technical transmission to that of serving as a method for raising critical conscientisations on the structural and relational projects that govern their specific contexts. In this sense, teachers are positioned as cultural agents with critical practices that situate culturally relevant and specific ways of knowing, and of shaping social and institutional praxis. Pedagogy is removed from the narrow confines and configurations of the everyday classroom to that of constructing and situating the political practice of educators to empower the ways in which individuals begin to learn, to make sense of their environments and to change the conditions that define their beings and becomings within that space (Giroux, 1997). Through critical pedagogy, hope and transformation are uniquely positioned to mobilise affective investments. Henry Giroux (1997: 117–​18) contends, ‘pedagogies of hope are about the political ethical, and affective investments that teachers and students make as part of their attempts to enact visions that enlarge the landscape of possibilities for transformation’. Within this form of critical pedagogy, therefore, affectivity becomes reframed to capture the potential for transformative investments through explorations of the nexus between criticality, affect and ethic engagement. For the most part, the language of hope enhances that of the possibility for change and action. While the process through which the language of hope becomes transformed into specific acts of engagement or strategies to initiate action emerges an area for further examination (specifically as it relates to Caribbean societies). The potential is for the framing of knowledge and teaching through relevant epistemological frameworks that encourage ongoing application and examination of these interventions. The role of the public intellectual remains integral to this change process. While this discussion is not new, and has been highlighted within the early treatment of radical thinkers in the Caribbean, the differences within this placement of the public intellectual is within the use of pedagogical approaches within the classroom with the expectations that the impact will filter beyond the classroom. In thinking through the prospect for higher education institutions as sites for radical transformation, therefore, Henry Giroux (2000: 35) asserts that if we see ourselves as public intellectuals, then 57

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we can ‘teach students what might be called a language of social criticism and responsibility; a language that refuses to treat knowledge as something to be consumed passively, taken up merely to be tested, or legitimated outside of an engaged normative discourse’. To do this, however, Henry Giroux and Patrick Shannon (1997: 8) advance the need for the repositioning of public intellectuals to allow for ‘critical citizens whose collective knowledge and actions presuppose specific visions of public life, community, and moral accountability’. In reframing the notion of the public intellectual, Henry Giroux (2002) speaks to the need for individuals who are informed, self-​conscious, committed to their role as political agents in knowledge production and who recognise the potential for teaching to serve as a form of cultural politics and transformative praxis. The potential here within the construction of the public intellectual therefore lies within the strategic and critical reframing of teachers, classrooms and teaching as sites and acts of transgression. Within this construction, these sites and acts become radical ways of working from the inside of educational systems to democratise relations of power. A major step towards this reconstruction is to help students ‘with the opportunity to develop the critical capacity to challenge and transform existing social and political forms, rather than simply adapt to them’ (Giroux, 1997: 218). These calls for the integration of a critical curriculum that employs diverse forms of knowledge, experience and subjectivities while expanding the application of these to their lives and to the shaping of the cultural, economic, and political forms that they embody and produce. In the context of neoliberal academy, and that of deepened coloniality, the application of critical pedagogy also calls for examinations of institutional cultures and contexts. In this sense, Henry Giroux and Kostas Myrsiades (2001: 33) remind us that the issue of organisational cultures is particularly relevant given the potential in the contemporary era for ‘reducing higher education to the handmaiden of corporate culture; [a process which] works against the critical social imperative of educating citizens who can sustain and develop inclusive democratic public spheres’. Fundamental to the creation of democratic cultures is the recognition that ‘education must be treated as a public good and not merely as a site for commercial investment or for affirming a notion of the private good based exclusively on the fulfilment of individual needs’ (Giroux and Myrsiades, 2001: 33). This prioritisation of education as a public good, however, has the potential for raising many contradictions and conflicts within organisational cultures. This is particularly the case where the charge of reconstructing democratic life comes into direct confrontation within the broader attack on political democracy (Giroux, 2004). In such neoliberal contexts, the call is for interrogations of the contradictions that unfold within institutional contexts for academic freedom, diversity, equality and social justice. 58

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The potential for contradictions and unease within post-​colonial societies are certainly areas for concern. The work of Fazal Rizvi, Bob Lingard and Jennifer Lavia (2006) is particularly insightful within this consideration as they draw on the contested terrain of post-​coloniality to underscore the points of discomfort for intellectuals who challenge the web of global capitalism and relations. Using the work of Arif Dirlik, Gayatri Spivak and Franz Fanon, for instance, they stress on the contentions within conceptualisations of (post)colonial societies, the promise of freedom and change that these fosters and the challenges of moving forward these agendas within a broader sense of ethnocentric essentialism. Rizvi et al (2006: 257) remind us that: Post-​colonialism’s contentions surrounding the relationship between knowledge and power are linked directly to education, both as an institution where people are inculcated into hegemonic systems of reasoning and as a site where it is possible to resist dominant discursive practices. In this way, education has a systematically ambivalent relation to (post)colonialism. On the one hand, it is an object of postcolonial critique regarding its complicity with Eurocentric discourses and practices. On the other hand, it is only through education that it is possible to reveal and resist colonialism’s continuing hold on our imagination. Education is also a site where legacies of colonialism and the contemporary processes of globalization intersect. What is clear is that these tensions related to colonial/​post-​colonial, traditional/​ modern and local/​global complicate the potential for transformative agendas. In speaking to these contestations,Jennifer Lavia (2012) notes that critical transformation in the region requires ongoing attention to the intricacies of global connectivity, historicity, identity and reflexivity. Through these multiple points of critical interrogations, she extends the notions of resistance to include the epistemological and ontological nature of one’s scholarship and the broader agendas that these are developed to engender. For Jennifer Lavia (2012: 9), these are particularly necessary given that the ‘the motif of the plantation is central to Caribbean scholarship’. In capturing the challenge of resisting this inner plantation within critical pedagogy, Jennifer Lavia (2012: 23) calls for attention to the representing and reconstructing of the creolised Caribbean subject who remains ‘conflicted by internalised images of self-​deception, transmitted through historical violence, marginalization and exclusion on one hand’. Here, the post-​colonial agenda is framed as central to the application of critical pedagogy and the framing of the public intellectual. In this treatment, Lavia centres the project of decoloniality, as unfinished agendas of post-​colonial thinkers, and, inadvertently, of educational transformations within the region. In this iteration of a post-​colonial pedagogical model, 59

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she therefore speaks to the potential relevance of political education, the ‘methodological and axiological foundations of historicism and the importance of these foundations for understanding the Caribbean subject and Caribbean societies’ (Lavia, 2012: 25). In speaking to this pedagogical framework, Lavia (2012: 26–​7) elaborates that: Developing a critical postcolonial pedagogy for education in present day circumstances suggests an aspirational intention as an act of recovery. Consideration of the strategic location of educational practice in postcolonial societies as has been discussed within this paper, signals a promise of a pedagogy of hope that requires critical engagement about contested values and interests; interrogation of intellectual and moral commitment; the generation of cultural values through the practice of teachers; and a consideration of practice as deeply implicated in political struggle. These elements reflect a commitment to constitute a practice of education that can serve to resist strategies that work to re-​colonise, leaving the inner plantation unchecked. Thus, while the post-​colonial pedagogical model, like critical pedagogy, underscores the critical levels of conscientisation that are required to convert the leadership and scholarly praxis of Caribbean scholars, it is marked by an emancipatory project, which remains historically situated within the context of plantation societies. What remains clear, however, is that this emancipatory project is neither linear nor uncomplicated, and requires a mix of flexibility, reflectivity, methodology, criticality and agency. The history of radical thought in the Caribbean and the failures of transformative and political projects tell of deep-​seated structures of power that muddle the roles and prospects of public intellectuals.

Conclusion The main objective of this chapter was that of highlighting the extent to which global structures of power challenge institutional and scholarly praxis in the Caribbean. A key contention throughout, therefore, was that within the context of academic capitalism, these structures of power work to deepen experiences of coloniality, accountability and performativity, while problematising critical thought and praxis in the region. Through the examination of both historical and contemporary iterations of Caribbean scholarship, the chapter demonstrates the extent to which prevailing structures of power both framed and constrained the degree of critical thought and action within the Caribbean. In so doing, the interrogation of radical thought within the region situates some of the historical contentions related to intellectual thought, freedom, leadership and social change in the 60

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Caribbean, with the university at the centre of this dialectal conundrum. Through the examinations of radical theorists, the chapter centres some of the structural challenges related to global economic relations, racialised subjectivities, political action and Caribbean theorisations. As the chapter shows, these are further complicated within the contemporary era by the increasing infiltration of neoliberal agendas into the framing of academic work, academic and institutional cultures. The chapter ends, however, with a treatment and recognition of the potential for critical pedagogy as subversive practice and change agenda. Where the contradictions and tensions of Caribbean societies raise doubt as to the promise of change, the chapter closes with some consideration of the unfinished interrogations and applications of critical pedagogy, (post)coloniality, structuralism and praxis central to the resistance and contestations of these processes. Note Meaning, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

1

References Ahmed, S. (2004) ‘Affective economies’, Social Text, 22(2): 117–​39. Altomonte, G. (2020) ‘Affect and labour’, Athenea Digital, 20(2): 1–​21. Beckford, G.L. (1972) Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World, New York: Oxford University Press. Beckford, G.L. and Witter, M. (1982) Small Garden, Bitter Weed: The Political Economy of Struggle and Change in Jamaica, Morant Bay: Maroon Publishing House. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Best, L. (1971) ‘From Chaguaramas to slavery’, New World Journal, 2(1): 1–​7. https://​neww​orld​jour​nal.org/​volu​mes/​vol​ume-​ii-​no-​1/​pole​mic-​chag​uara​ mas-​to-​slav​ery Best, L. (2003) ‘Independent thought and Caribbean freedom’, in S. Ryan (ed) Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom: Essays in Honour of Lloyd Best, Trinidad and Tobago: Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, pp 423–​41. Best, L. and Polanyi Levitt, K. (2007) Plantation Economy: A Historical and Institutional Approach to Caribbean Economic Transformation, Mona: University of the West Indies Press. Bjerg, H. and Staunaes, D. (2011) ‘Self-​management through shame-​uniting governmentality studies and the “affective turn” ’, ephemera, 12: 138–​56. Bozeman, B. and Boardman, C. (2013) ‘Academic faculty in university research centres: neither capitalism’s slaves nor teaching fugitives’, The Journal of Higher Education, 84(1): 88–​120. Braithwaite, K. (1971) The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–​ 1820, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 61

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Bristol, L., DeFour-​Babb, J., Esnard, T., Lavia, J. and Perez, L. (2012) ‘Comparative collaboration: a transgressive academic practice of being and becoming’, in J. M. Lavia and S. Mahlomaholo (eds) Culture, Education, and Community Expressions of the Post-​Colonial Imagination, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 235–​54. Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone Books. Brunila, K. (2012) ‘A diminished self: Entrepreneurial and therapeutic ethos working with the common aim’, European Educational Research Journal, 11(4): 477–​86. Brunila, K. (2015) ‘The ambivalences of becoming a professor in neoliberal academia’, Qualitative Inquiry, 22(5): 386–​94. Butler, J. (2015) Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chaput, C. (2010) ‘Rhetorical circulation in late capitalism: neoliberalism and the over determination of affective energy’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 43(1): 1–​25. Davies, B. and Peterson, E.B. (2005) ‘Intellectual workers (un)doing neoliberal discourses’, International Journal of Critical Psychology, (23)13: 32–​54. Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980) Esnard, T. and Cobb-​Roberts, D. (2018) Black Women, Academe and the Tenure Process in the United States and the Caribbean, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Esnard, T., Descartes, C., Evans, C. and Joseph, K. (2017) ‘Framing our professional identity: experiences of emerging Caribbean academics’, Social and Economic Studies, 66 (3/​4): 123–​50. Fanon, F. (1952) Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press. Fanon, F. (1961) The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press. Figueroa, M. (2003) ‘Thought and freedom: thirty-​five years after’, in S. Ryan (ed) Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom: Essays in Honour of Lloyd Best, St Augustine: Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, The UWI, pp 35–​70. Forstorp, P.-​A. (2008) ‘Who’s colonising who? The knowledge society thesis and the global challenges in higher education’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27: 227–​36. Fournillier, J. (2010) ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, Creative Approaches to Research, 3(2): 52–​62. Giroux, H.A. (1997) Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture and Schooling: A Critical Reader, New York: Routledge. Giroux, H.A. (2000) ‘Cultural politics and the crisis of the university’, Culture Machine. https://culturemachine.net/the-university-culture-machine/ cultural-politics-and-the-crisis-of-the-university/ 62

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Giroux, H.A. (2002) ‘Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: the university as a democratic public sphere’, Harvard Educational Review, 72(4): 425–​63. Giroux, H.A. (2004) ‘Cultural studies and the politics of public pedagogy: making the political pedagogical’, Parallax, 10(2): 73–​89. Giroux, H.A. and Myrsiades, K. (2001) Beyond the Corporate University: Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millennium, New York: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers. Giroux, H.A. and Shannon, P. (eds) (1997) Education and Cultural Studies: Towards a Performative Practice, New York: Routledge. Girvan, N. (2006) ‘Caribbean dependency thought revisited’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies/​Revue Canadienne d’études du développement, 27(3): 330–​52. Green, P. (2016) ‘The impact of internationalization on the regionalization of higher education in the English-​speaking Caribbean: a case study of the University of the West Indies’, Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, Toronto: University of Toronto. https://t​ spa​ ce.libra​ ry.utoron ​ to.ca/b​ itstre​ am/1​ 807/​73008/​1/​Gre​en_​Pa​ ula​_​ P_​2​0160​6_​Ph​D_​th​esis.pdf Hardt, M. (1999) ‘Affective labour’, Boundary 2, 26(2): 89–​100. Holland, J. and Solomon, T. (2014) ‘Affect is what states makes of it: articulating everyday experiences of 9/​11’, Critical Studies on Security, 2(3): 262–​77. James, C.L.R. (1964) ‘A national purpose for Caribbean peoples’ in C.L.R. James (ed) Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings, London: Allison and Busby, pp 1543–​58. Jessop, B. (2017) ‘Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities: on past research and three thought experiments’, Higher Education, 73: 853–​70. Jules, D. (2008) ‘Rethinking education for the Caribbean: a radical approach’, Comparative Education, 44(2): 203–​14. Lamming, G. (1995) ‘Western education and the Caribbean intellectual’, in G. Lamming and R. Nettleford (eds) Coming, Coming, Coming Home, Conversations II, Monographs, Philipsburg: House of Nehesi Publishing, pp 3–​28 Lavia, J, (2012) ‘Resisting the inner plantation: decolonisation and the practice of education in the work of Eric Williams’, Postcolonial Directions in Education, 1(1): 9–​30. Louisy, P. (2001) ‘Globalisation and comparative education: a Caribbean perspective’, Comparative Education, 37(4): 425–​38. Maldonado-​Torres, N. (2007) ‘On the coloniality of being: contributions to the development of a concept’, Cultural Studies, 21(2–​3): 240–​70. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 63

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Mignolo, W.D. (2000) Local Histories and Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Naidoo, R. (2007) Higher Education as a Global Commodity: The Perils and Promises for Developing Countries, London: The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education. Quijano, A. (2000) ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from the South, 1(3): 533–​80. Rizvi, F., Lingard, B. and Lavia, J. (2006) ‘Postcolonialism and education: negotiating a contested terrain’, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 14(3): 249–​62. Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L.L. (1997) Academic Capitalism, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Slaughter, S. and G. Rhoades (2004) Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, M.G. (1960) ‘Social and cultural pluralism’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 83(5): 763–​85. Staunaes, D. (2011) ‘Governing the potentials of life itself? Interrogating the promises in affective educational leadership’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 43(5): 227–​47. Stephenson, J., Persadie, N., Bissessar, A. and Esnard, T. (2020) Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion in Caribbean Organisations and Society, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Valero, P., Jørgensen, K.M. and Brunila, K. (2018) ‘Affective subjectivation in the precarious neoliberal academia’, in D. Bottrell and C. Manathunga (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education, Volume I: Seeing Through the Cracks, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 135–​54. Wynter, S. (2003) ‘Unsettling the coloniality of being/​power/​truth/​ freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation –​ an argument’, The New Centennial Review, 3(3): 257–​337.

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Academic patriarchal (post)liberal capitalism Demetra Tzanaki

Introduction During the academic year 2020–​21, the Greek right-​wing party New Democracy (henceforth, ND) put forward a series of political decisions as part of an extended, aggressive (post)liberal reform platform (Mylonas, 2021), with ideas about the marketisation of education and efforts to make Greek education more ‘effective’. Previous attempts had been made to introduce similar (post)liberal reforms in higher education, especially in 2005–​11, as a result of the so-​called ‘Bologna Process’ (2005), with the target set by the European Council in 2000 (the ‘Lisbon Strategy’) to make the EU the most competitive knowledge-​based economy in the world. We saw it in 2011, the year the Greek Parliament voted in favour of the Framework Act for Higher Education. The Act introduced ‘changes to [the] management, to the structure of degrees and courses, to funding, and accreditation and quality control’ (Traianou, 2013) of universities, signifying that the high degree of autonomy traditionally enjoyed by Greek universities was now radically changed. Nowadays, we see this economic authoritarianism expanding with measures in place to marginalise any criticism, preventing the lower strata of society from accessing higher education, and creating a police force within universities as part of implementing reforms for modernising Greek education. These changes were inaugurated with the removal of sociology (Μalagaris, 2020) from the prerequisite subjects list in the humanities cluster of the Panhellenic Entry Exams to Higher Education. Moreover, ND introduced, among other things, radical changes to the higher education admission system with stricter admission standards as well as further time restrictions for the completion of studies (Tzanaki, 2021). As a result, for the first time in academic history, in 2021 more than 40,000 candidates (40,229) were excluded –​due to stricter admission standards –​from the country’s universities (Αndritsaki, 2021). Not surprisingly, however, there has been a systematic effort to legitimise such measures by mobilising a powerful rhetoric of the devaluation of the public university as ‘unproductive’ and 65

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as a ‘topos of anomie’, well within the official political discourse of ND. This ‘anomie’ discourse has provided the necessary backdrop in which the state is given carte blanche to intervene in such subtle ways as to restrict laziness, chaos, anarchy and crime, in order to rehabilitate the lost prestige of meritocracy. What has followed is the bill for the constitution of a special police unit, assigning 1,030 police officers (Sotiris, 2021) to the task of patrolling universities –​an act that fits well within ND’s repression politics against so-​called ‘menacing’ student subcultures.With this backdrop, the general director of ELIDEK (Εlliniko Idrima Erevnas kai Kainotomias, Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation) will, from now on, be designated by the Ministry of Development (Aggeli, 2021), replacing the independent committee that was responsible for assigning this post until now. If we nonetheless suppose that such initiatives are only indicative of a certain level of authoritarianism that the (post)liberal dogma has so far exhibited, I will go so far as to suggest that even supposedly progressive policies in Greece, introduced by the left-​wing party of Syriza (Synaspismos Rizospastikis Aristeras, the Coalition of the Radical Left) in 2016, in essence, did nothing but reproduced the rhetoric that the crisis was the fault of an invisible enemy for disqualifying the EU from becoming the most competitive knowledge-​based economy in the world. These policies included the scheme for the ‘Support of Postdoctoral Researchers’ as well as ‘Academic Teaching Experience for Young [sic] (Early-​Career) Scientists’, both put forward by ELIDEK (Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation). On the other hand, these two policies that gave the possibility for teaching in higher institutions on a fixed-​term contract had, as a pre-​condition, the passing of no more than 10 years after acquiring doctoral status; otherwise, applications would not be considered (Tzanaki, 2018). During those last 10 critical years (2011–​2021), Greek society had undergone a deep crisis, with close-​to-​zero career openings in academia. Furthermore, they strategically ignore that the period of transition into a postdoctoral appointment is not always immediate, with some academics taking a career break after doctoral study and some entering academia at a later stage in their lives after a previous career or a personal or health problem (Τzanaki, 2018). In other words, a language of dichotomy and the repeated blaming of the individual offer a conceptual and explanatory panacea to the chronic despair of human exploitation. At the same time, Greek universities and universities in Europe are transformed into capitalising fields (see Chapter 2, this book). In this sense, Greek universities not only compete for economic capital but also for ‘cultural capital’, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu (see Chapter 2, this book), and, I will add, for ethical (post_​liberal capital. This means that to become a ‘normal’ Greek academic means to act and shape oneself into a manageable subject within the ethical, academic, capitalist European (post) 66

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liberal (affective) norm (Massumi, 2015; see also Chapter 8, this book). This procedure implies a form of subjectification that shapes a ‘normal’ –​self-​ regulated –​academic subjectivity (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004; Nehring and Kerrigan, 2020). However, the reactions to these measures on behalf of the academic community at large have, since 2016, been unjustifiably weak, as far as the Greek case is concerned. This can be explained by what Kristiina Brunila (see Chapter 6, this book) suggests -​using Lauren Berlant’s term ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011)​: ‘Injustices manifest themselves in ways that are increasingly hard to recognise and intervene in’ (see Chapter 6, this book). However, understanding the significance of this nexus between academics, capitalist ethos and universities requires that we critically interrogate historical and contemporary notions of the academically constituted subjects and ‘the key factors that influence their negotiation and/​or resistance’ (see Chapter 3, this book). This is an essential way to also think about the ways in which affective academic rhetoric continuously extend across patriarchal (post) liberalism. As I will highlight in this chapter, this discourse has deep historical roots in the liberal scientific language of psychiatry, forensic medicine, biology, criminology and psychoanalysis, and has been developed on the basis of the imaginary existence of an ‘immoral human being’, a carrier of corporal, psychic and moral disorders, therefore incorporating the cause of all society’s ills. I suggest that this provides an outline of what has become the institutional rule mode I call patriarchal (post) liberalism. The term I propose here describes a discourse regarding a psychic norm that was developed in the early 19th century under the umbrella term degeneracy, eugenism and heredity, and is still very powerful today. The idea behind such an ideology is to masquerade ‘society’s ills’ as problems pertaining to the individual’s mental health state. Social dysfunction as such should thus be understood within an entire system of interpretation based on the gender-​binary structure of life. In this sense, any interpretation of human behaviour is constructed within the binary normality (necessarily masculine)–​non-​normality (effeminate, degenerate). This discourse of normality and degeneration during the 19th century and the interwar years went as far as to attribute poverty, criminality, illness and violent death to the heredity of the lower socio-​economic classes of the society. Linked to this, it was also generally accepted that due to heredity, university knowledge ought to have been the interest of only a higher species, of a sophisticated elite, an idea that, once established, brought forward profound transformations in scholar identities and in the conceptual perspective of knowledge itself. It was Sir Francis Galton (1822–​1911), proto-​geneticist, psychometrician and proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, who was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and the [supposedly] inheritance of intelligence. He was a pioneer of eugenics, coining the term 67

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itself in 1883 in a book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (Galton, 1883). He focused on the human mind and psychometrics (the method of measuring mental facilities), concluding that intelligence and various other traits were inherited (Simonton, 2003; Kokkinos, 2021: 181-​231). Over time, this perception produced a series of eugenic measures –​initially in France, and later in the US and Greece (Tzanaki, 2019–​20), especially during the interwar era –​which drew from a sort of scientific analysis that emphasised the necessity on the state’s behalf to locate the ‘anomalous (abnormal or invalid) degenerate, effeminate other’ (Tzanaki, 2018: 9), and that called on educators to become inspectors of the lower classes’ psychic hygiene (Ross, 2015) by measuring, estimating and evaluating any anomaly, physical as well as psychic (Tzanaki, 2019–​20). This had a tremendous impact on the organisation of academic labour and on scholars’ experience, at both a professional and personal level (Holmwood, 2016; Nehring and Kerrigan, 2020), as academics do not stand apart from prevailing [capitalist] norms and conflicting power relations (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004: 17, 458; Nehring and Kerrigan, 2020). Most significantly, however, it enabled the invention of a regime of truth (Foucault, 1991), a eugenic understanding of social injustices masquerading as medical dysfunctions. After the Second World War, this theory did not change significantly. In times of crisis, the explanatory emphasis will always be on heredity and mental ill health (Carr, 2018), with higher education recognised as a ‘common good’, exclusively for the mentally fittest. It is within this backdrop that I discuss the structural and cultural tensions that have unfolded through this (post) liberal ethos and biomedical discourse, concluding with the ways in which this aligns knowledge production and an academia of accelerating (post)liberal governmentality; governing of people’s conduct through positive means rather than sovereign power to formulate the hegemonic ethos and law (Foucault, 2003: 43-​65), sacrificing the historically hard-​won, relative autonomy of academia (see Chapter 2, this book) by intensifying workloads and trimming down the career ranks of tenure positions, replaced by precarious teaching-​only work (see Chapters 2 and 10, this book), producing liberal-​market knowledge and services. I will demonstrate my case on three axes, using the Greek universities as a case study. The first axis will highlight how psychic illness became a structural part of the political and biomedical discourse during the 19th century and interwar years. The primary objective became the measurement of the psychological vulnerability of the lower classes in European societies as well as among the ‘savage’ tribes. This perception did not change significantly, not even with the belief that social conditions played a catalytic role in degeneration, especially after the influence of intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim (1858-​1917). The question remained the same –​how social conditions, as a natural fact, 68

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create anomie among human beings in industrial societies, without ever wondering whether it is the system itself that suffers from anomy (Lagios and Lekka, 2020:109), and, therefore, whether the system is responsible for the mentally and/​or psychologically ‘ill’. Thus, an integral part of the moral panic (Hall et al, 1978) of that time was the emphasis on the state’s effort to mould, with the help of academic experts (psychoanalysts-​pedagogues, sexologists and eugenics during the interwar years; see Promitzer et al, 2011; Kokkinos, 2021: 73-​179) the moral, mental and psychically ‘masculine’ man/​ woman, through an education that would drive the nation towards progress and evolution. In addition, during the interwar years, the restructuring of all public institutions, including universities, and their adaptation to a liberal normality cleared from any Marxist-​communist ideas, emerged as a national, psychic, eugenic necessity (Tzanaki, 2018). The purpose was to improve the ‘quality’ of the student population by eliminating the ‘anomalous libido’ and destroying the influence of the communist ideology. The second axis refers to how this discourse, along the official academic rhetoric, led to the development of a biomedical regime of truth (Foucault, 2006: 235-​239) –​ a corpus of knowledge, techniques and ‘scientific’ discourses –​that attributed poverty, misery, violence, deviation, crime, depression, suicide and mortality to the psychically or morally abnormal other, soon after the Second World War and up to the present day. This has significant consequences for what we discuss here, as a greater crisis of capitalism at this historical point calls for affectively and ethically driven academic labours and discourses in order to build citizen-​liberal ethical capacities for living into better, ‘new eugenic’ social futures (van Camp, 2015). The third and last axis examines how this biomedical regime of truth of psychic eugenics allows the space for a political and patriarchal-​ authoritarian psychic discourse in (post)liberalism, and how this has affected academia, particularly Greek academia, since 2016. I refer to the reproduction of the narrative of moral/​mental/​psychic/​affective (see Chapter 1, this book) and patriarchal normality that capitalism wants to impose on academia and its staff by considering a series of specific (post) liberal/​patriarchal policies for Greek universities alongside broader global transformations, as academics ‘act as capitalists’ in the ‘(post)liberally driven ethos’ (see Chapter 1). Finally, I conclude that the transition of the academy into a capitalist academy is but a symptom of the transition of capitalism into inhuman authoritarian capitalism. As Zola Carr (2018) so succinctly explains, ‘New Liberals’ offered a prescription of harmonious social integration. This vision of society as an integrated organism was to be guaranteed by the ‘emotional adjustment’ and ‘mental health’ of the individual. Its success would be secured through the benevolent rule of technocratic 69

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experts, trained and housed in the nation’s freshly minted university system. (Carr, 2018) The question is whether the academic community can resist the ‘colonisation’ of this (post)liberal capitalist racist and sexist normativity for safe democracy for all.

‘We do not measure, we classify’ Following the Springtime of the Peoples (1848) throughout Europe, French psychiatrist Bénédict Augustin Morel (1809–​73) developed the theory of degeneration. In Morel’s theory, degeneration was synonymous with anything that diverged from the ‘normal’ state. These abnormalities were caused by the non-​evolution of certain humans –​humans who, according to Morel, suffered the psychical and moral consequences of a hereditary predisposition that guided their actions (Morel, 1857: 338), with the result that some people, whom he identified among the primitive tribes and the lower social strata within European societies, remained in a state of ‘mental femininity’ (Tzanaki, 2018). Morel even employed the word ‘negro’ (Morel, 1857: 440, 452), in order to demonstrate this generic type of moral abnormality that degeneration signified, in the sense that within the degenerated being there was an irreversible state of moral decline (Morel, 1857: 338–​40) expressed by attitudes such as idleness, rejection of the army, anarchy and disobedience (Tzanaki, 2018). Similarly, according to Cesare Lombroso (1835–​1909), connected with the idea of degeneration was atavistic characteristics. More specifically, atavistic –​which derives from the Latin word avatus, meaning ‘ancestor’ –​offenders have specific physical, moral, political and mental characteristics resembling those of primitive humans. Thus, offenders are born criminals who are throwbacks to earlier phases of human history. According to Lombroso, ‘born criminals’ (1876) possess an array of stigmata –​corporeal, mental, moral and psychic –​which may be considered putative evidence of their non-​evolution and criminality. These ideas dominated interpretations of Europeans fending against the criminal, atavistic, savage ‘Other’ (Braidotti, 2013) as the source of poverty, illness and violent death, which originated from a false moral evolution. Likewise, psychiatrists, criminologists and forensic medicine experts who surrendered to a sexist, classist, orientalist and racist discourse depended heavily on an imaginary battle between the ‘normal’, mentally male human races and the effeminate, immoral, dangerous human subspecies (Olson, 2008: 229–​50; Doron, 2015). However, after having dominated the medical world for over half a century, the theory of degeneration gradually lost credibility by the end of the 19th century as Mendelian genetics, focusing now on chromosomes, 70

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were introduced and imposed as a legitimate science of the innate and the acquired (Pinell, 2016). The Darwinian as well as Mendelian school of thinking concluded that the combined effect of heredity and environment of different living conditions in different regions of the globe had resulted in an irreversible tendency of human chromosomes to deviate from the primitive type in two ways: a normal one and a pathological, or abnormal, one. The theory that chromosomes defined subjectivity and its capacities meant that the theory of heredity was redefined, with experts once again looking for any anomaly in the immoral bios 1 of lower strata. Thus, while most scientists rejected the theory of degeneration in the 1920s and 1930s, its racist and sexist connotations did not disappear. The perpetuation of the human species could only be made possible through the reproduction of human psychology in the ‘normal’ way, being, in fact, a patriarchal way, which meant measuring and distinguishing life between the normal and the effeminate (immoral) abnormal. American psychiatrists Henry H. Goddard (1866–​1957) and Théodore Simon (1873–​1961), using Simon-​Binet’s scale (Alfred Binet, 1857–​1911), invented the measurement scale of intelligence (1905) with which they intended to identify the range of ‘abnormal’ children (Chapuis-​Ménard, 2007; Klein, 2016a, 2016b). In The Kallikak Family (1912), Goddard developed his ideas on degeneration, the maleficent root of which he located in the ‘immoral mother’, while referring also to his vision of a society of meritocracy. In short, the cause of the crisis as well as of the defeat in a world war was the immoral mother and her mentally vulnerable, non-​competitive offspring, who lived in sloth, delinquency and violence, hampering the progress of a society of excellence –​according to the leading biomedical discourse in the US and Europe (Wetzell, 20l3). Within this framework, Goddard divided people with ‘disabilities’ into three broad categories: the idiot, the imbecile and the moron (Califano and Beebe, 1977). For Goddard, ‘morons’ posed a serious threat to society, as he identified a link between low intelligence rates and criminal behaviour in his book The Criminal Imbecile: An Analysis of Three Remarkable Murder Cases in 1915. Moreover, in 1916, Lewis Madison Terman (1877–​1956), following Goddard, developed the Simon-​Binet test of intelligence, and allowed for ‘scientific’ diagnosis of high-​g rade defectives for the protection of society (White, 2000: 6; White, 2006: 161–​98; Greenwood, 2017). Terman, in his standardised test, also included adults, aiming at a more accurate detection of this abnormal subjectivity (Sakellariou, 1935; Chapman, 1988; Klein, 2016a). In other words, the test, according to Terman, would result ‘in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-​mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crimes, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency’ (White, 2000: 7). By employing the term ‘intelligence quotient’ introduced in 1912 by German psychologist William Stern (1871–​1938), in order to describe the correlation between psychic 71

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age and chronological age, Terman multiplied this quotient –​shortened to ‘IQ’ –​by 100, so as to avoid fractions. In this way, he coined the first IQ test (Klein, 2016a; Klein, 2016b). The scale proved so successful that it became not only the template for the measurement of intelligence, but also for all the other psychological tests that then had to correlate with it in order to establish their credibility (Klein, 2016a: 20). From that point on, IQ tests would contribute to the reproduction of the liberal thinking of the time that blamed the immoral, natural-​born criminal, the effeminate, abnormal ‘Other’ by birth, and not patriarchal capitalism, for poverty, beggary, vagrancy, violence and wretchedness. It is exactly in this context that sterilisation programmes would become a reality in 1924 in the US, where it is estimated that the sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ resulted in approximately 60,000 involuntary surgeries (Straley, 2014). Moreover, in 1936, Terman, with Catharine Cox Miles (1890–​1984), published a 10-​year research report of the psychological differences between the sexes. The goal was to define masculinity and femininity more accurately, and to obtain quantitative measurements (Terman and Miles, 1936) through developing a test. Since patriarchal gender segregation was considered a necessary pre-​ condition for the development of civilisation (Satzinger, 2009), patriarchal affective capitalism, conditioned by European cultural habits and liberal ethos, emerged as the absolute cure for the ills of humanity. Obviously, this discourse allowed class inequalities to remain hidden under the pretext of excellence, while all human life was evaluated according to liberal-​patriarchal Western European standards of human morality. The Stanford-​Binet intelligence test on the other hand, was adjusted to fit the Greek context by eminent figures of the pedagogy such as Nikolaos Exarchopoulos (1874–​1960), who applied it to pupils in one of his studies in 1931, intending for the ‘cultivation of moral, intellectual and economic abilities of our youth’ (Tzanaki, 2019–​20). The aim was to integrate the psychographic method into schools in order to identify the ‘abnormal’ child (Sakellariou, 1935: 58; Sakellariou, 1924). The conclusion was evident for the experts of the time (Chapman, 1988: 58; White, 2006),–​‘isolating the “subnormal” children –​“the absent-​minded, the tardy, the sickly, the unruly, the liars, thieves and cowards” –​would free the teacher to work with the normal children’ (Sakellariou, 1924: 10, 24). In this context, Eleftherios Venizelos’ government inaugurated the Experimental Schools in Athens and Thessaloniki (1929) Law 4376 for the ‘excellent’, with the help of legislators and experts who also proposed the creation of special schools for ‘abnormal’ children in order to combat the ‘inferior will’, which would undermine the nation and its healthy reproduction. The University of Athens was a mere illustration of this theory. 72

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The Greek university against historical-​materialist thinking The University of Athens, founded in 1837,2 was originally intended to support the national aspirations of the country, and was exclusively reserved for male students only, before opening its doors to female students in 1890. Initially, the university institution appealed to the demand for free and uninhibited admission to higher education, with a high school diploma the typical criterion for access to higher education. Over the course of the century, the number of tenure positions proliferated, and a ‘distinct community’ was formed. However, after 1862, entry examinations were introduced, and among this new indirect disciplinary measure (of entry) was the written examination process: combining surveillance and regulatory certifications, it extracted the cognitive ‘truth’ from individuals (Gavroglou et al, 2014). In 1889, discussions and measures to reorient education towards more ‘practical’ training intensified, leading to the creation of schools of ‘scientific orientation’, producing scientific knowledge for practical, vocational use (Kyprianos, 1996). The university of Athens was under the direct supervision of the Ministry of Education throughout the 19th century, while faculties were unable to hire their own staff. The university institution was penalised for its low standard of studies, and in 1910, a wave of staff cuts followed. This led, as a direct consequence, to the dismissal of 20 of the university’s 57 professors (Gavroglou et al, 2014: 15). Nonetheless, in 1911, the law for tenure recruitment was passed, which granted permission to universities to retain sole responsibility for renewing their teaching staff (Gavroglou et al, 2014: 15). As typically mentioned in the Greek literature, ‘with the autonomy provided by the 1911 laws, the university was now able to reproduce its faculty, and thus its ideology’ (Gavroglou et al, 2014: 15). Moreover, the practice of entrance examinations was introduced by Decree 2905 (1922). After the first few months of 1927, the gradually growing student body became very active in forming communist clusters within the university. The need to protect students from communist ideas then reinforced the articulation of a paternalistic discourse on behalf of university authorities, which was soon associated with repressive practices. With articles in the press, professors of the Faculty of Philosophy, such as Konstantinos Logothetis and Adamantios Adamantiou, and Professor of Medicine and Rector Nikolaos Alivizatos, warned of the threat that communism posed to ethnic language and the nation, praising the state for its decision to oppose ‘ethnocidal ideas’ [sic] while assuring that the Faculty of Philosophy would be a ‘willing exponent’ in the desired goal (Gavroglou et al, 2014: 250). The University of Athens had already become one of the bastions of anti-​communism in the interwar period, from the early years of the 1920s, and action against communist students was taken with the connivance, or rather, the instigation, of the state apparatus. 73

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In March 1927, according to the newspaper Rizospastis, the Ministry of Education issued a confidential circular to all public educational institutions recommending the strict supervision of any communist movement among the youth, and proposing the organisation of a series of lectures against communism. In the same year, according to the same newspaper, the Senate decided to financially support the publication of George Fessopoulos’ book, Communism in Action (Ο Κομμουνισμός εν τη πράξει) and recommended that students read it. At the same time, some professors invited students to their offices to admonish them, with some even going so far as to orchestrate their prosecution by the police (Gavroglou et al, 2014: 250). The role of ‘invigilator’ of ideology at the University was assumed by professors of the Faculty of Philosophy, Adamantios Adamantiou, Emmanuel Pezopoulos, Herricos Skassis and Konstantinos Logothetis, with Adamantiou assuming the leading role in a pact with the Rectorate, the Ministry and the Special Security Office for actions against communism. The state itself, with its interventions from time to time in the organisation of University institutions, the selection of teaching staff and the functioning of higher education (tuition fees, the conduct of examinations ), intervened decisively in the coordination of higher education in a political, classist and sexist fashion. The aim was to cast society’s ills as an individual’s failure due to the (supposedly) morally degenerate, mentally and psychically ill effeminate communist insanity to achieve able-bodiedness and mind-bodiedness, instead of including discrimination and societal factors in this failure. Thus, not coincidentally, the bourgeois state adopted a series of legal measures for the protection of family that expressed in a clear way a shift towards the bourgeois patriarchal family and the patriarchal liberal ethos. In 1929, Venizelos’ government introduced the Idionymon (1929) –​ Law No 4229/​24 July –​with the new practice ‘idionymon’ (ιδιώνυμο) aimed at establishing a new order centred round a well-​disciplined society for its regulation against the ‘moral threat’ of ‘those morally degenerate communists’ (Tzanaki, 2019a), persecution that would essentially end in 1974 (Panourgia, 2009). At the same time (Lemontzoglou, 2020; Tzanaki, 2022:141-​229), after 1930, when the workers’ movement was strengthened and empowered with the presence of refugees from Asia Minor and a series of strikes, the biomedical discourse reiterated the menace of the mentally, psychically effeminate, abnormal Other among the lower social classes. It is also within this backdrop that university entry examinations were finally established in 1926, and in 1930, the numerus clausus method was imposed based on the argument of the social risks entailed in the overproduction of scientists. In this context, measures were hardened not only by direct police arbitrariness, but also indirectly –​first, by impeding access to higher education; second, with the persecution and marginalisation of groups and 74

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individuals who adopted communist ideas; and third, by employing terms such as ‘exceptionally low intelligence’ (Califano and Beebe, 1977: 13). In this context, with a discourse on excellence and an enormous campaign against the negative and dehumanising image of the mentally/​morally ‘old world’, the regime of Ioannis Metaxas (1936–​41) undertook the moral reform of young people and of the scientific community in even more authoritarian and paternalistic terms. After the 1930s, the roots of any social crisis were located in the individual’s libido. This discourse allowed the continued crisis to be engineered by the elite, university-​trained social and political order technocrats. The belief that the unconscious effeminate libido shaped the individual’s psyche mainly provided the basis for the patriarchal biomedical thinking and political praxis in Greece. The best tactic for social control was no longer confrontations of blood theories but changing individuals’ libido through patriarchal psychic eugenics (Tzanaki, 2021; Tzanaki, 2022:185-​202). Accordingly, Metaxas’ regime took all the necessary measures to engineer society itself through scientific eugenics principles. The creation of the National Youth Organisation (Εθνική Οργάνωσις Νεολαίας, EON), an association that was supposed to have been endowed with ‘superior will’, was organised in 1936 by Metaxas. It emerged as a contrast to the School for Abnormal and Retarded Children, (Σχολείον Ανωμάλων και Καθυστερημένων Παιδιών) created in 1937 by Metaxas (Imvrioti, 1939), under the guidance of the dominant biomedical discourse of the time, which argued for the necessity of such foundations, since abnormal, disobedient children had to be enclosed in particular educational institutions. Such a classification was carried on the discourse regarding the distinction between superior and inferior life (zoi), furnishing a solid foundation for an authoritarian control programme over education designed to ‘normalise’ beings into liberal, ‘ethically civilised’ humans. This discourse did not change significantly in the following years. At the same time, the language of difference, eugenics, hierarchy and mental health as the cause of social ills became part of the education and organising of relations among members of academia –​as was still the case in 2016, when, in times of crisis the problem became embodied in the idea of the ‘effeminate, unfit academic’.

‘I fear that nobody is going to take us very seriously if we continue to suggest that war is imminent because fathers hate their sons and want to kill them’3 At the end of the Second World War, the prevailing psychiatric, forensic, psychoanalytic and criminological discourse focused on the need to eliminate the mentally and psychically disturbed/​abnormal life. At the same time, the 75

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emphasis placed on the IQ test gradually led to the conclusion that the IQ was a stable characteristic of the individual (White, 2000: 21). With this idea becoming an international trend, an entire discourse was developed through which the recoding of life according to the IQ of the subject became central, assuming, thus, that subjects’ lives exist independently of class, racial and gender capitalist hierarchies. As Sheldon White highlights, ‘what brought [IQ] it to life was not the findings of scientific research but, first, speculative efforts to account for human differences in evolutionary terms’ (White, 2000: 33). Within this background, the Marshall Plan, allegedly designed to protect Greece from a communist invasion and, by consequence, from an effeminate communist psychological degradation (Tzanaki and Tsea, 2021), led to the fall of the Greek government with the proclamation of military law and a patriarchal order imposed. The military junta passed a law for the direct appointment of academic staff in universities (Karamanolakis, 2015; Souvlis and Gounari, 2019), and during its entire seven-​year regime, suspended all civil liberties, using imprisonment, torture, political violence and state oppression against men and politically active women, ‘as a vehicle for re-​ appropriating gender roles, power hierarchies, sexual stereotypes and social norms’ (Stefatos, 2012: 4), and the exile of political opponents. Finally, the fall of the dictatorship following the 1973 student uprising in the School of Law and the National Polytechnic School of Athens (Kornetis, 2008; Souvlis and Gounari, 2019) introduced a whole new reality in which the leftish youth began to play a major role within universities (Papadogiannis, 2009; Souvlis and Gounari, 2019). The fall of the Greek military junta, the legalisation of the Communist Party of Greece (Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδας, KKE), which had been outlawed since 1947, and its participation in the elections of November 1974, put an end to a cycle of repression that took the form of widespread demand for modernisation along the lines of Western civic standards (Voglis, 2015; Souvlis and Gounari, 2019). These standards also included the emergence of education as a fundamental state obligation towards the ‘ethical, intellectual, professional and physical formation of Greeks … and their shaping into free and responsible citizens’, according to the declaration of Article 16 of the Greek Constitution (Souvlis and Gounari, 2019: 4). However, in 1978, Kostantinos Karamanlis, elected with ND, attempted to pass bill 815, ‘which was initially perceived by professors as a threat to their individual and academic status. The bill, ‘while not eliminating the institution of the “chair” (edra in Greek), weakened the authority of the chair-​holders by grouping them into academic departments and by converting junior lecturers into employees of the departments rather than of each chair-​holder individually’ (Souvlis and Gounari, 2019: 4). The law eventually did not

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pass, due to a 100-​day strike by students and junior academics in the spring of 1980 (Souvlis and Gounari, 2019). In 1982, the socialist government of PASOK (Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα, Panhellenic Socialist Movement) passed Law 1268/​82, ‘On the Structure and Operation of the Institutions of Higher Education’ (Souvlis and Gounari, 2019: 4). The law abolished the chair system and passed the handling of academic and administrative matters solely to the newly formed academic departments (Prokou, 2010; Souvlis and Gounari, 2019: 5). However, as George Souvlis and Panayota Gounari (2019) so precisely demonstrated, the most important aspect of the Law 1268 was the: strengthening of academic freedom, the rightful access of all citizens to public and tuition-​free university education, and the obligation on behalf of the state to fund higher education institutions. These principles, codified in article 16 of the Greek Constitution, are still in place despite the multiple aggressive attempts to amend them since the 1990s. (Souvlis and Gounari, 2019: 5) Moreover, in 1983, the new Family Law, introduced by PASOK, jolted Greece from the existing patriarchal legal framework regarding marriage, divorce and child custody. In particular, it abolished the institution of the dowry, introduced consensual divorce, granted women the right to maintain their family surnames and guaranteed the principle of an equal division of assets among spouses. However, after the Greek government signed the Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies (MEFP), and after 2015 and Syriza’s victory, there was a radical change in Greek politics and society. Indeed, under pressure from the supranational entities, the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) and European Commission, and the Memoranda with the European Central Bank (ECB), European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Souvlis and Gounari, 2019:8), the establishment of a (post)liberal norm in universities finally materialised through a series of austerity measures, the implementation of reforms and the restoration of Greece’s credibility through the liberalisation of academic staff and society in general. In search of more flexibility, adaptation and competitiveness, this trajectory had catastrophic consequences on the Greek Universities and its staff, as well as in Greek society at large, as, in reality, as a result of the deep crisis that Greece was going through, the burden was again transferred to the shoulders of the internal invisible enemy –​the lazy, mentally vulnerable Greek academic man and, more than often, woman. The political discourse employed medical metaphors where politics and science assumed the role of the ‘social doctor’ against the supposed patient, the mentally, effeminate, immoral other. Τhe practical outcome of this reasoning was that while the human cost of austerity 77

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was reaching tragic levels, a proliferating idea centring round the individual and their mental capacities was persistently provided as the par excellence explanatory motif of personal (academic) failure as well as the nation’s failure to follow the EU’s progress and evolution patterns.

(Post)liberalism –​patriarchal psychic normality and academia In 2016 the Syriza government announced the Postdoctoral Researchers Support Act as well as the Academic Teaching Experience for Young [Early-​Career] Scientists scheme, implemented by ELIDEK (Tzanaki, 2018, 2019a). However, while initially, there was no time limit, in 2017 (Tzanaki, 2018: 9), both initiatives introduced a new particularly discriminative prerequisite: ‘Applications ten years past the acquisition of the doctoral status will not be taken into consideration’ (Tzanaki, 2018: 9). Therefore, doctorate holders beyond this benchmark are literally excluded from the whole procedure, regardless the number of publications or other academic credentials. Τhis requirement did not appear in the first draft of the aforementioned programme in 2016. Indeed, after Syriza’s electoral victory in January 2015, the efforts to liberalise the university in a country where national and economic sovereignty had been lost to the rule of the MEFP intensified. At the same time, and deliberately failing to specify in any of the above drafts the term ‘academically young’, in reality creates a problematic grey zone between the ‘healthy’ –​eligible –​and the ‘unhealthy’ –​non-​eligible subject, who, in this case, is defined by the restrictive term that requires applicants to have acquired doctoral status no more than 10 years prior to the day of their application. By distinguishing between the normal ‘young’ and the non-​normal ‘non-​ young’ academic researchers/​students, the state effectively manages to pass this crisis onto the rather ‘mature candidates’ shoulders. It is an interpretation of maturity that clearly persists in blaming individual responsibility and its [supposedly] unsuccessful academic lifestyle, instead of raising the increased class and gender inequalities that emerged under the pressure of memorandum policies imposed on the Greek economy since 2010. Law 4009/​2011 was introduced at a time when a significant part of Greek society was close to or below poverty level –​in 2012, 34.6 per cent of the population was facing poverty, the Greek welfare state was on the verge of collapse, and there were massive layoffs and violations of labour rights. This signified the beginning of a new managerial model, completely against the idea of a public and free-​for-​all higher education. Universities are now facing the expectation to seek out private funding funding (impose tuition fees), even for the undergraduate level of studies. Considering the demand for transparency, accountability and effectiveness as part of the disciplinary agenda which seeks to make amends for the ‘excesses’ 78

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of the previous years, both the Postdoctoral Researchers Support Act and the scheme for Academic Teaching Experience for Young [Early-​Career] Scientists have applied the restrictive term4. Αcademics are now called upon to endorse to this new and particular kind of academic normality as long as they aspire to a tenure position (Morrissey, 2013). In light of these new developments, the underlying premise of this expectation, as any discourse, is the intention to lead to governmental policies for the ‘protection’ of society against perpetually new others. However, all it does is inflate inequalities produced by (post)liberalism and incorporate protective measures for the younger generation which is at an imaginary level the healthy part of the academia. Thus, it is through a racist, sexist, ageist and in short, patriarchal interpretation of subjectivity that the (post) liberal power puts forward elaborate policies, based on the moral, psychic and mental ‘reform’ of the populace, and its academic counterparts in particular. Such an interpretation is constantly rhetorically evoked, creating mental panics against the immorally and mentally criminal other, who allegedly pose a serious threat to society as a whole. Thus, it is no accident that in January 2021, campaigns run by ND were full of representations of drug dealing, vandalism, intimidation, theft, beatings and depreciation –​an entire discourse on supposedly ‘dangerous students’ suspected for being involved in criminal activities. Likewise, in a country where universities’ funding has been significantly reduced, tenure position salaries have been reduced by 30–​40 per cent. While the opening of over 700 academic positions, according to Souvlis and Gounari, was postponed in 2016 (Souvlis and Gounari, 2019: 11), Law 4009//​11 opened the gate to universities mainstreaming with EU standards. It is within this framework that the Greek Parliament, following the August 2019 abolition of the constitutionally protected institution of university asylum, passed the new law for educational reform on 11 February 2021. These new measures include the constitution of a special police force for Greek universities, a change to the system of student admissions, and finally, further curtailing of the timeframe of studentship, with some exceptions made only for working students and those with health problems. These provisions have been introduced at a time when the economic crisis is weighing heavily on the shoulders of the lower social classes, and on top of that, the state, similarly to the interwar period, is constructing the abnormally dangerous, internal enemy by extracting human violence from individual violent episodes in order to highlight the ‘danger’ and to introduce the need to restore order through strict policing, at any cost. In this spirit, an incident, mostly known as ‘The attack on the Dean’ of the University of Athens that occurred in October 2020, emerged as a pivotal point for implementing the Education Reform Act in 2021. 79

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The Dean of the Business and Economics Department at the University of Athens, Dimitris Bourantonis, was captured by a group of activists and had his photograph taken holding a sign that read ‘Solidary with the Squats’. The group was described as a group of anarchists who had vandalised his office, equipment and walls with anarchist symbols. Consequently, this incident occupied a central position on the discourse regarding the perils it communicates. Referring to the incident and to similar incidents in the past, Michalis Chrysochoidis, Minister of the Citizen Protection Bureau, at that time, stated that measures included in the Act were necessary as they would protect students and faculty staff ‘from the violent acts of certain groups’ (Chrysochoidis, 2021). This is what this discourse sought –​a cartography of the internal enemy –​ the menacing person responsible for the abuse of the Dean –​and to satisfy the demands of social and moral order. In this discourse, political identity is necessary. This criminal being stigmatised as ‘the danger’ through a political categorical ascription (that is, the anarchist) that renders them ‘dangerous’ extends beyond the academic sphere. Thus, the false narrative of anarchy within universities in our days is created in a context of social inequality that constructs increasingly inhuman conditions of repression. This narrative, in fact, goes back to the projection of a ‘sick’ society, extending as far as allowing entrance to the police to higher education, since the predominant demand for progress is the moral, physical and mental patriarchal ‘reform’ of the populace, a society of competition and not solidarity, a society that reads discrimination and hierarchies as social justice in the name of evolution and progress. In this way, post-​liberal power manages to conceal the reality, as Souvlis and Gounari explain in their article ‘State and universities in Greece, 1974–​2018’ –​that between 2010 and 2018, 12 rounds of tax increases were introduced, alongside spending cuts and reforms, triggering local riots and demonstrations nationwide (Souvlis and Gounari, 2019). In addition, public spending on public education in Greece has decreased by 40 per cent, between 2010 and 2018 (Souvlis and Gounari, 2019: 2). Moreover, as Souvlis and Gounari underline, the restructuring of higher education has not been limited to Southern Europe, but is the tip of the iceberg in the current European landscape, where higher education is being reformed according to (post)liberal standards imposed by governments, meaning that access by the lower social strata is now virtually impossible (Souvlis and Gounari, 2019). Thus, as Maria Vidali points out referring to the Greek reality, we find ourselves confronted with a series of governmental initiatives ‘that have as their axis … the link between the university and the market and thus the degradation of any institution that does not have a direct financial effect’ (Vidali, 2021: 2), while universities are en route to privatisation and students 80

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transform into clients. Indeed, (post)liberalism seems to have succeeded, right through to the myth of personal evolution, to a deplorable verdict by asserting that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity that cannot be augmented (that is, is specified by a psychic/​mental IQ), and thus of a definite incapacity to progress. Education in our days is translated into practical historical terms, that even the conditions of survival in industrial society through work require a degree of intelligence, (post)liberal ethos and leadership. Differences in ‘intelligence’ determine ‘differences in success, so that intelligence [becomes] increasingly a recognised condition of upward mobility and economic and social security, and hence [rises] to the top of the scale of human values’ (Califano and Beebe, 1977: 13). Nowhere in all this is it recorded how the sexist, racist, class, hierarchical, capitalist discourse creates human taxonomies. Accordingly, the thinking mind emerges as the measure of human value. After all, it is no coincidence that along with all these changes in education we witness the ghost of pro-​life campaigns emerging, while, on 21 May 2021, a new law introduced compulsory joint custody of children following acrimonious divorce, where experts explained that in families where children grew up with only the mother, there was a greater risk of them developing delinquent behaviour (Tzanaki, 2021). The great end of all this discourse is to minimise any class-​struggle differences by providing an apparatus peculiarly adapted to the subjects’ capacities according to their class, gender, sexuality, race, religion, ‘intelligence’ and ‘political and mental DNA’. The recent ND’s discourse on public education takes shape along the lines of a developing capital-​patriarchal driven society away from anarchism, effeminacy and chaos. After all, Greece is not alone in these discriminative agendas that put the political and mental DNA back to the forefront, and frame the narrative of progress around war metaphors against mental and neurological mental disorders, as well as against a more materialistic perception of things. A similar capital-​patriarchal interpretation can be witnessed in France, for example, in our days. The ‘Great Capitalist Reset’ In February 2021, Emmanuel Macron advanced a discourse against what is known as ‘Islamo-​gauchisme’ (‘Islamo-​leftism’), linking Islamist extremists to left-​leaning intellectuals and to a recent spate of terrorism. Macron even claimed that some French citizens of Arab or African descent had introduced theories to the academy that were both alien and institutionally race-​blind to French society through a post-​colonial or anti-​colonial discourse. Along these lines, Vidal announced a probe into ‘Islamo-​leftism’ in French universities, accusing a coterie of left-​wing academics of ‘always looking at everything through the prism of their will to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the 81

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enemy’ (quoted in Tharoor, 2021: 1). Similarly, there is the recent example of Denmark, where, on 1 June 2021, ‘the Danish Parliament adopted a position against “Excessive activism in certain research environments”. … The position states that “The Danish Parliament expects that the university leadership ensures that self-​regulation of scientific practice is continuously paying off” ’ (Atgender, 2021: 1). This violence is therefore not the result of pure chance, but takes the framework of human taxonomy (inferior–​superior) and the dominance of excellence as a necessary condition for the catalysis of economic crisis and the formation of a ‘new society’ that will emerge after the pandemic, without those (psychically/​mentally/​politically abnormal) subjects that project a vision other than that of capitalism. This interpretation takes shape along the lines of ‘The Great Reset’. The ‘Great Capitalist Transformation’, an initiative of the World Economic Forum (WEF), created in June 2020 through its Strategic Intelligence, does not aim at global sustainability or ‘social justice’. Instead, it seeks to confirm the doctrine of capital within a higher state of technological reality, which, in turn, requires more and more policing (Stoukogeorgos, 2020) –​a development, the practical results of which we can see in France in Sonia Herzbrun-​Dayan, Michael Löwy and Eleni Varikas’ article, ‘Max Weber victim de violences policières’. They demonstrate how the French state ‘legitimates monopoly of violence’ by grossly falsifying the sociologist and political theorist Max Weber. Referring to observations made by journalist David Dufresne, the three writers conclude that under the present Macron government, police intervention had resulted in ‘three deaths, five hands torn off, 28 dazed and 341 seriously injured in the head [under Macron]. Such violence has been unprecedented since 1962 and by any other right-​wing, centre or left-​wing government of the past; nothing like this has ever been seen before’ (Herzbrun-​Dayan et al, 2020: 155–​65; see also Hall et al, 2013). This also comes with a dominant biomedical discourse that, alongside (neo)liberal power, seeks to find ‘objective indisputable’ answers for learning difficulties, for example, in the brains of the subjects and not in the inhuman hierarchical classifications that capitalism imposes on human lives. Specifically, in 2018, the French Minister of Education Jean-​Michel Blanquer announced the constitution of a Scientific Committee encumbered to study student learning processes, under the supervision of neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, a professor at the Collège de France (Sgherri and Trevert, 2018). Almost at the same time, researchers in Canada and France shifted their attention to studying factors influencing educational effectiveness and optimisation of memory processes, and ways to transfer knowledge from neuropsychology and neuroscience to teachers. In this way, state power shows utter contempt towards social distinctions such as class, which have proven to 82

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be inhibiting factors to learning progress, by putting under the microscope the brain capacities of students –​in other words, putting forward individual responsibility against class. Going even further, in 2020, Blanquer, in order to promote measures for improved teaching methods, pointed towards the discoveries of the brain specialist Dehaene. The result was the 130-​page guide for teachers, which has been published and distributed to schools throughout France, thus denoting the beginning of a new era, since, with the help of these measurements, neuroscience places itself at the service of education (Ropert, 2018) under the pretext of individual responsibility (Champy, 2021).

Conclusion: decolonising academia In this chapter, I have tried to capture the complexity of a (post)liberal applicable policy as part of the patriarchal rhetoric, according to which the imaginary, immoral degenerate constitutes a dysfunctional, mentally effeminate being, unable to mature, responsible for and prone to failure. This construction echoes the (post)liberal view that identifies an anarchist effeminate menace in human nature and society as an organism, among specific individuals/​groups, as the source of failure, instead of considering the economic and social crises resulting from capitalist patriarchal class struggle relations and inhuman hierarchies, causing social, human and economic deterioration. With inequality firmly established as the core stigma in personal psychic germplasm, two problems are now paramount on a global scale: how to produce excellence and ensure obedience among academics, while the university as an institution is becoming more entrepreneurial –​an institution where the overriding objective is not knowledge, but rather the ‘competitiveness of the university as an end in itself’ (see Chapter 3, this book). This falls in line with the Greek government’s current agenda and the needs of the capital economy, in the ideology of which working for offering knowledge as a common good has become a thing of the past. In this way academics learn to be competitive, stand by the rules of the patriarchal authoritarian game, and furthermore, they remain silent. It is what we read as academicity, a performance (Massumi, 2002; Bjerg and Staunaes, 2011; Brunila 2016; see also Chapter 10, this book) to act within the growing lines of competitiveness and quest for survival as economic and moral agents of the (post) liberal ethos. Similarly, ‘in terms of social justice, higher education has continued to overlook not only women’s roles as shapers of the academy but also intersections of race, gender and sexuality’ (Brunila and Ylöstalo, 2013: 456; Brunila, 2016) –​and, I will add, disability. Since injustice, inequality and power, even among community members, have become the academic normality, no one dares to speak out. So even the term ‘equality’ has a hard time finding a place. But this is affective capitalism: ‘Affective capitalism 83

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means ambivalences, social isolation, heightened anxiety … as well as limited possibilities to speak and to be heard’ (Chapter 6, this book). More than ever, academics are required to produce a (post)liberal ethos-​ knowledge-​truth obviously beyond Frankfurt School thinkers, Marxist and Foucauldian analyses of power (Cole and Ferrarese, 2018). According to Judith Butler (1990: 128–​42), the subject is defined as man or as woman through performativity (see Chapter 9, this book). Therefore, the subject is an effect rather than a cause. By paraphrasing Butler, we can say that academics are an effect and not a cause, in the sense that their identity is an effect of repeated acts on the ‘body’ and ethos of a patriarchal liberal regime of truth, and this identity is a category that results from the effect of institutions, practices and discourses, and, moreover, of a patriarchal regime of truth. In other words, as long as the norms that regulate the world are defined by binarism, normal–​abnormal, academics are called to perform through the patriarchal, colonialist (post)liberal regime of truth. What occurred in 2017 (Tzanaki, 2018: 9) in Greece reflects sophisticated governance in order to control academic freedom. Precarious teaching-​only work becomes the rule within a concept where any failure is a problem of the individual’s ‘mental health’ and fashion of lifestyle. However, this has been achieved precisely because a patriarchal, binary regime of truth casts the blame for all crises on the shoulders of the ‘most vulnerable’. The memorandums turned Greece into a race field for restructures that throw academics into a (post) liberal-​affective turmoil. Their existence is gradually becoming dependent on short-​contract positions in universities, which, in turn, become increasingly dependent on external funding. Likewise, knowledge and the production of knowledge are transformed from a common good to a capitalist good. Academic knowledge as superior knowledge is necessary for the development of capitalism and the new era of (post)liberalism, while (post) liberalism needs obedient technocratic experts trained and housed in the university system (Carr, 2018), in this historical era of extreme capitalist crisis and pandemic. Likewise, in our days we now see more and more often the production of material of the concept of society as an organism, an organism that guarantees harmonious social integration for the fittest, as if ‘this vision of society as an integrated organism [is] to be guaranteed by the “emotional adjustment” and “mental health” of the individual’ (Carr, 2018), which leaves aside any human subspecies that do not fit into the pattern. (Post) liberal academia, against this background, devotes itself to maintaining its performance; thus, universities fight to protect and secure intellectual property rights and patents (see Chapter 5, this book), while there is increasing competition and control among members of the academic community in a struggle for the most resilient. It is indicative that ‘even in the Nordic higher education systems, with their relatively high levels of 84

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public funding and stable employment, academic subjects experience the pressures of global, (post)liberal education policy with demands for efficiency and performativity’ (Chapter 6, this book). However, in order to resist such an authoritarian patriarchal governance (Foucault, 1991, 2003, 2014) that takes the form of global governance through a moral (post) liberal economy (see Chapter 7, this book), we need a queer materialist theory, a theory that struggles against (post) liberal normativity and ‘mental illness’ as the cause of all social ills (Deleuze and Guattari,1980), one that is able to imagine another kind of university and academia, where academics are not liberal entrepreneurs (see Chapter 11, this book). This intervention is not a heterotopia (Foucault, 1967) but another way of imagining life, society, humanity and sameness instead of difference and taxonomy, and, moreover, knowledge as a common good. This implies a new concept in European history and philosophy, which refuses binary, patriarchal oppositions, which rejects human taxonomy and connotations of power, leadership and continuous control. It would, instead, respect the difference that ‘rather than being exterminated, is primarily transformed into sameness’ (Santos, 2014). We need an academy open to society like a library (see Chapter 5, this book), where knowledge as the common good is for all, regardless of sex, class, race, disability, sexuality and gender. This is possible. Venceremos! Notes As Michel Foucault explains in Greek: ‘there are two verbs that we translate with one and the same word: “to live”. You have the verb zēn, which means: ... the quality of being alive. ... Then you have the word bioūn [bios] ... which is related to the way of living this life’ (Foucault, 2017: 34). That is, the way one conducts life, in the light of the fact that is linked to the way that science can describe it as moral or immoral; the immoral bios is considered to be the art of living that leads to disease and violent death, according to the principles of eugenism. 2 The University of Athens was founded on 1837 by King Otto and was named in his honour Othonian University). It was the first university in the Greek state, as well as in the Balkans and the Eastern Meditarranean region, at that time. 3 During the International Psychoanalytical Association Congress in Vienna in 1971, this comment, made by German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, referred to the ongoing war in Vietnam (Herzog, 2017: 4). 4 According to which, as I mentioned above, applicants must have acquired their PhD within no more than 10 years prior to the day of their application. 1

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Nehring, D. and Kerrigan, D. (2020) Imagining Society: The Case of Sociology, Bristol: Bristol University Press. Olson, R. (2008) Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-​Century Europe, Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Panourgia, N. (2009) Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State, New York: Fordham University Press. Papadogiannis, N. (2009) ‘From coherence to fragments: “1968” and the making of youth politicisation in Greece in the 1970s’, Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories, 9: 76–​92. https://e​ journa​ ls.epubl​ ishi​ ng.ekt.gr/​ index.php/​histor​ein/​arti​cle/​view/​2114/​1954 Pinell, P. (2016) ‘Genèe et récemption de la théorie de la dégénérescence’, Revue européenne des sciences sociales/​European Journal of Social Sciences, 54(1): 183–​200. Prokou, E. (2010) ‘University reform in Greece: a shift from intrinsic to extrinsic values’, in D. Mattheou (ed) Changing Educational Landscapes, Educational Policies, Schooling Systems and Higher Education –​A Comparative Perspective, New York: Springer, pp 59–​74. Promitzer, C., Trubeta, S. and Turda, M. (eds) (2011) Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, Budapest: CEU Press. Ropert, P. (2018) ‘Cinq idées que defend Stanislas Dehaene, l’éminence grise de Jean-​Michel Blanquer’, France Culture, 12 January. www.france​ cult​ure.fr/​scien​ces/​stanis​las-​deha​ene-​en-​cinq-​idees Ross, K. (2015) Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, London: Verso. Sakellariou, G. (1924) Συμβολή εις την Ελληνική Εκπαίδευσιν [Contribution to Greek Education], Athens: Ek tou typografeiou Thanou Tzavella. Sakellariou, G. (1935) Ψυχολογία του παιδός [Child Psychology], Athens: Vagourdi Papachristou. Santos, C. (2014) ‘Academia without walls? Multiple belongings and the implications of feminist and LGBT/​Queer political engagement’, in Tayloe, Y. (ed) The Entrepreneurial University: Public Engagements, Intersecting Impacts, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 9–​26. Satzinger, H. (2009) ‘Racial purity, stable genes, and sex difference: gender in the making of genetic concepts by Richard Goldschmidt and Fritz Lenz, 1916 to 1936’, in S. Heim, C. Sachse and M. Walker (eds) The Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 145–​70. Sgherri, M.-​S. and Trevert, E. (2018) ‘Et bientôt la ‘neuropédagogie?’, Le Point, 13 May. www.lepo​int.fr/​soci​ete/​et-​bien​tot-​la-​neu​rope​dago​gie-​13-​ 05-​2018-​221​8016​_​23.php Simonton, D.K. (2003) ‘Francis Galton’s hereditary genius: its place in the history and psychology of science’, in R.J. Sternberg (ed) The Anatomy of Impact: What Makes the Great Works of Psychology Great, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp 3–​18. 89

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PART II

Relationships

5

The storytelling and storyselling of neoliberal academic work Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Paola Valero

Introduction Storytelling is important in organisations. For Hannah Arendt, storytelling captures the process by which we reconfigure our inner thoughts, emotions and opinions for public appearance. Through storytelling, we express who we are as opposed to what we are (Arendt, 1998). At a deeper level, storytelling confirms that we are agents who matter in the communities in which we work. This agency is enacted simply when we reconfigure a series of events into a story and insert ourselves into history (Young-​Bruehl, 1977). Through this process, we become grounded in a continued history. Second, we weave together a durable reality from an otherwise multiple, ambiguous and continuously changing and chaotic world. Furthermore, through sharing stories it becomes possible to create a common horizon from multiple worldviews. In academia, storytelling is important for professional identities, the continuation of academic values and virtues as well as for creating academic communities (Jackson, 2013). We create stories through, for example, reading, writing and thinking, and through engaging in dialogue and communication. Through storytelling we inscribe ourselves in the history of a particular research field, and participate in renegotiating and changing its traditions so that it can meet the challenges of the present. The university is in this way an important space of appearance where we can legitimately share our stories –​ including stories of knowledge. Classes, seminars, conferences, publications and all the informal meetings and channels established among academics are collective spaces where we have different possibilities of participating and sharing our stories. Our professional identities rely on the affordances that the university offers. For example, the simple fact of having an institutional affiliation and having access to resources are important conditions for the stories we can create. For Arendt and for Walter Benjamin (1999), stories belong to and move among the people, in this case researchers, teachers, students and administrative staff.

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But there is a dark side of storytelling, an appropriation of the dearest of human possessions for purposes that may sometimes even go against its very same role, function and existence. Such dark storytelling is clearly expressed in the corporate academic capitalism of today and appears in different variations associated with strategic storytelling. Strategic storytelling has become integral to the neoliberal university. Universities generally renegotiate their relations to the world through stories for the purpose of obtaining legitimacy and support from other actors, as noted in Chapter 1 (this book). Universities as actants (Latour, 2007) are public bodies that are answerable to other actors of the intricate network they are part of. In the neoliberal university strategic storytelling is, however, itself restoried. When the university becomes a corporation, storytelling is tactically linked to strategising and marketing. The stories produced then provide answerability to particular types of actors, namely stakeholders and customers –​the former including, for example, the local collaborators and the latter the students. The relationships between these actors are also restoried in terms of commodities and consumption (Saunders and Blanco Ramirez, 2017). Milton Friedman (1970) has (in)famously argued that the corporate social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits. This statement has, of course, received serious criticism in the literature from people suggesting that corporations do indeed have a more humanistic side. For us, however, the statement captures the essence of what a corporation is about: profit. Paraphrasing Gilles Deleuze’s (1992a) critical remark on the brutality of corporations, we state that the idea that corporate universities ‘have a soul’ is the most terrible news in the world. Thus, in their different ways, Friedman and Deleuze capture the core of organising universities like corporations: the ‘human’ side of a corporation’s social responsibility is the ‘soul’ of profit. From this it follows that the corporate university does not envision a common space among people for purposes other than accumulating value. Universities become businesses that need business models to target stakeholders. Nowhere is this more evident, for example, then when universities fight for protecting and securing intellectual property rights and patents for the purpose of capitalisation, not just in the natural sciences and engineering, but also in the humanities, or even in the slides that any simple employee uses to talk in a conference or to students in a classroom. For this reason, the stories that the corporate university uses to brand itself stand as a dark and perverse appropriation of storytelling to serve corporate interests. Storytelling becomes storyselling, and it turns into an important part of the commodification of knowledge. This chapter debates tensions between academic capitalism and ethical subjectivation through debating the differences between storyselling and 96

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storytelling. Inspired by Finn Janning’s (2014) discussion of ethical leadership in organisations, we delineate two different types of stories. The first is the university as what Janning calls a ‘moral concentration camp’. We argue that education and research here become part of biopolitical neoliberalism in which the academic entrepreneur is the model to measure ourselves against. In contrast, Janning uses the metaphor of the ‘the public library’ as the totally generous and free-​of-​charge place where experience and knowledge is generated and passed on for free for future generations. The public library stands as an alternative metaphor to organise and manage relations in the university (Jørgensen and Ingman, 2022). We see the ‘public library’ as a model for resistance to the neoliberal university turned into a ‘moral concentration camp’. Our purpose with the debate in the chapter is, on the one hand, to highlight how storytelling is paradoxically very important for both the neoliberal university and for imagining another kind of university. This recognition is in fact central in addressing power and opening spaces for resistance (Jørgensen, 2022). On the other hand, we want to use the invitation of storytelling as a creative force in our writing to revisit experiences that are shared among academics, while allowing us to playfully twist them and fictionalise them. We find this to be a power strategy to reclaim valuable experience that no longer seems to count (Benjamin, 1999). The chapter is organised around two sections that contain both stories and analysis of storyselling in the neoliberal university as a moral concentration camp and of storytelling in the university as a public library. We end with a discussion on possible spaces for resistance in universities.

The 10 commandments of A-cademics •  Research is your life. There are no limits to working hours. You belong to the university. •  Score as many bibliometric research indicator points as possible, in high-​ranking journals (level 2); higher ranking journals (level 3); highest ranking journals (level 4+​); so high that no-​other-​mortal-​peer-​around-​can-​publish-​in-​it (level 4+​+​). •  Protect and nourish your h-​index (Does anybody know what the ‘h’ stands for?), and make sure that you know what it is. Check it constantly and compare it to close and distant colleagues. •  Attract research funding of the right type (with the highest overheads, so that it pays), and from competitive prestigious agencies. This shows your project is worthy. This is your worth. •  Keep a strategic research strategy that includes a more effective publication strategy, a renewing and innovative new research strategy, and a publication strategy constantly tailored to the research strategy. 97

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•  Spread actively any good deed in Twitter, Facebook, ResearchCage, Google Scholar, Instagram and TikTok for maximal visibility; the traditional media will not make you go viral. •  Produce only international research (research in languages other than English is not even worth mentioning), world-​class research, and out-​of-​this-​ world-​class research. •  Be part of the continuous institutional success. Your points and index add to moving higher and higher in the world ranking of universities. Make sure your colleagues will say that ‘we are the best’. Only to be ‘A’ level, No. 1, is the limit. •   Do teaching. Prepare just enough to get excellent (customer) evaluations. •  And above all, thou should remain loyal and keep your opinions to yourself. Critique (or even reflective commentary) is forbidden. Thou should only speak positively.

Academic storyselling in the ‘moral concentration camp’ Ernest Hemingway’s terse writing style left stories with no need for further explanation. Benjamin (1999) also argued that too much definition destroys stories. In fact, there must be space to be filled by the reader’s imagination. ‘The 10 commandments of A-cademics’ gather fragments of stories that repeat in slightly different arrangements all around the globe. If you do not follow the irony or if you nod in the belief that these fragments will lead to the sacred, promised land, you have probably been living in the moral concentration camp of the corporate university for too long. Probably you cannot see beyond quantification; you have learned to thrive in the continuous strategising and grow the gut desire to be seen and evaluated continuously by the public to prove your own worth and greatness. You have become an exemplary dweller of that camp, the reign of academic capitalism. In the neoliberal university as a ‘moral concentration camp’, knowledge and learning are transformed and measured by algorithms. Short and fast publications –​more resembling memos than books (Mills, 2000) –​are privileged, while complex knowledge composition and exposition does not have a value. Knowledge is more specifically defined by its utility and speed that need to be measured here and now, in economic terms. The moral concentration camp is that academics’ thinking, reading and writing are forced into frames defined by journal impact factors, publication, funding record and very strategic research strategies. The achievements are forced to appear on public leaderboards even at global scales that comparatively assign value to institutions and individuals. Such visibility makes it possible to exercise power and to expose academics to close and immediate public scrutiny and disgrace by close colleagues, managers, distant peers, students, citizens, politicians, journalists and even popular taste judges. The neoliberal 98

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exercise of power in academia represented in concepts such as managerialism, management accounting and marketisation are effective affective mechanisms for academic self-​control by which the corporate university is internalised into the bodies and minds of academics (Valero et al, 2019). The subject of this moral concentration camp, the ‘A’ level academic or A-cademic, is the entrepreneur, who must work on the self, invest in the self and market the self in order to stay ahead or at least ajour –​or barely afloat –​ in a fierce competitive market. These developments follow the logic of what Wendy Brown (2015) calls a neoliberal ‘stealth revolution’. She defines neoliberalism as ‘that form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms’ (Brown, 2015: 1). This development has been under way for some time and has manifested with variations across contexts. However, it is carried by the story of the unavoidable and inescapable necessity of updating universities to the current times and trends. As an example, in Denmark the significant event of the University Reform in 2002 was a political intervention that contained a change in management, education, ownership and control. Elected managers were replaced by hired managers, and universities became their own corporations that were funded according to their quantifiable outputs in terms of publications and student completion rates and jobs. Finally, a significant amount of research funding was allocated through strategic programmes and project applications in competition with other universities and researchers. Academics achieved neoliberal ‘freedom’ and were blessed with strategic management. This freedom came with acceleration and speed –​ever-​increasing workloads and performativity of the moment in terms of ever-​increasing demands for publication, external funding, optimisation of teaching and an organisation of learning pipelines. Arendt’s notion of storytelling as appearance attains a darker side in this neoliberal university. It is clear that appearance is decisive for the work of neoliberal universities. We call such dark storytelling storyselling. It is integral to how a university marketises itself, how it communicates with stakeholders and how academics are gradually turned into entrepreneurial business (wo) men who then have to incorporate capitalism into every article, every thought and every performance. ‘The 10 commandments of A-cademics’ could be seen as the maxims for storyselling that, sometimes more explicitly than others, set in operation the following mechanisms. Storyselling works through visibility. It is a precondition for storytelling that we need to appear in order to be confirmed as people who have an agency in the world. But in the neoliberal university, appearance serves another role, namely, as a means for managing and controlling people in organisations. Technologies of visibility that are expressed on, for example, public leaderboards or league tables like Web of Science, Scopus, ResearchGate and Google Scholar are important devices that belong to the network of relations between tools, instruments and discourses that Foucault termed 99

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‘dispositive’ (Foucault, 1980). The strategic but subtle work of the neoliberal dispositive is effective because it works through the active commitment and engagement of the ‘free’ academic subject, to voluntarily desire to make every single act visible. The visibility gives freedom, which, in turn, comes with heightened demands for production, temporary jobs, decreased job security on all levels of academia, budget cuts and increased demands for external research funding. And social media that academics freely use also to make visible the entanglement of work and private life –​to sell the story that actually one’s life is (almost) no other than one’s work –​are also powerful tools of the whole dispositive. Second, such visibility invites continuous investments in the self because this self is always measured according to market value. This turns the academic into an entrepreneur. Foucault clearly emphasised that the idea of an active economic subject was the defining difference between classical economics and neoliberal economics. He suggested that the ideological armour for neoliberalism was found in Gary Becker’s theory of human capital (Foucault, 2008; Becker, 2009; Newheiser, 2016), which subsequently combined an enterprising subject with investments in learning and knowing for the benefit of future return for the subject. In order to stay ahead in competition, however, we need to work much more than what our contract officially states. Investments in the self are furthermore connected to a projectification of the self (Berglund et al, 2020). Through this process we open the self for consumption of customers and stakeholders. There are probably no other individuals than entrepreneurs who rely so much on making their stories seen and heard before an audience. Academic entrepreneurs are no exception. Through storyselling, we have to improve our image and look good by maximising numbers, we compete in English-​speaking journals dominated by Anglo-​Saxon academic communities, and we have to write in particular ways –​and the only thing we can only be sure of is that it is never enough. As a consequence, storytelling as storyselling leads to an excess of storytelling: an effect of fierce competition, stress, anxiety and fear. The excess of storytelling is not only symbolised by a steady accumulation of junk articles, junk books and junk journals, which are all fighting to increase their impact factor. Excess of storytelling also entails that academic subjects paradoxically lose their stories because they have to always think about how they appear, what story they tell or enact, how they should collect attention and how to collect the necessary resources to survive now and in the future.

Academic storytelling in the ‘public library’ Storytelling is also central for creating a counter-​narrative (Lueg and Wolff-​Lundholt, 2020) to academic capitalism. It is central for imagining, repeating and reconfiguring the world for the purpose of inserting ourselves 100

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into history. It serves as the means by which whole beings share their experiences when they are in company with others. For Benjamin (1999), such storytelling is in fact inseparable from the details of places and all that is done there. This contrasts with universal, standardised and commodified knowledge. We are of-​the-​world (Barad, 2007) and have places in our blood, veins, heart and soul. Who we are reflects where we come from. Places are repeated and revitalised in our stories. Because storytelling is about sharing experiences, a counter-​narrative could be what Finn Janning (2014) captures in the metaphor of the ‘public library’. In contrast to the ‘moral concentration camp’, a public library is a place of total generosity where experiences are shared and passed on for free to contemporary and future generations. Many university professors like seeing themselves as parts of a public library, making history and experience available for future generations (our colleagues and our students). There is an implicit contract that this history should be treated with compassion and care. The ‘goods produced’ are not there to be barely consumed and utilised. Books, articles, university classrooms, discussions and debates and other artefacts and places are important parts of the network of relations among the people and resources in action at universities. These places, artefacts and activities are living spaces where lived stories and experiences are made (de Certeau, 1984), and are therefore to be treated with respect and care. In the meetings between colleagues, teachers, students, researchers and others there are always so many other things in play than dominant power. Power always relies on subjectivation (Deleuze, 1992b), which means that in the end, power relies on how people enact it into being. Subjectivation is at the same time an important source of resistance if it is in the form of ethical self-​formation characterised by a care of the self in which academics identify moral principles and try to create themselves as a work of art (Foucault, 1997, 2005). In the moment of actualisation, we should not underestimate our own and other people’s creative ability to craft other realities than the ones we are dispositioned for. This creative agency is manifested in the ways we use universities to continue particular histories of our respective fields, but also to reimagine and rewrite them. In other words, resistance can be found in the possibility of new stories, subjectivities and creations. Such resistance is not only founded in a strong belief in a counter-​narrative to the neoliberal university, but also in how we use storytelling for passing on experiences. Benjamin (1999) argues that storytelling was lost in modernity as the passing of experiences was mainly replaced by scientific information. It is not only the public and the citizens who become alienated in this operation. We, as researchers, also somehow lose our abilities to tell a story properly. An important part of resistance to the neoliberal university is how we write and how we engage with the field, and how we organise the spaces between ourselves, our colleagues and our students. 101

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Imaginary realism We propose to think of storytelling in the university as a ‘public library’ as an imaginary realism, a type of research ethos that is expressed through inquiring, writing and sharing experiences, where imagination is central. Hannah Arendt, in her essays on Isak Dinesen’s philosophy of storytelling, notes that without repeating life in imagination we can never be fully alive. Lack of imagination prevents us from living (Arendt, 1968: 97). Imagination is so important for resistance because in collecting fragments into stories, through reconfiguring the connections between past, present and future, and to enact such stories in being confirm that we are political agents. Imagination is used as a political act of not surrendering to the burden of reality by daring to create a new possibility, an imagination that sometimes may feel as magical but that is still a plausible course of action. If we are only able to imagine life in our thinking and not in our lived practices, we are forever alienated by the neoliberal university. Imagination is perhaps the strongest resistance force against the neoliberal university in that it is shown that a strong story is a chief foundation for resistance movements (Caygill, 2013). We find inspiration for this form of academic storytelling in Bruno Latour’s work. Latour asks the seemingly stupid question: ‘Who killed Aramis?’ in the opening sequence of his book Aramis, or the Love of Technology (Latour, 1996). Barbara Czarniawska (2014) has argued that the book was inspired by Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose. It is shaped around the dialogue between the lead researcher and the young inexperienced apprentice when they unravel the tortuous history of a state-​of-​the-​art technology (Latour, 1996: vii). This is one example of how research can be told as a story that collects attention about technology or another matter of concern. Storytelling is used to share experiences not only between the experienced researcher and the apprentice, but also between the author and the reader. We are situated in a particular context with particular people. What the researcher is trying to figure out is who has done what, why they have done it, how they have done it and what in particular circumstances they have done it. The last question is, of course, the political question of what the perpetrators did to cover it up (Jørgensen, 2007). Through putting the story together, we imagine how people in particular historical, geographical and material conditions collected the pieces of their realities into new stories with significant material effects. In stories from the field, we are in the company of people who are represented as heroes, scoundrels, scapegoats, crooks, bandits, angels and fortune tellers, and we encounter the histories of everyday objects like Aramis, bus terminals, IT systems and classrooms (Latour, 1996; Jørgensen, 2007). Realities are never simple and are always living. When we learn about such stories, we learn about how people have been crafting realities, what 102

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practical problems they are struggling with and how they have dealt with them. These are the stories that we need to know in order to be able to tell other stories and obtain wisdom. The problem for the neoliberal university is that research does not seek to simplify and quantify but rather complicate and grasp the intricacies of stories. An academic should rather tell the truth in a few short statements and wring out the essence of the text (Derrida, 2004). This is why journal articles are the preferred media for communicating knowledge in the neoliberal university. But these articles are usually boring to read because, within the standard of a ‘right’ paper, there is no space for complex stories and histories. The imaginary realism in storytelling is, of course, connected with love and passion. Che Guevara should have argued that love is the key driving force behind revolutions (Sandoval, 2013). This love and passion belong to the work of artists, artisans, professional, craftspeople and others who put a lot of dedication into their work. How can we ever dream of writing something interesting if we are not somehow in love with our research topic? Benjamin’s storyteller loves her craft. Unfortunately, today this storyteller for Benjamin has become ‘an angel of history’, who has her face turned towards her past for the purpose of recovering the lost fragments that have not yet been destroyed by capitalism (see the description in Arendt, 1999). While storytelling is a new beginning, a storyteller is always answerable to their beginnings but without being hostage to them, that is, places, spaces, people, cultural practices, objects, artefacts, etc. Viewed from the perspective of storytelling, researchers write themselves into the histories of particular fields for the purpose of reinvigorating them, transforming them to the contemporary, and perhaps destroying parts of these histories if the material-​discursive practice is tyrannical, violent and destructive. Our fields, mathematics education and organisation studies have their own troubled histories in being complicit in wars, colonisation and economic exploitation. But how can we avoid the fallacies of the past without being aware of how these histories are embedded in the discourses that we use to think and write within? A space of resistance against the neoliberal university is the space we researchers create between our research and writing practices and the material with which we are engaged. A work of art is meant to last. It does not become outdated just because it was not done within the last five years. To qualify as an artistic practice or a craft, it involves dialogue and conversation with the subjects as well as the inner dialogue that an artist, artisan or craftsperson has with themself in the process of creation. The point is that this takes time and involves patience, and the courage to dare to go outside the norm and the standards. The education of new researchers can be taken as a site to exemplify the possibilities of imaginary realism as an ethos of resistance. A group of 103

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senior and younger scholars were together to investigate maths and science education as social and political practices. People from Colombia, Denmark, Pakistan, Portugal and Sweden made up part of the group. International visitors from around the world –​such as Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway, South Africa and the US –​came to spend periods of time in the group and became part of a larger network of collaboration. Taking as a point of departure the notion that critical education is an attitude to investigate a possibility that is not yet the regular case (Skovsmose and Borba, 2004), the group came to be recognised as a research environment that produced new insights into mathematics and science education. Moving an intellectual critical agenda was the centre of working together in research. Despite doctoral students having different projects, examining part of the terrain together was a possibility that counted towards an individual PhD thesis. For example, a team of three students wrote a series of papers on the changes in policy in science education in Denmark (Sillasen et al, 2011; Schmidt et al, 2015). The shared critical stance also materialised in experimentation with different styles of writing to challenge fixed ideas of the academic text. For example, Lars Bang Jensen (2014) consistently embraced the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to organise his thesis, mimicking in the writing the tensions between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, sense and non-​sense that were present in the investigation of how youth are individuated to learn to become interested in science as part of their education. Mythical monsters (for example, the Chimera or the Ouroboros) as Images of Thought were used to tease and problematise the many lines that cross the way the logic of science comes to being in society. Melissa Andrade-​Molina (2017) studied how mathematics education teaching and assessment are cultural devices that inscribe rationality and (de)fect the child, and published a paper in the form of a cartoon that captured the obsession to govern maths education for the making of improved human beings –​what she called the ‘MINDNIAC’ (2018). The manifestations of storytelling imbued in the ethos of imaginary realism in the work of academics in universities as public libraries exist. The examples we have highlighted here, taken from existing work of others and of our own, are not unique. Our point is not to propose something new and unheard of; but rather, to remind us that those possibilities are there, and can be promoted purposefully to counterbalance the corrosive effects of storyselling.

The heart and the darkness Up to this point we have argued that storytelling contains the potential of rethinking academia as a space of freedom that is more consistent with Arendt’s and Benjamin’s original ideas in which storytelling is an expression of 104

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uniqueness and artistry. But this entails a focus of attention on the collective spaces that exist between people in academia. Our metaphors, the ‘public library’ and the ‘moral concentration camp’ work as two contradictory forces, which are simultaneously at play in processes of subjectivation in academic environments. They are not mutually exclusive, but are rather entangled with one another in ways in which they also obtain their meaning in relation to one another. They are simultaneously co-​present as the heart and the darkness in an academic’s identity work. Storyselling and storytelling reflect very different logics, but they are also quite similar in that they both rely on appearance in public. Michael Jackson (2013: 31) notes how Arendt’s storytelling always takes place in the space between people in which a multiplicity of private and public interests is always problematically in play. Actually, for Arendt, to act and to be free are the same (Arendt, 1961). In fact, power and the freedom to act rely on the same processes to be effective, namely, visibility (Marquez, 2012). The mechanisms of visibility have always been central for the exercise of power in organisations: from the classical panopticon (Foucault, 1977) to modern Human Resource Management technologies such as coaching, development conversations and assessment and evaluation technologies (Townley, 1995; Valero et al, 2019). This idea that freedom and power both rely on visibility and that they are therefore entangled opens other possibilities as well as problems for resisting neoliberalism and creating oneself as a work of art. In distinguishing between the Christian and the Greek practices of the self, Foucault attempted to frame an ethics of self-​formation, which was a contrast to pastoral power. However, the question is if Foucault did not commit the modern error of locating the locus of ethics in thinking and acting individuals where power and ethical subjectivity are in a relation of exteriority to one another. As Lois McNay (2009) has argued, the practices of ethical subjectivation thus come dangerously close to the practices of the enterprising selves of neoliberalism. Ethical subjectivation, in other words, becomes an individual responsibility. An important strategy of neoliberalism is to isolate the individual by individualising responsibility. To create more effective resistance strategies, we need to embed them in more collective spaces. Arendt calls them the ‘space of appearance’ (Arendt, 1998: 198–​9), which is where people are together as ‘equals’ and can share their experiences in dialogue and conversation. A space of appearance never exists a priori, but has to be enacted. People are together as ‘equals’ in the sense that people dare to disclose who they are and what they think in front of others instead of appearing as mere representatives of certain positions, functions or discourses. Meetings, seminars, conferences, workshops, informal conversations and anywhere where people are together are possible community-​building spaces if we dare engage with each other and be with 105

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people and neither for, nor against, them. We know from our experiences how much such spaces matter for our academic life and communities. We don’t believe that the space of appearance is a romantic fantasy, but an integral part of the imaginary realism ethos that we have delineated before. In fact, it corresponds to experiences that we all know and encounter from academic experiences. We know how important these spaces are because they have been lost during the isolation of the COVID-​ 19 pandemic. Such spaces weave communities together as they weave people into shared story at the same time as they confirm the validity of individual stories. The common sense that may evolve from such spaces is furthermore an important source of resilience against the meaninglessness of the neoliberal university. We cannot bypass neoliberalism and the reality that our careers and our lives also rely on playing the game. Instead, today, we have to find ways of living with our heart in the company of a potential dark ‘monster’ that is always dangerously present and can overthrow our careers from one moment to another. At the same time, we are not here because of this monster, and we cannot forget that in the end, power is actualised by academic subjects. We are never determined by power, but power is an important part of the conditions of crafting subjectivity. Hannah Arendt (2006), in her essay on the crisis in education, argued that the purpose of education is to prepare newcomers to begin again and create their own future. This requires agency and creativity in the ways in which we read, teach, write and engage, and, in a holistic sense, are with other people. Such purposes of education, agency and creativity do not have favourable conditions in the neoliberal university. But the fact that the criticism against the neoliberal university is so widespread is evidence that this other image of university embedded in storytelling is still present as a widespread passion for working in academia. Education is a ‘new beginning’ in so far as its practitioners can reconfigure an otherwise chronological series of events into a story and insert themselves into history (Young-​Bruehl, 1977). Education and research in universities may be the possibility of a new beginning insofar as they are ‘grounded in our experience of life’. References Andrade-​Molina, M. (2017) ‘(D)effecting the child: the scientifization of the self through school mathematics’, PhD thesis, Aalborg: Aalborg University Press. Andrade-​Molina, M. (2018) ‘MINDNIAC: the reasonable citizen of schooling (Chilean Edition)’, The Mathematics Enthusiast, 15(1): 3–​53. Arendt, H. (1961) ‘Freedom and politics’, in Hunold, A. (ed) Freedom and Serfdom: An Anthology of Western Thought, Dordrecht: Springer, pp 191–​217. Arendt, H. (1968) Men in Dark Times, London: Harcourt Brace & Company. 106

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Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition (2nd edn), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1999) ‘Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–​1940’, in W. Benjamin, Illuminations, London: Pimlico, pp 7–​58. Arendt, H. (2006) Between Past and Future (edited by J. Kohn), London: Penguin. Bang Jensen, L. (2014) ‘The logic of science: a vivisection of monsters’, PhD thesis, Aalborg University Press. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Becker, G.S. (2009) Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, W. (1999) ‘The storyteller –​reflections on the work of Nicolai Leskov’, in H. Arendt (ed) Illuminations, London: Pimlico, pp 83–​107. Berglund, K., Lindgren, M. and Packendorff, J. (2020) ‘The worthy human being as prosuming subject: ‘projected selves’ in emancipatory project studies’, Project Management Journal, 51(4): 367–​77. Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Caygill, H. (2013) On Resistance –​A Philosophy of Defiance, London: Bloomsbury. Czarniawska, B. (2014) ‘Bruno Latour: an accidental organization theorist’, in P. Adler, P. Du Gay, G. Morgan and M. Reed (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory, and Organization Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 87–​106. de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Deleuze, G. (1992a) ‘Postscript on the societies of control’, October, 59: 3–​7. Deleuze, G. (1992b) ‘What is a dispositif?’, in T.J. Armstrong (ed) Michel Foucault Philosopher, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp 159–​68. Derrida, J. (2004) ‘Living on’, in H. Bloom and J. Derrida (eds) Deconstruction and Criticism, London: Continuum, pp 62–​142. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1980) ‘The confession of the flesh’, in C. Gordon (ed) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings by Michel Foucault, 1972–1977, New York: Pantheon Books, pp 194–228. Foucault, M. (1997) ‘The ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom’, in P. Rabinow (ed) Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Foucault (vol 1), New York: New Press, pp 281–​302. Foucault, M. (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–​1982, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics –​Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–​1979, London: Palgrave Macmillan. 107

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Friedman, M. (1970) ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’, The New York Times, 13 September. www.nyti​mes.com/​1970/​ 09/​13/​archi​ves/​a-​fried​man-​doctr ​ine-​the-​soc​ial-​res​pons​ibil​ity-​of-​busin​ ess-​is-​to.html Jackson, M. (2013) The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Janning, F. (2014) ‘Affirmation and creation –​how to lead ethically’, Tamara Journal of Critical Organization Inquiry, 12(3): 25–​35. Jørgensen, K.M. (2007) Power without Glory: A Genealogy of a Management Decision, Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Jørgensen, K.M. (2022) ‘Storytelling, space and power: an Arendtian account of subjectivity in organizations’, Organization, 29(1): 51–​66. Jørgensen, K.M. and Ingman, S. (2022) ‘Leadership without leaders –​ Implications of the “Agora” and the “public library” ’, in F. Hertel, A. Örtenblad and K.M. Jørgensen (eds) Leaderless Management –​A Debate Book, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Latour, B. (1996) Aramis, Or the Love of Technology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press. Latour, B. (2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lueg, K. and Wolff Lundholt, M. (2020) Routledge Handbook of Counter-​ Narratives, London: Routledge. Marquez, X. (2012) ‘Spaces of appearance and spaces of surveillance’, Polity, 44(1): 6–​31. McNay, L. (2009) ‘Self as enterprise: dilemmas of control and resistance in Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics’, Theory, Culture and Society, 26(6): 55–​77. Mills, C.W. (2000) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newheiser, D. (2016) ‘Foucault, Gary Becker and the critique of neoliberalism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 33(5): 3–​21. Sandoval, C. (2013) Methodology of the Oppressed, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Saunders, D.B. and Blanco Ramirez, G. (2017) ‘Resisting the neoliberalization of higher education: a challenge to commonsensical understandings of commodities and consumption’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 17(3): 189–​96. Schmidt, J., Daubjerg, P., Sillasen, M.K. and Valero, P. (2015) ‘From the literate citizen to the qualified science worker: neoliberal rationality in Danish science education reforms’, in D. Tröhler and T. Lenz (eds) Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems: Between the National and the Global, London: Routledge, pp 213–​26.

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Sillasen, M.K., Daubjerg, P., Schmidt, J. and Valero, P. (2011) ‘Bæredygtige reformer af naturfagsundervisningen i Danmark’ [‘Sustainable reforms of science education in Denmark’], MONA, 2011(1): 39–​56. Skovsmose, O. and Borba, M.C. (2004) ‘Research methodology and critical mathematics education’, in P. Valero and R. Zevenbergen (eds) Researching the Socio-​Political Dimensions of Mathematics Education: Issues of Power in Theory and Methodology, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp 207–​26. Townley, B. (1995) ‘“Know thyself ”: self-​awareness, self-​formation and managing’, Organization, 2(2): 271-​89. Valero, P., Jørgensen, K.M. and Brunila, K. (2019) ‘Affective subjectivation in the precarious neoliberal academia’, in D. Bottrell and C. Manathunga (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 135–​54. Young-​Bruehl, E. (1977) ‘Hannah Arendt’s storytelling’, Social Research, 44(1): 183–​90.

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Exploring the academic and affective leadership in academia Kristiina Brunila

Introduction A few years ago, I became a female leader in academia. It was not my intention to become a leader, but I realised that it was something that came with the job of being an associate professor heading towards full professorship, who was determined to influence faculty policies and practices. As time passed I learned about the relentless pursuit of individual orientation in different situations related to leadership in neoliberal rationalism, where academics become human capital consisting of ungendered productive units. I understood that the power effects of neoliberalism through the affect of anxiety is a particular governing strategy of subjectivation, and that it directs academic leaders direct towards an economic logic, where the self of academics and their work is shaped as insufficient (see also Brunila and Valero, 2017). When the amount of my leadership duties grew, the complexity of issues that I had to deal with in academia led to me critically exploring leadership by analysing and politicising my experiences through affective academic encounters. Because of my theoretical and methodological aspirations in the field of critical studies in education and concerns about power and social justice, my aim was to give up my authorial right to stand outside of power relations as well as my desire for authenticity. I chose to focus on my experiences as an academic leader at the centre. I believed that this would help me to discover the fault lines in leadership discourses as well as to find new discursive practices and subject positions to be able to continue as an educationalist and critical scholar and politically active academic while utilising my leadership position for more collective purposes and for challenging the contemporary neoliberal order. One of the reasons I wrote this chapter was the pervasiveness of the neoliberal order, where it was sometimes hard, or nearly impossible, to find room for political imaginary outside of the market and a market metrics, which are colonialising all spheres of academic life. It was also a surprise to me that while there has been a mass of critical literature related to the 110

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effects of changes in academia, little critical analysis was available about how academics are themselves deeply, affectively and ethically entangled with these changes (see also Chapter 5, this book). I came across Lauren Berlant’s (2011) concept of ‘cruel optimism’ as a particular feature of contemporary late-​capitalist societies, where injustices manifest themselves in ways that are increasingly hard to recognise and intervene in. The notion of ‘cruel optimism’ describes the affective operations of the prevailing neoliberal ethos or ‘common sense’. Taken in an academic context, this can be considered to rise from many scholars’ observations that academics continue to construct their academic lives and identities around the pursuit of such desirable and socially esteemed objects as academic job security, upward organisational mobility, mutual respect and acknowledgement, equality and economic and other wellbeing, although these have become increasingly difficult to redeem under today’s neoliberal and competitive restructuring. Following Berlant (2011), the pursuit of these gives the academic a sense of purpose and meaning in life, but the downside is that because these objects remain unattainable to most, their pursuit merely engages the individual in a constant struggle of self-​management and self-​improvement. Because of a long history as a feminist scholar familiar with hierarchies and processes of othering, I had come to take power relations as multidimensional seriously. I wanted to be more aware of the academic leadership discourses through which people speak about themselves and are spoken about by others. It was yet another attempt to build on my experience in examining the making of academic subjects in universities in times of neoliberal ethos (Brunila, 2016; Valero and Brunila, 2018; Ylöstalo and Brunila, 2018; Valero et al, 2019; Brunila et al, 2020; for more on gender, academia and challenges for change, see Gherardi, 1994; Gill, 2009; Bird, 2011; Parsons and Priola, 2013). The concept of experience I chose to use was not about individuals having experiences but rather about academic educational leaders who constitute themselves and are constituted as experiencing leaders through affective academic encounters. In addition, I had already become curious about the process of leadership, where being a young professor in the neoliberal academia and a leader could be understood as a discursive practice within multiple and contradictory power–​knowledge relations and as a form of academicity (Petersen, 2008: 56; Brunila, 2016). For Petersen, academicity is about doing, a continuous cultural and discursive practice by which the discourse produces the effects that it names. One of the constant sources of inspiration for me has been Michel Foucault, who is in favour of science that takes values and power seriously against the objectivist strands that understand human activity as modelled by cumulative, predictive and stable natural sciences. Instead, Foucault advises 111

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that, rather than looking for a coherent definitional field, we should attend to the overlapping, contradictory and conflictual definitional forces that do not oversimplify our pursuit of a counter-​science (Foucault, 1970 [1966]). I wanted to understand more about how I came to think of, and recognise, particular statements and affects belonging to discourses on who is the desired leading subject, and how we maintain but also at the same time challenge and change these discourses in the neoliberal rationality (see also Parsons and Priola, 2013). I believed that this understanding would help me in creating something collective and politically relevant in the current ethos that was de-​ politicising structural problems towards behaviour management and collective apathy. With the term ‘leading subject’, I pointed to the configuration of the leading subjects –​the people who become academic leaders –​while also thinking about how leading subjects are entangled in the multiplicity of forces that constitute academia and academics nowadays. I also wanted to create more understanding of the governing strategies in the ‘cruel optimism’ and in the neoliberal rationality, and not just stick with the already-​familiar survival mode. I wanted my work to be more than just survival.

Academia and leadership on the market It goes without saying that academia is going through constant major changes in the current neoliberal ethos (see, for example, Davies, 2005; Taubman, 2007; Gill, 2009; Petersen and Davies, 2010; Vostal, 2016; Bottrell and Manathunga, 2019). Marc Edwards and Siddhartha Roy argue that incentives for academic scientists have become perverse in terms of competition for research funding, development of quantitative metrics to measure performance and a changing business model for higher education itself (Edwards and Roy, 2017). Even in the Nordic higher education systems, with their relatively high levels of public funding and stable employment, academic subjects experience the pressures of global, neoliberal education policy with its demands for efficiency and performativity (Jauhiainen et al, 2009; Brunila et al, 2020). The various ways in which neoliberal policy is carried out in everyday work at university include quality assurance, a system of defined annual working hours, an outcome-​based salary system and a work time allocation system (Jauhiainen et al, 2014), all leading towards public apathy and isolation. As a political rationality (Brown, 2015), neoliberalism shapes and constrains academics’ conduct, undermines collectivity and democratic forms of participation and casts the market as the model for the university. In terms of social justice, higher education has continued to overlook not only women’s roles as shapers of the academy, but also intersections of race, gender and sexuality (Bensimon and Marshall, 2000; Chesler et al, 2005; Asher, 2010; van den Brink and Benschop, 2012). As a matter of fact, as Phyllis Bronstein (1993) and Nina Asher (2010) have both argued, the more 112

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dimensions of ‘differentness’ that individuals represented (in terms of race, gender and ethnicity), the more difficult a time they had at their institutions, and the more they were perceived as a threat to existing power structures and those invested in maintaining them. Accordingly, academic leaders as well as other academic subjects have constituted themselves in institutional and affective encounters, and are currently facing the tensions of the current neoliberal rationality of university life. This constitution includes constant ambivalences such as performing individuality, effectiveness and the ability to be in charge. It can induce excitement, satisfaction and pride when getting it ‘right’, but also feelings of shame, frustration, stress, loneliness, uncertainty, devastation and betrayal (see, for example, Davies, 2005; Brunila and Valero, 2018; Valero et al, 2019; see also Chapter 7, this book). As an economisation of academic work, it has extensive outcomes in shaping knowledge, research and researching subjects. In terms of academic and affective leadership, there is a persistent assumption that leadership ought to be coherent and leaders strong and visible individuals. This is easily considered as self-​evidently leading towards the common good in spite of evidence from non-​individualistic ways to achieve results (see, for example, Chin et al, 2007). In search of more diverse leadership, Srilatha Batliwala (2011; see also Ford and Harding, 2007) has deconstructed the most common characters in relation to leadership, which are: •​ •​ •​ •​ •​

the individual as the leader, and the leader as (usually) a man; the leader as a hero, and leadership as heroism; the leader as a decision-​maker; the leader as the embodiment of character and integrity; the leader as the provider of vision, mission, goals and strategy for the enterprise, motivating others to share those goals; and • the capacity to influence, inspire and motivate others, directing others’ behaviour and actions. Historically, leadership in the academy has been gendered and mainly the domain of white men and male professors while privileging certain types of masculinities (Bird, 2011; van den Brink and Benschop, 2012; Parsons and Priola, 2013). Accordingly, the mainstream leadership discourse tends to focus on either leaders or their attributes or to definitions of leadership, as a process or practice derived mostly from management and organisational developments field. Jackie Ford and Nancy Harding have shown that although there has been a phenomenal amount of publications on leadership in general, it has had a strong, uncritical, managerialist focus and an absence of non-​and anti-​performative stance that would challenge the legitimacy and efficacy of established patterns of thinking and action (2007, 477; see, 113

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however, Bottrell and Manathunga, 2019). In the neoliberal rationality, this leadership discourse has continued to exclude women and enhance economisation, in which the ability to make tough decisions is associated with ‘maleness’ (Blackmore and Sachs, 2000; Asher, 2010). However, in the current neoliberal rationality there seems to be no political imaginary outside of the market and a market metrics. This is where feminism and gender might be recalled. Catherine Rothenberg (2018) has argued that because neoliberalism reduces everything to a market calculation, it actually needs feminism in order to allow professional women to cultivate themselves to become more productive and to strive towards balance. This gender balance could be called post-​feminism, which Rosalind Gill (2007) describes as a complex entanglement of feminist and anti-​feminist ideas, and where previous public feminist discussions, namely, equal rights and social justice, have turned into happiness, balance and lean in (see also Rothenberg, 2018: 5, 55). In other words, the post-​feminist and cruel optimist ideal for a specific type of female actor would be to accept full responsibility for their own wellbeing and self-​care. This goes together with neoliberalism as a dominant political rationality that moves to and from the management of the state to the inner workings of the subject, constructing and interpellating individuals as entrepreneurial and capital-​enhancing actors (Rothenberg, 2018: 57). The other problem with the individual-​oriented leadership discourse in the neoliberal ethos is the complete absence of wider political perspectives, the context and debate related to the nature of change (see, for example, Batliwala, 2011; Rothenberg, 2018). This tends to push the ideal academic leadership towards neoliberal goals. Wendy Brown (2015) has elaborated Foucault’s idea of the shift from liberalism to neoliberalism and to homo economicus. For Foucault, the crisis of liberalism gave birth to neoliberalism as well as to homo economicus as a man of constant interest in economics. Brown (2015: 84) goes further, arguing that ‘homo economicus is made, not born, and operates in a context replete with risk, contingency, and potentially violent changes, from burst bubbles and capital or currency meltdowns to wholesale industry dissolution’. Accordingly, unless academics themselves critically acknowledge that the neoliberal leader is profoundly integrated in, and hence subordinated to, the supervening goal of macro-​economic growth, their being and doing is easily sacrificed to these larger purposes.

Data and analysis In this chapter, different kinds of (messy and undone) data have informed the analysis. The most important data include various types of writing tasks, notes, observations and other written material from one-​year academic leadership training and its encounters for the future leaders of the university, 114

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which was conducted in the University of Helsinki during 2017. For me this training was a springboard in becoming an academic leader. I considered the analysis of it highly relevant because the training showed in practice how problematic and affective the whole academic leadership discourse is. I was appointed by the dean to attend the whole training together with several other professors from different disciplines in the same university. This included frequent 1–​2 days of obligatory seminars where various types of visiting speakers gave presentations from different themes. The majority of the visiting speakers came from the private sector and multinational companies (the reason for this was not given). In addition, the participants were expected to read selected books on leadership and to watch educational films on leadership, again, mainly from the private sector. Further data used in this chapter includes emails and formal and informal encounters in the academy from 2014 to 2018. The methodology of autoethnography demands self-​reflexivity and provides a form of resistance, enabling lived experience to be inscribed within a collective critical academic debate (Sparkes, 2018; Andrew, 2019). In this chapter, academic leadership is understood as a discursive and affective practice (Bacchi and Bonham, 2014), adapted in the quest for ways in which academic subjects can be managed. The data, where the self is presented and represented through interactions, observations, analyses and interpretations, have been used to answer the research question of how discursive constructions related to academic leadership take hold of the body, and how certain discursive constructions are to be considered appropriated while others are discarded, relegated, or even considered threatening (see Petersen, 2008). For me, it was important to use various types of data to demonstrate how the academic leadership is constructed as a rather intensive discursive and affective practice. When I started to write the chapter, I was keen on my belief that in the academy, the process of becoming a leading subject never totally permeates every practice and cell of the social body. Even in the neoliberal rationality, there must be various ways that academic subjects such as leaders are discursively and affectively constituted and constitute themselves as subjects. In this way I thought it would be possible to focus on the discursive and affective encounters through which subjects become academic subjects and are constituted as well as the variety of subject positions available. In terms of subjection, I understood it as both conditioned by and dependent on the prevailing norms, and at the same time, as something that calls for finding one’s way politically, ethically and responsibly. In Western language, the dual nature of subjection is easily interpreted in the binary structure as necessarily either submission or mastery, but not both. So, when trying to understand how academic and affective subjectivation as a form of becoming a leader works, it is the paradoxical simultaneity of submission and mastery, and the 115

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related affective ambivalence, that I aim to explore. I also argue that the conditions of possibility for becoming require both. The negotiations need not be an either/​or dilemma, but rather both/​and. The focus of this chapter turned to the discursively and affectively produced effects, what academic leadership in the neoliberal rationality does, and what it enables leaders to do. When looking at academic leadership discursively and affectively, I considered it important to find out what was left unsaid, what was regarded as central and what was regarded as marginal. Understanding academic leadership in this sense made it possible to analyse the structure of the forms of power connected to the politics and practices of becoming a leader. It also allowed the search for more fluid perspectives concerning both the subject and agency.

Becoming a leader: the messy journey begins Dear Leader, You have been nominated … as a candidate in university’s leadership programme which is planned for research group leaders, heads of discipline and for researchers named Principal Investigators. (Email received in 2015) In the academy and in our faculty community, I was rapidly expected to take the leader position through various practices, such as when introducing and positioning myself, and especially when applying for funding resources for our AGORA research centre and research group. I became a leader of the discipline, of a research group, of a research project, of an international team, of an international MA programme, of a research centre and finally, deputy head of the rather large department. While taking up these positions I eventually came to consider myself both able to influence some practices and at the same time becoming submissive to them, and more and more isolated from others (see also Chapter 9, this book). It is hard to point to the exact situation or moment when I realised this, as it was more like something I experienced while working but without being able to consider it thoroughly. It just seemed I was on the move all the time. However, the academic leadership training first inspired me to begin examining leadership discourse, and it was also one of the central practices that positioned me in the academic leadership discourse. The training was university leadership arranged ‘for the talented future leaders of the Academia’, as it said in the advertisement. This one-​year intensive training was the starting point of this chapter. I can still recall how peculiar it felt to be addressed as ‘a leader’ in the email that was sent to all participants. The university leadership training started with a pre-​assignment in which I was asked to list my research group’s common goals, and how they connected with the faculty’s aims. I could already see problems with this 116

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task because everything that interested our group was about challenging and overcoming mainstream, individually oriented policies and practices as shifting and societal power relations in the neoliberal ethos. Right after this, I was asked to evaluate my competences as a superior, and how I evaluated my group’s competences within the discipline. I was also asked to refer to successful moments or challenges with diverse staff at work, and finally, to describe what kind of communication skills I needed as a superior. The affective ambivalences started right there. The vocabulary that was used in the training felt strange and problematic and I became anxious. I considered myself a critical scholar and became aware of my position in a new way. I struggled to present these tasks to our research group who, not surprisingly, expressed deep concern towards the leadership discourse introduced, not least because the group was sensitive towards the operation of power in multiple contexts. Previously I had invented a concept of ‘discourse virtuosity’ in order to analyse how long-​term equality specialists were able to promote equality in the marketised and project-​based work, and realised I had to put it to work: PhD students:

Me:

Do we really have to use this kind of problematic managerial language? I don’t know what to answer. What is a competence, how do we determine it? This is so individualistic. Please be careful that this training will not turn you into a something else because we all know what discourses do to people if we are not aware of it. I am sorry about this. I know how problematic this is. And I promise to be alert. But if we try to think about this in terms of discourse virtuosity, how could we try to shift the given discourse so that we could still talk about things important to our group?

I remembered feeling ashamed of this ambivalent position and the leadership discourse that felt ridiculous, and recalled what Sarah Ahmed had written about shame. Shame can be experienced as the affective cost of not following the scripts of normative existence (Ahmed, 2004: 107). For a critical scholar interested in power, the academic leadership training was both intriguing and confusing. This was the constant affective ambivalence in my experiences. It was a practice with an individualised orientation and a confusing mixture of popular psychology, counselling, neuroscience and market-​oriented business models, which aimed to develop and improve leadership and performance within the university (see also Ford and Harding, 2007). I also realised that when performed accordingly training was promising to give an access to new places and a possibility to 117

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speak language that would have a chance to be heard and understood. I also thought that it would provide new ways to recognise problems and challenges caused by hierarchies and inequalities. This was the reason I carried on with the training. However, the focus of the training days and pre-​assignments were all about turning the gaze inwards instead of thinking about leadership as a construction, as political, societal, cultural, as something shared, collective and beyond individuals as well as a form of discursive power relation. During the training we practised various kinds of ‘affective techniques’ of interaction with others, which were supposed to help in leading and getting the outcome that the leading subject was supposed to want towards enhancing more efficient academic practices. There was an evaluator who gave comments about the process and outcome. I remember getting appraisals and giving appraisals to others when performance was considered affectively correct. I remember thinking how these practices offered a seductive transcription for leaders to shape and retool academics to conform to neoliberalism or whatever was considered important without using force or domination. It was confusing and I tried to joke about the practices with some colleagues. As I performed these tasks, I discovered that the affective techniques seemed to work because of the way they provided a pre-​written and clear transcription of the leading subject, providing a subtle way for their subordinates to mastery and submit. I wanted to reflect this critically because I believed writing would make visible possibilities that were left without critical notice: I have noticed that in leadership literature it is quite common that the ‘I’ is the central point of activity. Leader does this and that, this is up to the leader, the leader has to do this and that etc. (My reflections from one of the writing assignments, early spring 2015) One thing that puzzled me through the whole training was the idea of leadership as something very individual and individualised –​derived mostly from psychologically and managerially oriented research. (My reflections from one of the writing assignments, late spring 2015) In the end, the whole course showed absence of any critical analysis in challenging the current leadership discourse and how it facilitates the governing of individuals and in creating forms of selfhood, encouraging academics to see themselves as individualised leaders. There was no possibility for collaborative work and no time for critically making sense of what was happening. During the training and in terms of power it became important to realise that, when involved in academic leadership discourses, which I thought I could no longer avoid, you are both conditioned by and 118

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dependent on the prevailing norms, and at the same time you need to find your way ethically and responsibly. Because of the training, I started to ask how to become a leader by simultaneously acknowledging complex forms of power related to it while trying to strengthen my critical perspectives. It was the paradoxical simultaneity of submission and mastery, and the related affective ambivalence, that I eagerly wanted to explore further.

Becoming a gendered leader in the academy In the meantime, and in relation to individualisation, I kept receiving advice and suggestions from senior colleagues (see also Brunila, 2016) that was more or less about exercising authority. This was friendly and sometimes patronising advice given in cafeterias, in hallways, after meetings and in emails by senior scholars, relating to the importance of toughening up, looking as neutral as possible, never showing my weakness, and reminding others how the ‘world was my oyster’ now. I was also asking for ideas and advice for connecting with people and for calling for forms of collaboration. The relationship between academic women and authorship has repeatedly claimed to be difficult (see also Gherardi, 1994; van den Brink and Benschop, 2012; Parsons and Priola, 2013). One central remark was the constant lack of gender perspective (as well as other differences) in the mainstream leadership literature, although gender is a key feature of leadership (see, for example, Asher, 2010; Chin et al, 2007; Blackmore and Sachs, 2000), both as an outcome of and a rationale of it. There is still a lack of research related to women as leaders as well as women positioned as leaders in higher levels of leadership. In leadership discourse, gender becomes an internal matter to the individual, which became clear to me through various academic practices. While more leadership duties were given, I received congratulations from colleagues: You are exactly the right woman for the position. I am so happy that a woman was chosen. We need more women like you. Women like you will go far. It goes without saying that when men were chosen to leadership positions in the university they were not addressed as men but as leaders, demonstrating the position of the woman as the ‘other’ in the leadership discourse. Considering the rather female-​dominated field of education it was a bit surprising that most of the leadership positions were still male-​dominated. Even when I got the prestigious tenure-​track position I became very conscious that at that time I was the only female tenure-​track professor in the faculty. My professorship’s area (social justice and equality) was not 119

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appraised by everyone. I got used to comments challenging the importance of social justice and equality, like below, in a conversation taking place in the mail room. I mentioned the importance of bringing equality perspectives into our teaching activities, and a female senior colleague’s response was very frustrated: ‘Why do you keep repeating equality, equality, equality? Don’t you understand we have many other more important issues to teach than equality?’ Sometimes it was just eye rolling when I brought equality aspects into discussion or requests in meetings to answer on behalf of ‘all women’, ‘sexual minorities’ or ‘racialised or disabled people’. I also got friendly advice about my appearance and the tone of my messages, which was advised to be not too assertive or demanding. I was given examples of how to write emails so that I would not appear too assertive and decisive. I was warned not to appear too aggressive or too weak as a female leader. I was reminded to look positive and smile whenever possible, while I was made aware of how the constant doing of difference related to gender tends to lead to gendered distinctions as basic and enduring dispositions of people (Butler, 1990). I started to get used to feeling isolated. It felt like the survival of the fittest game. I knew I was in an ambivalent position, which could produce various kinds of anxieties. The experiences of various affective ambivalences had already begun when applying for the professorship (Brunila, 2016). These continued as a form of a particular governing strategy of subjectivation, and in particular through the affect of anxiety, which I understood as associated with academic work in the neoliberal order as a socially manufactured affect rather than a personal deficit. Helle Bjerg and Dorthe Staunaes (2011) understand the ‘affect’ as an attempt to appreciate intensities as expressed in the body. In relation to anxiety in the neoliberal academia, the political activists group of the Institute of Precarious Consciousness (IPC) propose a critical stance towards the current celebration of the creative potential that capitalism is supposed to unleash in humans when the boundaries of fixed work frames are lifted and immaterial labour can freely flow. Alternatively, they suggest that precarious neoliberal capitalism’s dominant reactive affect is anxiety. I, with a colleague, wrote about anxiety emerging in the meeting of the individual with the multiple systems of communication that bind individuals to measurements of accounting, to visibilisation, to economic control and to productivity (Brunila and Valero, 2018). One of the most difficult affective encounters that I started to notice was something generally referred to as ‘envy’. Eventually, I started to consider it as an affective outcome of the constant competition in neoliberalism where the few female scholars who became leaders had to be twice as good as men. Sometimes it was just a gaze from head to toe, and on other occasions, it took the form of silence or leaving women in meetings without support. In the competitive male-​dominated academy, envy as an affective encounter 120

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between women is understandable in the highly gendered practices and terms of women lacking the power to influence (see, for example, van den Brink and Benschop, 2009, 2012; Parsons and Priola, 2013). This was something I also wanted to gain –​more power to influence practices I considered problematic. What I chose as a strategy was to find colleagues in similar positions experiencing the same things and to write about it, analyse it, verbalise it. In contrast to isolation, when support and praise was given it made my day because of the feeling of belonging. At the same time this ambivalent affective subjectivation reminded me of the ‘cruel optimism’ that Lauren Berlant (2011) used in understanding and describing the present neoliberal ethos, where people’s attachment to unattainable fantasies of good life have become increasingly difficult to redeem. In other words, cruel optimism occurs when something that you want is actually an obstacle of one’s flourishing. And this was exactly the case with envy and wishing for praise.

How to rethink the academic leadership:​the end of the ‘messy’ journey The mastery and submission. Being both insider and outsider. Being both supported and envied. Being at margins and at centre. Being at space in-​between. (Notes from the diary I wrote during leadership training) In the neoliberal rationality, the leaders seemed to be positioned as neither scholars nor thinkers in the binary theory–​practice. In the discursive and affective encounters of the training, good leaders were like good practitioners and solution-​makers, trusting their intuition rather than theory. This is what the leadership literature regime tends to offer. The fact that no practice is without an implicit set of theories was rarely acknowledged, especially in a wider critical, societal and cultural perspective, which was something “I also tried to mention to the organisers of the training”. Becoming a recognisable leader in academia means learning how to present yourself the ‘right way’ or, in other words, performing academic leadership correctly. Accordingly, once an academic leader is categorised as such, they soon learn how to belong to that particular category, and thus become submissive to their ‘leadership-​ness’. If you don’t succeed in producing the right kind of discourse, the responsibility remains a problem for the individual themself. This represents the cruel optimism of the academic leadership. Although I had not considered leadership discourse much before, it became clear that my understanding of leadership would be driven somewhere else, from perspectives addressing issues of society, culture, power, agency, marginality, otherness and voice. This is why I was actually grateful for the 121

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bizarre training, because it provided me with ideas for more critical thinking. Inspired by the ideas of performativity theory (Butler, 1990), I started to think that the leader is built by the discursively and affectively formed politics and practices that produce the leader. Thinking about leadership this way sends a stronger message that there are no positions outside of discursive and affective power relations, and reflects academic leadership more inclusively. Accordingly, the academic leader takes shape out of this material, and communicates the sense of power that is delegated to them. This insight has the potential to provide a more multidimensional idea related to power and agency. In terms of agency, leadership could be characterised as a particular kind of discourse virtuosity, as a form of competence you perform in order to be heard. This was also partly why I became interested again in the virtuosity discourse in terms of the leadership I got to ‘perform’ during training: In the programme I learned various kinds of leadership discourses, belief-​systems, politics and practices attached to nowadays’ leadership thinking. Because I got access to the ‘leadership regime’, I learned that words do matter when you lead, especially the word ‘strategy’ when used in certain situations. Because the programme gave me access to the leadership discourse I learned how to utilise the discourse in various encounters in order to be heard. It was valuable to learn to speak the leadership discourse in some particular situations. (Extract from the final task, University of Helsinki Unilead programme, 2015) I realise that a great amount of leading will be done by switching and shifting from one affective discourse to another depending on the political situation and the various societal interests. Although this could be considered an obstacle, but when different affective discourses are utilised, leadership as something promoting social justice becomes more possible in contexts that might otherwise be inaccessible. More than anything, to act as a leader means constantly learning to act in various kinds of power relations, as well as utilising them. (Extract from one of the tasks, University of Helsinki Unilead programme, 2015) Because of the training and my experience, I was able to argue that the main problem in the desire and tendency towards ‘a strong individual leader’ is about enhancing power that serves both neoliberalism and inequalities. The neoliberal rationality tends to shape the notion of subjects by enhancing the illusion of individual autonomy as a consequence of the ‘autonomisation’ and ‘accountability’ of the self (Brunila and Valero, 2018). While shaping academic subjects, the purpose of neoliberalism remains seductively disguised: providing legitimation to become more governable and eventually more economically productive subjects. In relation to academic leadership, 122

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this is present and therefore makes it harder to interrupt. The paradoxality is, of course, that although the promise of neoliberal ethos is all about enhancing individualism and freedom of thinking, it actually inadvertently ends up undermining subjectivity and agency by governing the focus towards the pre-​written transcription of the neoliberal ethos. Judith Butler (1997) has written that becoming is no simple or continuous affair, but rather an uneasy practice of repetition and risks, compelled yet incomplete, wavering on the horizon of social being: maybe some accounts of subject and agency could provide a way of understanding agency not as a possession of a leader but as a subject-​in-​process and as the effect and redeployment of power. In other words, if leadership would be considered as a regulated process of repetition taking place in discourses (not as an act derived from individuals), it simultaneously meant that the possibility exists to repeat leadership differently. This kind of thinking gives me hope to find some political meaning from this work. (Extract from one of the tasks of leadership training) And at the same time I was still stuck with leadership wanting to try to shift the position of leader to be more messy, undone, shifting, contradictory and multiple. I was thinking that, accordingly, if academicity is a regulated process of repetition taking place in discourses, it simultaneously means that the possibility exists of repeating it differently as Eva Bendix Petersen (2008) has argued. However, I was quite aware that multidimensionality was easier to think and theorise than to put into action. A typical problem in neoliberalism is related to the attempt to promote collectivity through individualist leadership discourses. In the idealised leadership discourse, ‘an open dialogue and free exchange of meaning in conversational engagement’ is often present. In the university, this is a rather ordinary situation in staff meetings where ‘staff get a chance to be heard’. I was able to lead some of these staff meetings and realised quite soon what the pre-​written transcription of these academic meetings was. The leader, who usually stands in the front of the staff, opens the meeting, provides the agenda they have devised beforehand, and is expected to provide the space for the subordinates to take their subordinate position to speak up, provide perspectives and actively engage. In other words, the colonised are expected to internalise, for the sake of survival, the colonisers and their ways of being and language (see also Asher, 2010). Accordingly, participants who, for example, remain silent or who do not produce academically standard speech are easily interpreted as passive or incompetent, although the silence could be considered a refusal or inability to fit into the pre-​g iven discourses. I could only recall the isolation and 123

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breathlessness I felt when standing in front of the staff. While going through the pre-​written agenda, this was yet again a missed opportunity to challenge the completely individualist leadership discursive practice as problematic. This is why I ended up writing: performing leadership is easily informed by the view that the problem which needs to be addressed is to be handled on an individual level, among individuals who are similarly considered as stable, and coherent (in leadership it is still common to think of this individual as white, highly educated, Western, able, heterosexual male). If the capacity to act would not be considered as a possession of an individual there would be no need for a pre-​existing subject. In the neoliberal order, the ideal human homo economicus upholds the Cartesian view of the subject and knowledge, that is, the binary opposition between the mind and the body, and the former dominating the latter. In this order of things, ‘woman’ and ‘black’ are also ‘marks’ in contrast to the unmarked terms of ‘men’ and ‘white’ (Hall, 2000). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that in terms of academic leadership we do not address questions related to differences such as gender, ethnicity or colour, class, religion or sexuality. Alternatively, if we do, they tend to become forms of identity politics by essentialising differences into personality characteristics instead of understanding how academic practices end up reproducing differences as hierarchical. In the leadership literature, neoliberalism remains silent in terms of differences in the conditions of human opportunities. This silence demonstrates the limits in thinking of the situational and the relational understanding that human subjects become subjects conditioned by limits or opportunities defined intersectionally by age, ethnicity, class, gender, ability, sexuality or mental health (Collins and Bilge, 2016). It would help us to realise that in the binary opposition of both as leaders as well as subordinates we are conditioned by and dependent on the prevailing norms, and at the same time, we need to find our way ethically and responsibly in order to overcome this binary opposition. In other words, the leaders as well as subordinates could be considered more as subjects who constitute themselves and are constituted as experiencing subjects in various different forms of discursive practices. (Notes from leadership training) If only the problems concerning leadership were considered not as objects but rather as the product of different practices, policies and power relations there could be more room for understanding how power works. Interestingly 124

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this would most likely to lead us to question the necessity of the whole position of the leader, its purpose and outcomes. This chapter took a long time to write. While finishing it, I became a full professor and ended up giving up most of my previous faculty leadership tasks, and feeling relieved by this. It was the outcome of a decision to focus on my research and learning to say ‘no’. I might have felt some disappointment because I had become better in unperforming leadership while performing it, but Berlant’s thinking helped me in analysing disappointment and loss as a way cruel optimism had captured my affective attachment with academia. I still remember a close colleague saying to me, ‘Just wait, give it a time and it will get easier after a while’.

Conclusion The main argument of this chapter was to rethink the idea of subjectivity in relation to academic leadership. In performing the leading subject, the most valuable outcome of rethinking leading was to think of subjectivity as constituted in different forms of discursive and affective encounters, as a constant becoming. What is important is to resist thinking and writing about leadership as something that can be synthesised into a singular picture. In leadership discourses, in spite of good intentions, the leading subject cannot simply choose to construct oneself or doings differently, because choosing is also an effect of power. The main challenge is linked to the individualist idea of subjectivity and, in parallel, the neglect of tackling questions of societal differences, inequalities, hierarchies and ethics. To interrupt individualism by enhancing collectivity is especially important nowadays when the neoliberal ethos is shaping academic policies and practices. The neoliberal rationality is in direct conflict with discourses that set out to strengthen, for example, social justice and enable collectivism and people to become actors in academia. I also thought that the possibility of writing what is happening around people and in people would allow me to find ways to act differently. When I look at the situation now, autoethnographic writing, as an act of repositioning, ended up allowing me to make visible the possibility of becoming an academic who is able to stay firm in refusing leadership tasks. References Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Andrew, M. (2019) ‘Double negative: when the neoliberal meets the toxic’, in D. Bottrell and C. Manathunga (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education, Vols I & II, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 59–​81.

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Asher, N. (2010) ‘How does the postcolonial, feminist academic lead? A perspective from the US South’, International Journal of Leadership in Education, 13(1): 63–​76. Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. (2014) ‘Reclaiming discursive practices as an analytic focus: political implications’, Foucault Studies, 17: 173–​92. Batliwala, S. (2011) Feminist Leadership for Social Transformation. Clearing the Conceptual Cloud. www.uc.edu/​cont​ent/​dam/​uc/​ucwc/​docs/​CREA.pdf Bensimon, E.M. and Marshall, C. (2000) ‘Policy analysis for postsecondary education: feminist and critical perspectives’, in J. Glazer-​Raymo, B.K. Townsend and B. Ropers-​Hulman (eds) Women in Higher Education: A Feminist Perspective, Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing, pp 133–​47. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bird, S.R. (2011) ‘Unsettling universities’ incongruous, gendered bureaucratic structures: a case-​study approach’, Gender, Work & Organization, 18(2): 202–​30. Bjerg, H. and Staunaes, D. (2011) ‘Self-​management through shame –​uniting governmentality studies and the “affective turn” ’, ephemera, 12(2): 138–​56. Blackmore, J. and Sachs, J. (2000) ‘Paradoxes of leadership and management in higher education in times of change: some Australian reflections’, International Journal of Leadership in Education, 3(1): 1–​16. Bottrell, D. and Manathunga, C. (2019) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education, Vols I and II, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bronstein, P. (1993) ‘Challenges, rewards, and costs for feminist and ethnic minority scholars’, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 53: 61–​70. Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone Books. Brunila, K. (2016) ‘The ambivalences of becoming a professor in neoliberal academia’, Qualitative Inquiry, 22(5): 386–​94. Brunila, K. and Valero, P. (2018) ‘Anxiety and the making of research(ing) subjects in neoliberal academia’, Subjectivity, 11(1): 74–​89. Brunila, K., Ikävalko, E., Honkasilta, J. and Isopahkala-​Bouret, U. (2020) ‘Enhancing criticality and resistance through teaching in the neoliberal academy’, Subjectivity, 13: 200–​16. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chesler, M., Lewis, A. and Crowfoot, J. (2005) Challenging Racism in Higher Education: Promoting Justice, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Chin, J.-​L ., Lott, B., Rice, J.K. and Sanchez-​H ucles, J. (2007) Women and Leadership: Transforming Visions and Diverse Voices, Hong Kong: Blackwell Publishing. Collins, P.H. and Bilge, S. (2016) Intersectionality, Cambridge, MA and Malden, MA: Polity Press. 126

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Davies, B. (2005) ‘The (im)possibility of intellectual work in neoliberal regimes’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26(1): 1–​14. Edwards, A.M. and Roy, S. (2017) ‘Academic research in the 21st century: maintaining scientific integrity in a climate of perverse incentives and hypercompetition’, Environmental Engineering Science, 34(1): 51–​61. Ford, J. and Harding, N. (2007) ‘Move over management. We are all leaders now’, Management Learning, 38(5): 475–​93. Foucault, M. (1970 [1966]) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books. Gherardi, S. (1994) ‘The gender we think, the gender we do in our everyday organizational lives’, Human Relations, 47(6): 591–​610. Gill, R. (2007) ‘Postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2): 147–​66. Gill, R. (2009) ‘Breaking the silence: the hidden injuries of neo-​liberal academia’, in R. Flood and R. Gill (eds) Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, London: Routledge. http://​platf​orm-​hnu.nl/​ wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2015/​05/​g ill-​break​ing-​the-​sile​nce-​2.pdf Hall, S. (2000) ‘Who needs identity?’, in J. du Gay, P. Evans and P. Redman (eds) Identity: A Reader, London: SAGE, pp 15–​30. Jauhiainen, A., Jauhiainen, A. and Laiho, A. (2009) ‘The dilemmas of the “efficiency university” policy and the everyday life of university teachers’, Teaching in Higher Education, 14(4): 417–​28. Jauhiainen, A., Jauhiainen, A., Laiho, A. and Lehto, R. (2014) ‘Fabrications, time-​consuming bureaucracy and moral dilemmas –​Finnish university employees’ experiences on the governance of university work’, Higher Education Policy, 28(3), 307–​22. Parsons, E. and Priola, V. (2013) ‘Agents for change and changed agents: The micropolitics of change and feminism in the academy’, Gender, Work and Organization, 20(5): 580–​98. Petersen, E.B. (2008) ‘Passionately attached: academic subjects of desire’, in B. Davies (ed) Judith Butler in Conversation: Analyzing the Texts and Talk of Everyday Life, London: Routledge, pp 55–​68. Petersen, E.B. and Davies, B. (2010) ‘In/​difference in the neoliberal university’, Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences, 3(2): 92–​109. Rothenberg, C. (2018) The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, New York: Oxford University Press. Sparkes, A. (2018) ‘Autoethnography comes of age: consequences, comforts, and concerns’, in D. Beach, C. Bagley, C. and S. Marques de Silva (eds) Handbook of Ethnography of Education, London: Wiley, pp 479–​99. Taubman, P. (2007) ‘The tie that binds: learning and teaching in the neoliberal order’, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 4(2): 150–​60.

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Valero, P., Jorgensen, K.M. and Brunila, K. (2019) ‘Affective subjectivation in the precarious neoliberal academia’, in D. Bottrell and C. Manathunga (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education, Volume I: Seeing Through the Cracks, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 135–​54. van den Brink, M. and Benschop, Y. (2012) ‘Slaying the seven-​headed dragon: the quest for gender change in academia’, Gender, Work and Organization, 19(1): 71–​92. Vostal, F. (2016) Accelerating Academia: The Changing Structure of Academic Time, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ylöstalo, H. and Brunila, K. (2018) ‘Exploring the possibilities of gender equality pedagogy in an era of marketization’, Gender & Education, 30(7): 917–​33.

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Friendship in academia: the moral economy of academic work Erika Andersson Cederholm, Carina Sjöholm and Dianne Dredge

Introduction Having friends at work, or friendly colleagues, may seem like a condition for a good working environment. It may contribute to a supportive atmosphere and a sense of wellbeing for the individual (see Bach Pedersen and Lewis, 2012). In certain types of work, friendship is not only supportive in an emotional sense but could also be strategic, particularly in work where the boundaries between the private self and the professional are blurred. Such boundary blurring often arises in academia, where the difference between friends, friendly colleagues and networks is not clear, if it exists at all. For many academics, their research networks and friendships are intertwined. Participating in conferences may be a way to sustain or widen a research network, as can socialising with colleagues who also are friends. Furthermore, academic labour is not confined to the actual workplace, such as a specific department or university, but flows into international connections and networks. Such networking can be experienced as a way of cultivating friendly as well as interesting and useful relationships –​as part of academic and creative freedom –​and may add value to the academic’s professional work. But this networking could also be regarded as a means to strategically accumulate social capital outside the actual workplace. In this mode, networking can be perceived as a combination of economic and moral imperatives, as an instrumental performance or working skill that could be measured and quantified as capital. Friendship in academic work seems to span different value spheres, from the realm of emotional bonding and collegial exchange to an economised or even marketised realm of quantifying network performance and social capital (see the notion of ‘quantified academia’ by Juhana Venäläinen in Chapter 10, this book). Relationships can be emotional as well as instrumental, and moral obligations intertwine with a calculable ‘what’s in it for me?’ In this complex and boundary-​less work environment, the value and character of work relationships are seldom openly defined or articulated. Instead, boundaries between different types of relationships are negotiated in situated 129

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social interactions, such as in the way we expect a colleague to reciprocate a favour to indicate friendship or the way we negotiate work hours with a head of department and hence enact our professional roles. Recognising how boundaries are being drawn or not drawn between categories of relationships and how these relationships are experienced is illustrative for understanding the social and economic organisation of the academic workplace. This recognition is also illustrative for understanding the affective organisation of academic work and how experiences of close relationships are deeply embedded in the moral economy of higher educational institutions. Social interactions are experienced and felt, indicating that the moral economy of academia is a social and emotional economy. This feeling becomes particularly tangible when there is a mismatch between different logics of exchange and accompanying expectations, as when favours or other forms of non-​paid work are not reciprocated or acknowledged, or expectations of repayment in working hours never occur. Eva Illouz (2007) has termed the process in which emotional and economic discourses and practices mutually shape each other ‘emotional capitalism’. Against a backdrop of an increased marketisation of intimate life, or emotional capitalism, one could assume that boundaries between intimate relationships and relationships viewed as professional and/​or instrumental are being renegotiated at universities as well as in other areas of society. This trend may influence how academics experience, understand and value their work, and affect the prevalence and character of mismatches between different forms of exchange. Within the framework of emotional capitalism, which can be broadly interpreted as a marketised logic permeating all facets of life (see Chapter 1, this book, and the similar concept of ‘affective capitalism’), it is thus relevant to understand how such societal changes affect the (re)negotiation of personal relationships, and how academics themselves are deeply involved in both blurring and demarcating boundaries between different logics of exchange. Through the lens of friendship, we aim to shed light on how the moral economy of academic work plays out in the way academics understand, experience and ‘do’ relationships at work. We argue that the experience of intimate relationships and the way that they are sustained and enacted in everyday working life have implications for the flow of power relations that shape academic work, in both teaching and research. We also bring into the discussion the phenomenon of friendship in relation to the marketisation of higher education. Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie (1997) call this ‘academic capitalism’ –​a new circuit of capital accumulation based on the metrics of managerialism, productivity and performance that disrupts the classical liberal-​humanistic university’s attention to knowledge accumulation. We ask what possible consequences this academic capitalism may have for structures of support, and in particular, in potentially undermining reciprocal 130

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collegiality –​an academic gift economy –​as a specific form of social and economic exchange. Theoretically, we draw on the notion of ‘relational work’ developed by Viviana Zelizer (2005, 2013). Relational work can be defined as a form of ongoing social negotiation of the value of and boundaries between various types of social relationships in relation to different forms of social and economic exchange. In this chapter, we also depart from the assumption that many areas in life, in which the academic working environment is an illustrative example, are characterised by tensions between different forms of social and economic exchange. It can be depicted as a tension between different value spheres, or, as we suggest, as a continuum of reciprocity based on personal friendship or varying by degree from informal/​formal reciprocal collegiality to a marketised form of exchange where social relationships are counted as capital and commensurable in economic terms on the other end (see Andersson Cederholm and Åkerström, 2016). The analysis in this chapter is based on interviews and conversations with academics from various disciplines and career levels, and will illustrate how they make sense of these relationships, experience them and mark –​or blur –​boundaries among types of relationships, contexts and situations.

Theoretical framework Networking and friendship at work Previous studies of personal relationships in working environments such as academia have often focused on networking. These have highlighted the notion of capital in analysing subtle social dynamics and the accumulation of different forms of economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital that academics value (Bourdieu, 1988). Critical perspectives have demonstrated how access to capital, such as valuable personal contacts, financial resources and prestige, varies with gender, ethnicity and class (see Behtoui and Leivestad, 2019). Studies taking a bird’s eye perspective on networking as a social phenomenon have highlighted the role of networking in social capital accumulation, arguing that ‘network sociality’ is an emerging professional skill (Wittel, 2001). For instance, networking through travelling has turned into a goal in itself, and ‘international collaboration’ thus becomes a metric in assessing academic performance (Ackers, 2008). In working environments, where networking has become a parameter of performance, the value of personal relationships may above all be articulated in the form of a marketised vocabulary, such as ‘useful’, ‘generating value’ and ‘adding to my network capital’. This articulation is also in line with and perhaps reinforced by the perspective of networking studies that often depart from the assumption that networking is instrumental in one way or another, framed in terminology such as ‘social capital’. In this study, we have chosen 131

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a different point of departure than most network studies by focusing on the inherently personal notion of friendship. By considering the whole palette of work-​related personal relationships to include intimate relationships, we analyse if and how distinctions between ‘networks’ and ‘friendship’ are being made in the first place, and whether some relationships are interpreted and articulated in instrumental terms and some depicted as purely emotional. One of the few and exploratory studies to focus on friendship relationships (including romantic/​sexual) in the academic workplace has uncovered an interesting variation on how academic workers both demarcate and/​or actively blur the distinction between what is regarded as ‘genuine’ friendship and as collegiality (Emmeche, 2015). In some academic workplaces, unclear norms for where the line should be drawn have resulted in more or less articulated avoidance of nepotism or favouritism (Emmeche, 2015). Simultaneously, in many other types of workplace, recruitment through friends and relatives is common (Pettinger, 2005), and the phenomenon of commercial friendship, particularly in the service industries, has been highlighted (Price and Arnould, 1999). This form of friendship has similarities to historical forms of relationships, where commercial relationships were considered quite compatible with friendship (Hill and McCarthy, 2004). Hence, previous studies of workplace friendship highlight different and contradictory historical traces of friendship ideals, and how the division between the private and the public is to be understood and practised. How these ideals are enacted in working life today is related to shifting views on friendship in Western societies (Spencer and Pahl, 2006; Österberg, 2010), and to specific cultural and organisational characteristics of the workplace and the character of work itself. One historical and cultural dimension that we would like to highlight as relevant for understanding how close social relationships are experienced and practised at work is the notion of ‘passion’ in relation to work. Studies in the field of cultural and creative work have pointed out how ideals of ‘passionate work’ have paved the way for blurred boundaries between work and life (Gill, 2014), as well as reinforcing precarious working conditions where individuals are voluntarily working for free (Arvidsson et al, 2010). The double-​edged sword of ‘passionate work’ is illustrative of academic labour as well (see Cannizzo, 2018). Boundaries between the role of being a ‘creative’ researcher and the role of being a civil servant in teaching and administrative roles are constantly negotiated. These negotiations occur not only in the concrete meaning of academics struggling with allocating hours to different tasks, but also when it comes to work identity more generally, and how academics cultivate and sustain relationships. As we will show in the analysis, academics often distinguish between colleagues in research networks, with whom the relationship could be described as relatively informal and voluntary and sometimes close, and relations with 132

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colleagues in teaching or administration, which are described as more professionalised. Hence, the intrinsic value of creative work could be further reinforced by the emotional value of friendship in such research networks. However, informal relationships could be both inclusive and exclusionary, and unclear boundaries between different forms of relationships and value spheres could pave the way for relational mismatches. The double-​edged sword of ‘passionate work’ is thus not only related to the willingness of academics to work for free, but also to the possibility that the benefits of close relationships in academic work could easily become otherwise when competition for calculable resources such as funding, positions and paid working hours is pressing. We suggest that related to the ideals of creative research is the Humboldtian ideal of the university as characterised by close ties between research and teaching, with an emphasis on a tight community of researching teachers and students, cultivating broad intellectual knowledge (Macheridis et al, 2020; see also Östling, 2018). As Macheridis et al (2020) discuss, the Humboldtian ideal of a tight research and teaching relationship is promoted in university policy documents, while simultaneously, higher education faces increasing pressure to adapt to a marketised need for graduate employability. These conflicting demands influence the way teachers understand the relationship between research and teaching and their own role as academics. We highlight that it may also influence the way academics cultivate and sustain personal relationships. A clearer division between research and teaching, reinforced by a process of marketisation in higher education, may have a self-​generating tendency if the character of the social relationship is experienced as different in these two realms, and the academic worker socially identifies as belonging to one or the other group. Another condition of academic labour today that may affect how workers form relationships is the globalisation of the academic workplace. Here, friendships can be de-​localised and extend across national boundaries. Transnational encounters facilitated by higher education policies, staff mobility programmes, co-​authoring, conferences and other networking activities can serve to internationalise friendship networks (European Commission, 2015). Conversely, in their work in a Norwegian university, Marit Greek and Kari Mari Jonsmoen (2020) observed that language and cultural barriers can also serve to intensify local friendships within institutions because of experiences non-​local academics share as ‘outsiders’. These and similar studies foreground how structural and globalised work conditions, processes of marketisation, socio-​cultural norms around the division between private and public roles and ideals related to the nature of creative and independent work and research and teaching are important to consider when studying how people ‘do friendship’ at work. 133

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Gift exchanges and relational work As mentioned, a marketised language may be used when networking is discussed, both among academics in everyday work and in research. In our analysis, many social relationships are not referred to as ‘capital’, although it is obvious that people need the support of colleagues, personally and professionally. Personal favours and repayment seem to belong to the spheres of friendship or collegial reciprocity to sustain and cultivate relationships. These are the types of exchanges that are difficult to valuate and articulate in quantitative and commensurable terms. Such practices belong to the informal and –​in working environments –​non-​articulated and thus hidden realm of moral reciprocity. The academic workplace is characterised by an institutional form of favour exchanges, as in the form of the academic peer-​review system and collegial assessments. These traditional forms of gift exchange intersect with both informal friendship or collegial reciprocity and marketised relationships where work and relationships have a price tag –​not necessarily in pecuniary terms, but in other quantifiable modes such as citation index and rankings. The exchange of favours is also an important dimension of an informal gift economy. Such exchanges exist outside the requirements of paid work and formalised work roles or workload models, although they can be institutionalised, such as mentoring programmes. The intersection of different forms of exchange, gift economies and market relations is not unique to the academic workplace. Previous studies of gift economies within modern market economies have highlighted the moral economy of interpersonal exchanges in relation to more formalised market exchanges (Cheal, 1988; Godbout, 1998). David Cheal, for instance, defines the gift economy as ‘a system of redundant transactions within a moral economy, which makes possible the extended reproduction of social relations’ (1988: 19), and suggests that it is not necessarily a separate sphere outside a formal economy or work relations but is rather integrated into all spheres of life. Although intertwined with formal work relationships, a gift economy operates with a different logic than an economy that valorises the exchange in either monetary or other quantifiable and measurable terms. A gift exchange aims at strengthening social relationships, and reciprocity can never be openly articulated as an obligation (Godbout, 1998). Gift exchanges in academic workplaces are thus inherently informal and non-​articulated. The silence and fluidity of these gift exchanges may increase vulnerability to exploitation. Relationships that are socially defined as friendship are thus embedded with expectations that may align or collide with formal work roles. The blurriness and complexities that characterise workplaces, as well as markets, where gift economic exchanges are intertwined with market relationships, often evokes an intense ‘relational work’. 134

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The notion of ‘relational work’ developed by Viviana Zelizer (2005, 2013) represents an interactionist approach in economic sociology to the study of how boundaries between different forms of relationships –​economic and non-​economic –​are negotiated. Relational work often implies an effort to reduce ambiguity and to draw lines between different forms of relationships, such as between ‘true’ friends and business partners in professional networks. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, we suggest that relational work can be theorised as a continuum –​from informal friendship-​based favour exchanges to institutionalised gift exchanges in the form of collegial exchange to marketised academic work valorised in calculable terms (see Andersson Cederholm and Åkerström, 2016). The structural contradictions of both collaboration and competition prevailing in the academic workplace (Emmeche, 2015), and foregrounded in studies on emotions in academia (Bloch, 2012), may further reinforce the tensions and ambiguities involved. Moreover, attempts to understand relational work also require recognition of the importance of the affective politics of neoliberal higher education management. Kristiina Brunila and Paola Valero (2018) argue for more attention to the affective impacts of neoliberalism, including anxiety, stress, guilt, insecurity, competition and shame along with passion, commitment, enthusiasm and pride, which all influence relational work. We will demonstrate that marketised forms of exchange and ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitudes work in combination with the unspoken and reciprocal moral logic of gift exchanges. All of this interaction takes place within a working culture infused with ideals and norms of ‘creative work’, which paves the way for interpretive misalignments, relational mismatches and potential conflicts. The unspoken and thus hidden character of gift exchanges may increase vulnerability to exploitation, either actual or perceived, when gift giving is not reciprocated. This outcome may be particularly precarious if a marketised logic of exchange undermines traditions and structures of collegial exchange that have been part of the culture of many universities, especially among higher education institutions that nurture ideals of autonomous creative research.

Approach and methods This chapter relies on data from an ongoing study of friendship in academia. The analysis presented here is based on seven in-​depth recorded interviews conducted in 2019 and on 10 informal conversations with university researchers, individually and in the context of a seminar, when the study was presented at an international conference the same year. Four of the interviews were with academics at Swedish universities, and interviews were also conducted with one researcher at a US university and two researchers working at Australian universities. In the process of selecting interviewees, 135

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our aim was for heterogeneity in gender, national/​ethnic background and academic career level. Traditions of co-​authorship and collegial collaborations may differ in countries and by various disciplinary traditions, which we also kept in mind when selecting interviewees. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The interviewees were guaranteed anonymity and gave written informed consent. All names in the interview excerpts used in this chapter are fictitious. We interpreted the interviews as ‘active’, in which our interviewees co-​ constructed a narrative in interaction with the interviewer (Holstein and Gubrium, 1995). Our interviews typically started with opening questions on what the interviewee ‘did at work’, with the aim of encouraging elaborated accounts (Riessman, 2008). This approach often led into a topic that dealt with the interviewee’s academic position, tasks related to various work roles, and the division between work and life generally. This discussion was typically followed by the overall topic of relationships, how these were experienced and practised, and where these interactions ‘took place’. We were also interested in dilemmas and possible conflicts, such as ‘when things did not work so smoothly’, to highlight normative and taken-​for-​granted ways of being and acting. Because the very mention of the normatively loaded concept ‘friendship’ triggers specific associations, our aim was for the interviewee’s own understanding of the concept. There are various cultural and social norms around friendship and around what is considered appropriate when it comes to ‘doing’ and showing friendship at work. We often used the more neutral concept of ‘close relationship’ in the interviews, with the intention of encouraging interviewees to talk about experiences of romantic and/​or sexual relationships as well, because ‘friendship’ was often distinguished from love relationships. Given our interest in the academics’ own interpretation and practices of various types of relationships, the first theme in our analysis was to identify the meaning ascribed to forms of relationships and how they are typified and categorised. The second theme was to identify tensions and ambiguity and how these are played out and concretised in specific interactive situations, illustrated and conceptualised in the analysis as ‘thick situations’ and ‘invisible gifts’. The following analysis is structured according to these two overall themes.

The meaning and making of friendship Boundaries and categories When talking about the various relationships that the interviewees are engaged in at work, all of them mentioned various friends that they had. Having friends or developing friendships at work seemed self-​evident to them. Caroline, for instance, is an associate professor at a Swedish university, 136

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and began her response by emphasising the ‘boundary-​less’ workplace: ‘I have so many good and close friends in academia’. To her, friendship was not connected with the division between private life and work. Caroline is married to an associate professor in the same discipline as hers, in the humanities, and although she said that she had many friends outside academia, close friendship was very much present in her work sphere. However, during the course of the conversation, she spontaneously made a distinction, which was quite typical among the interviewees. This was not between the work and non-​work private spheres but between relationships within the academic workplace –​primarily between research relations and ‘other’ types of relationships: I would like to say that research relations are far less formalised [than teaching and administrative work]. They are driven by something else. ... In research I have the privilege of choosing people, because we like each other, we can laugh together, have dinner and go out after work. ... But I don’t have to do that with people I teach with, we don’t even have to like each other. This boundary became gradually discernible and reflected on during the interviews. Some interviewees, such as Marge, an associate professor working in Australia, used the categories ‘friend’ and ‘colleague’ to distinguish between different qualities in the relationships in a rather categorical way: There is a big difference between a friend and a colleague. A friend is someone you can share a laugh, empathise, be vulnerable with. Colleagues –​I have reservations about trust with colleagues. It’s more about a collaboration but I wouldn’t count on anything more. It’s instrumental, that’s all. ... I prefer to publish with friends because they will treat me well. Colleagues? Well, they are in the department, and we kind of coexist and collaborate at a functional level on teaching and administration and the like. There seemed to be a distinction being made between different roles within academia and the different relationships connected to these roles. In part, but not always, this distinction appeared to be related to the division between a more clearly professionalised role as a teacher and administrator and a less defined, less formalised role as a researcher. Furthermore, the relatively voluntary dimension in research relations, in combination with the less formalised character of those relationships, probably contributed to the experience that these roles were different. It seemed to be a common experience that research colleagues were freely chosen, although the motives for choosing them may vary. To Caroline, the 137

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distinction between colleagues and friends was blurred throughout her career, at least when it came to finding research collaborations. But she also had an explanation for it. She described a situation involving a conflict between her and a colleague who was also her friend. They were competing for the same position, and Caroline got the job, which was the starting point for a toxic relationship that lasted for many years. Caroline described the situation as emotionally very painful and also as an explanation for why she now wanted to have only research colleagues whom she could trust and really like, and that she had stopped looking at people’s CVs. Interestingly, we showed an interview excerpt from this conversation at a seminar in an academic conference, and one of the participants commented, in a somewhat resentful way, that not everybody could ‘afford’ to not look at people’s CVs and to be strategic. This researcher further pointed out that younger researchers in particular were often forced to be strategic and instrumental in how they chose partners for research. This comment, as well as Caroline’s story, shows the delicate relational work going on and that academics may experience themselves being ‘caught’ in a specific, calculable process of cultivating relationships. Marge’s self-​reflection on her own balancing between opportunism and instrumentality on the one hand, and what she called ‘the moral compass’ on the other hand, is another illustration of the emotional wellbeing put into play in such balancing work: Where friendship goes wrong, it leads you to be devastated. It can be just a little wrong, and we have been able to fix it up later. Where things have gone mightily wrong, our ideas have been taken and used in a conference and a presentation that was inappropriate. It’s got a lot to do with moral compass and how you should and should not treat other people. I have deliberately been instrumental. We all have. I started my career being an apprentice, and I put up with a lot of shit. I had to be able to achieve the publications and my moral compass developed by reflecting on what I was doing. Some apprentices, or PhD students, simply don’t have or don’t develop that moral compass. In line with the discussion in Chapter 1 in this book, this comparison can be seen as an illustration of how affective power relations related to academic capitalism take hold in a seductive manner, and of an experience of not having any choice, ‘making academics act, know and feel in a certain way while reducing human condition to human capital’ (Chapter 1). Distinctions and boundaries drawn as the interviews progressed were not just related to various roles and work tasks such as teaching and research. Although our interviewees described close friendships with colleagues in their own department, they seemed to be making a distinction between how they socialised with people who were formal colleagues in the physical 138

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workplace and colleagues who belonged to a wider network, often a research-​oriented international network. It seemed to be different between employees in the same organisation and those having a more informal relationship in a network. To several of the interviewees, this separation was clearly spatial –​there were the network colleagues they met only at conferences or outside the workplace, and there were those they met only in the workplace. This was the case for Julia. Julia works in the natural science faculty in a Swedish university as a senior lecturer, but has experience in various disciplines, including the social sciences. With the exception of one particular colleague, another woman at the same department to whom she was very close, ‘almost like family, as sisters’, she clearly separated the way she socialised with her research network from colleagues in the same organisation. She experienced her current workplace as very competitive and hierarchical, where people were not really interested in what the other colleagues in the department were doing. When the interview raised the topic of reciprocity and giving and receiving among colleagues, Julia was very explicit about how she had gradually learned how to demand certain things –​a form of repayment –​from the department. This was after a long explanation and different stories about deceit and betrayal, and that she had now learned the hard way that you can’t just give without requiring something back. ‘I am not some helping lady here’, she pointed out. But this mundane struggle to be acknowledged for the work she was doing seemed to be specific for departmental work, and she clearly separated this form of reciprocity from her network colleagues. Julia’s story points to an instrumental form of reciprocity or gift giving within the department. This form of gift giving or favour exchange seemed to be distinguished from friendship-​based reciprocity and was depicted as potentially exclusionary by our interviewees. Zuleika, who is a professor at a US university, interpreted the instrumental gift giving in gendered terms: There are gifting arrangements that happen in academia that when we collaborate it’s no longer about the pursuit of knowledge. ... It’s very uncomfortable and not what academia should be about. Bill [a fictitious name] is very instrumental, for example, and he knew exactly how to get to professor even if it meant coopting other people’s ideas and using student labour without acknowledging it. Because I don’t play that game, I tend to get a lot of the teaching and the difficult students that need more care. Making friends in academia thus seemed to be ongoing relational work, where a tension between instrumentally ‘playing the game’ and the valuing of personal 139

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trustworthy relationships was played out. There were primarily two types of discernible boundaries: one between the more professionalised role of being a teacher and/​or administrator and the more informal collaboration with research colleagues. Research is more clearly in line with the idea of ‘creative work’, which is often associated with individual autonomy and choice, and passionate commitment. The other boundary is, on the one hand, between other employees in the workplace –​within the same organisation –​and the wider network, on the other hand. The interviewees sometimes described this as ‘separate worlds’, where the ‘other’ world was quite often an international network. Within the organisation, employees were more obviously competing for the same resources, sometimes positions, or, as Zuleika put it: ‘That’s why I value my global friendships much more. There is no competition and there’s a stronger sense of common interest’. Apart from competing for general resources and recognition in the department, academics may not be in the same field of research as their colleagues. Julia, for instance, mentioned that except for the woman to whom she was very close in her department, she did not have much in common with the others when it came to research. When talking about different types of relationships and the subtle distinctions being made between categories, the conversation often evolved into the practicalities of doing friendship. This was characterised by familiarity and ease in the relationship, such as ‘knowing exactly what she is thinking about, we can fill in each other’s words’, or caring practices, such as ‘I say “how are you?” and notice that there seems to be something that bothers her … then coming back’, or doing ‘leisure-​related things’ at times and places outside the physical and time boundaries of the workplace, such as ‘going for a drink’, going to the gym together, hiking together, cooking or talking about things other than work-​related activities. One researcher said that he and his (male) friends used to go to conferences together and then stay an extra couple of days to socialise and engage in leisure-​oriented activities. The ongoing and often subtle negotiation of boundaries and categories of friendship points to a blurring among conventional categories of ‘personal friends’, ‘network’ and ‘colleagues’. The emotional experience of being close to someone and being friends is not simply related to these common categories but could be experienced in all types of relations. However, structural dimensions such as competition for resources and positions, the degree of professionalisation and formalisation of various work roles and norms of creative work do play a role and give rise to various boundary negotiations. Thick situations and invisible gift giving Boundary negotiations could be very subtle and boundaries sometimes so blurred as to make it difficult to socially define the nature of a relationship. 140

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One type of situation that becomes particularly ambiguous is what we call ‘thick situations’. These are often emotionally intense, with several layers of meaning and unclear normative guidelines. Caroline, for instance, described the death of a young colleague. The department arranged a memorial ceremony. Caroline was a friend of the late colleague and was very pleased that the department had arranged a ceremony. However, the ceremony seemed to stir ambivalent emotions and contrary reactions: Then there was a situation, both at the memorial ceremony we had at work and at the funeral. … I didn’t think it was so obvious but still … a bit of a hierarchy … among those who cried most and knew her best, the closest friends were those who showed most despair. And still, I don’t think it was a big problem but someone might think it was a bit awkward. ‘How much grief can I show?’ as a colleague. ‘How close was I?’ someone might have asked. This is an extraordinary type of situation. However, thick situations could also be happy occasions, such as birthday celebrations or colleagues getting married or having a child. These are thick situations because they highlight the ambiguities involved in friendship relationships at work. While some departments seemed to have formalised celebrations such as 50th birthdays and retirement celebrations, there seemed to be an ongoing negotiation over the boundaries between the private non-​work sphere and the work sphere that was never given but always ambivalent. Workplace friendships did not have the common ritualised forms of friendship-​making as in the non-​work realm. In addition, a subtle but normative distinction was brought to light in thick situations that professional roles and private roles should not be too mixed. There seemed to be a social danger lurking that may cause the uncomfortable situations that Caroline described in the example with the memorial celebration. Thick situations demonstrate this ambiguity perhaps more clearly than other forms of social occasions in the workplace. Apart from these situational factors, there are also structural sources of ambiguity and tension. In particular, formal gift economic exchanges, such as peer-​review systems and the more or less systematic exchange of examiners and committee members between institutions, are often intertwined with informal personal gift exchanges and market-​related types of exchange. In some contexts, higher education is increasingly marketised –​students pay fees, funding is linked to student placement and completion rates, students are referred to as ‘consumers’, and funding is incentivised through metrics. Branding and market sentiment is influenced by students who have an interest in returning evaluations that inflate the perceived value of their university. Market logics underpin and reinforce an instrumental orientation 141

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to academic work, where relationship building in underpinned by a ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitude. In academia, the informal and individualised form of gift giving seems to span different types of work relationships, and these may change over time. Researchers describe administrators who ‘give a little extra’ to help them out with tricky or time-​consuming formalities because of friendship loyalty rather than collegial duties. They also describe how researchers in the same network give and take by offering co-​authorship, participation in research applications or simply valuable information exchange, such as about available positions or funding. There are, however, numerous examples from our interviewees where gifts were not reciprocated. One type of ambiguous situation is when one party realises that the gift being given has not been recognised as a gift, which we have termed ‘the invisible gift’. Julia described how she often engaged in collective department work, such as evaluations and writing applications for research groups, but that she seldom got any credit, acknowledgment or any kind of repayment for that type of work. Although she participated in the preparations and discussions of new research applications, she was finding that it was not guaranteed that she would eventually receive research hours in her workload. However, she recalled a recent situation of being surprised that the head of the department had shown appreciation or a form of acknowledgment. Julia had asked for a meeting with the head to explain why she thought some things needed to change in the department. The response to her concern was not in the form of an active ‘thank you’ but rather in the form of ‘shame’, that is, an embodied but not articulated apology. Julia’s own interpretation was that the head of the department had, for once, actually listened to her. That was a form of repayment, she thought, because she had previously helped him with a specific urgent document. Her story shows that her ‘help’ and her ‘gifts’, in the form of collective engagement with department issues that were beyond her formal work role, were normally invisible or taken for granted. The exception was in this specific case, where the emotional expression of shame made her realise that her department head was giving something back, that he had acknowledged her engagement and work. However, in her workplace, non-​reciprocity and failure to acknowledge gift giving were things that she experienced as normalised. Julia explained that in her department, there were many colleagues who “just take. Who come to me and ask ‘Julia, what is your opinion about this ...’ and then they just take my advice and my time and I get zero back”. Similar experiences were shared by some of the other interviewees, such as when Zuleika said, ‘Because I don’t play that game, I tend to get a lot of the teaching and the difficult students that need more care’. As we mentioned, gift giving was sometimes experienced as exclusionary, either because one 142

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party in the situation was not part of a reciprocal interaction that contained particular forms of favour exchanges, or because the favours in the form of extra work or engagements were not acknowledged as such, and were simply taken for granted in that work environment (see Kalm, 2019).

Conclusion Looking at academic labour through the lens of friendship, with an analytical focus on the tension between different forms of social exchange, allows us first, to bring into focus the ways in which the marketisation of higher education influences affective experiences and relationships in this realm. Second, it draws attention to the roles that may be in play in the production of marketised social relationships and forms of exchange. Third, it considers affect as a central dimension in the way academic labour is organised, and the ways in which it may be integral to the contestation and reinforcement of academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). In our research, we have come across several examples of emotionally devastating conflicts and friendship break-​ups. Some of our interviewees themselves encountered these conflicts in specific competitive situations, for positions, funding or other resources or advantages. In our study, we heard stories of stealing, plagiarism, former friends who were not loyal in conflicts that they could leverage to their own advantage, and other forms of deceit or betrayal. People had blocked emails from certain others or refused to have anything to do with a particular colleague ever again. However, in this analysis, we have focused on the more subtle forms of tension, such as misalignment, non-​reciprocated gifts and disappointments rather than on open conflicts. These subtle tensions are the things that are more difficult to pin down. They are more ambivalent, and it is often not possible to openly accuse someone of having done wrong or even of having broken norms. Our examples belong to the more subtle and complex area of affective ambivalence. Norms related to the character and boundaries of relationships are not clear, are often not articulate, or perhaps are conflicting. This analysis of friendship reveals considerable tension underpinning an increasingly commodified academic labour force. Hence, in this type of social context we can find lively relational work, a constant negotiation and efforts to draw and redraw boundaries around relationships and define what type of reciprocity and means of exchange are considered appropriate. The autonomy and presumed freedom in academic research influence how relationships are cultivated. There is a tension between highly individualised passionate work and collective efforts, as well as between individual becoming of the academic self and the collective performance of the organisation. Individual researchers often need co-​researchers and co-​authors, and the 143

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division of labour is frequently regulated by codes of ethics, academic integrity and a more or less formalised or balanced reciprocity about who is doing what. Although some regulations such as written co-​author ethical guidelines do exist, the delicate forms of reciprocity are largely based on informal codes of conduct and trust. The informal character of these relationships is probably the background to our interviewees’ experiences of close relationships and friendship in this type of work, and the perception that these types of relationships are different from more formalised and professionalised roles and relationships at the university. It is not as simple as that, however. Relationships between research colleagues who are working in the same organisation seem to be different than those between network colleagues. Hence, a marketised university seems to reinforce individualisation, distance and competition in its relationships. Personal advance is commonly pursued over collective effort. Being physically close, even working in the same corridor, does not necessarily encourage collegiality or even simple forms of socialising. Overall, boundaries for friendship seem to be floating between work and private life and across various work roles and spatial and organisational workplaces. However, the norms and ideals of creative research work, as well as the competitive structures of the academic workplace, do seem to play an important role in how academics experience friendship. In academic work, many work tasks do not count as paid work or appear on formal workload models. These include mentoring, reviewing papers and giving feedback on presentations. All teachers and researchers are expected to engage in this type of work, and often willingly do it as part of the job. Formalised gift exchanges of this kind often do not take place within a department but rather between departments or actors in a wider research network or academic society, at institutional level. These services belong to the credentialing realm, a form of ‘congealed’ service to be ‘cashed in’ in the future, not in money, but in merits and credentials (see Gerber, 2017). These credentialising services may also be conducted at department level, and among colleagues in the workplace. However, gifts and favour exchanges are not always acknowledged. These are invisible gifts, where academics give away work without any form of repayment, and without acknowledgment. There seems to be a misalignment here, a lack of acknowledgement or ignorance of the gift system at department level, at least when it is non-​ formalised. Still, an informal gift system of exchange that is close to friendship reciprocity seems to flourish among certain research relationships, particularly those that are based on mutual exchange. Why do these misalignments, disappointments and resentments exist among academics? Why do they give something with no return, not even a ‘thank you’? It seems to be a recurrent topic of concern among academics, and thus not only individual misunderstanding. Some work seems to be 144

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invisible. Studies of gender relationships in academia have pointed out that women’s work is often more invisible than men’s, and that women perform more of the collective ‘academic household work’ (Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, 2017; Kalm, 2019). Gendered structures may not be the only reason, however, although they may reinforce inequality among academics. As many scholars argue, academic work is increasingly being ruled by new public management structures dominated by a market logic (Hanley, 2005). Academic capitalism reinforces quantification and metrics, which entails the need to specify and articulate the worth, or value, of specific work tasks. This is quite contrary to the logic of gift exchanges, where, as Jacques Godbout states: ‘The magic of the gift can only operate as long as the underlying rules are not formulated’ (1998: 5). Relationships are built on the logic of exchange, which can never be an open requirement or specified in quantity but is based on norms of moral balance. If colleagues or heads of departments are locked into market-​based forms of interaction, the gifts will remain invisible unless the employee openly requires ‘hours’ or an increased salary or other quantified forms of return on investment in time and effort. However, this demand would probably undermine collegiality, and for many academics, the very basis for engagement and the sharing and accumulation of knowledge. If the cultural and social basis for gift economic exchange disappears in the academic workplace, we are left with small and exclusive individualised clusters of close friends, loyal to their friends but seeing others as either competitors or strategic business partners, and nothing in between. Networking may become increasingly instrumental, and research collegiality becomes social capital in a purely marketised meaning. Coming back to our continuum, apart from a traditional and highly formalised and structured gift exchange such as peer reviewing, situated in the middle, the other forms of relationships will move to the extreme ends. What they have in common, however, is a highly individualised basis for collaboration. References Ackers, L. (2008) ‘Internationalisation, mobility, and metrics: a new form of indirect discrimination?’, Minerva, 46: 411–​35. Andersson Cederholm, E. and Åkerström, M. (2016) ‘With a little help from my friends –​relational work in leisure-​related enterprises’, The Sociological Review, 64(4): 748–​65. Arvidsson, A., Malossi, G. and Naro, S. (2010) ‘Passionate work? Labour conditions in the Milan fashion industry’, Journal for Cultural Research, 14(3): 295–​309. Bach Pedersen, V. and Lewis, S. (2012) ‘Flexible friends? Flexible working time arrangements, blurred work–​life boundaries and friendship’, Work, Employment & Society, 26(3): 464–​80.

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Behtoui, A. and Leivestad, H.H. (2019) ‘The “stranger” among Swedish “homo academicus” ’, Higher Education, 77: 213–​28. Bloch, C. (2012) Passion and Paranoia: Emotions and the Culture of Emotions in Academia, Farnham: Ashgate. Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brunila, K. and Valero, P. (2018) ‘Anxiety and the making of research(ing) subjects in neoliberal academia’, Subjectivity, 11: 74–​89. Cannizzo, F. (2018) ‘ “You’ve got to love what you do”: academic labour in a culture of authenticity’, The Sociological Review, 66(1): 91–​106. Cheal, D. (1988) The Gift Economy, London and New York: Routledge. Emmeche, C. (2015) ‘The borderology of friendship in academia’, AMITY: The Journal of Friendship Studies, 3(1): 40–​59. European Commission (2015) The European Higher Education Area in 2015: Bologna Process Implementation Report. https://​eacea.ec.eur​opa.eu/​ natio​nal-​polic​ies/​euryd​ice/​cont​ent/​europ​ean-​hig​her-​educat​ion-​area-​ 2015-​bolo​gna-​proc​ess-​imp​leme​ntat​ion-​report​_​en Gerber, A. (2017) The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gill, R. (2014) ‘Academics, cultural workers and critical labour studies’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 7(1): 12–​30. Godbout, J.T. (1998) The World of the Gift, Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca, NY: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Greek, M. and Jonsmoen, K.M. (2020) ‘Transnational academic mobility in universities: the impact on a departmental and an interpersonal level’, Higher Education, 81: 591–​606. https://l​ ink.sprin​ger.com/​arti​cle/​10.1007/​ s10​734-​020-​00558-​7 Hanley, A. (2005) ‘Academic capitalism in the new university’, The Radical Teacher, 73: 3–​7. Hill, L. and McCarthy, P. (2004) ‘On friendship and necessitudo in Adam Smith’, History of the Human Sciences, 17(4): 1–​16. Holstein, J. and Gubrium, J. (1995) The Active Interview, London: SAGE. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kalm, S. (2019) ’Om akademiskt hushållsarbete och dess fördelning’ [‘On academic household work and its distribution’], Sociologisk Forskning, 56(1): 5–​26. Macheridis, N., Paulsson, A. and Pihl, H. (2020) ‘The Humboldtian ideal meets employability? University teachers and the teaching–​research relationship in marketized higher education’, Industry and Higher Education, 34(5): 3030–​311. Österberg, E. (2010) Friendship and Love, Ethics and Politics: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern History, Budapest: Central European University Press.

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Östling, J. (2018) Humboldt and the Modern German University: An Intellectual History, Lund: Lund University Press. Pettinger, L. (2005) ‘Friends, relations and colleagues: the blurred boundaries of the workplace’, in L. Pettinger, J. Perry, R. Taylor and M. Glucksmann (eds) The Sociological Review, Special Issue: Sociological Review Monograph Series: A New Sociology of Work?, 54(s2), pp 39–​55. Price, L.L. and Arnould, E.J. (1999) ‘Commercial friendships: service provider–​client relationships in context’, Journal of Marketing, 63(4): 38–​56. Riessman, C. (2008) Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences, London: SAGE. Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Slaughter, S. and Rhoades, G. (2004) Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group (2017) ‘The burden of invisible work in academia’, Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 39, 228–​45. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​90007​882?seq=​1 Spencer, L. and Pahl, R. (2006) Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Wittel, A. (2001) ‘Toward a network sociality’, Theory, Culture & Society, 18(6): 51–​76. Zelizer, V.A. (2005) The Purchase of Intimacy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zelizer, V.A. (2013) Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker: an uncanny story of contemporary academic life1 Mark Vicars

Introduction It has been proposed that academics have a responsibility to remind people of their histories (Bullough, 2020), and in starting this chapter with reference to my own educational experiences, I am reminded of Daniel Nehring and Kristiina Brunila’s suggestion: ‘how, in order to make sense of the patterns of domination, contestation and resistance that emerge from the contemporary unmaking and remaking of the university, it is necessary to make sense of the everyday forms of practice and modes of subjectivation that characterise contemporary academic labour’ (see Chapter 1 this book). When I first started working in universities, there were face-​to face lectures delivered in large auditoriums, academics had their own offices in which to conduct PhD supervision, hot desking was not yet a concept, and neither was booking a private room if a student dropped by in distress requiring assistance. There was no such thing as Zoom or QR codes to access campus facilities, and workload was equally divided between teaching, research and service in a 40/​40/​20 model. Jill Blackmore (2001: 353) has noted how in the context of the massification and internationalization of higher education. New learning technologies facilitate the commodification of curriculum into consumable ‘packages’ online and off-​campus. For academics, these factors collectively have produced a significant shift in the nature of their work toward ‘academic capitalism’. Flexible academics are expected to sell their expertise to the highest bidder, research collaboratively, and teach on/​off line, locally and internationally. Blackmore goes on to say ‘Perhaps the next “phase” will be for university courses for the masses to be written by instructional designers, accredited by a shrinking core of university-​based academics, tendered to private providers 148

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for online delivery, out-​sourced to local tutors in global locations, with clearly stated competencies assessment’ (Blackmore, 2001: 359). C. Wright Mills’ exhortation to critically make use of ‘the personal uneasiness of individuals [that] is focused upon explicit troubles’ (1970: 11–​ 12) stimulated the impetus for the writing of this chapter from my own experience of angst as Blackmore’s polemic proposal is increasingly seen in practice. Ji Hong, Barbara Greene and Jennifer Lowery (2017) assert that individual and personal experiences orient teachers in their professional lives and can provide a valuable insight into effective strategies for coping (or not) with professional obstacles and adversity. Working with Michel Foucault’s (1972) notion of genealogy as a counter history of the position of subject has been a useful starting point to think with ‘descent’ and ‘emergence’, and with how the contingencies of my experiences with educational disciplinarity continue to shape my understanding of educational domains and myself (Garland, 2014: 371). My experience of formal primary and secondary education had been somewhat chequered. Throughout my schooling, at times it felt like my educational ship was sinking and that the primary concern of my parents and teachers was whether there should be fresh lemon slices in the finger bowls. I came to realise throughout my secondary comprehensive education in a small northern town in the UK in the mid-​1980s that schools and classrooms were places where I was made to be, or should, for my own safety, become silent. The zeitgeist of the 1980s was not a good time to transgress the narrative of normalcy. Too many boys and girls like me spent the majority of their compulsory years of schooling in hiding, or, as George Chauncey (1984) has described, as passing. The effects of ‘passing as’ straight on LGBTQ+​youth, it has been suggested, can make everyday life difficult due to an innate fear of inadvertently revealing their sexual identity (Pachankis, 2007). I have written before (Davis and Vicars, 2014: 80) of what it felt like to fall between the gaps of masculinity, of neither belonging to the majority or a minority; instead, of inhabiting ‘a space of betweenness, that requires special tools to hold open’ (Secor and Linz, 2017: 568) the ‘in-​ between border of line of flight or descent’ (Deleuze and Guttari 1987: 293). For me, the school academic environment was the site where my passing behaviours were initially learned, it was the place where I arrived, conscious of displacement, en route to ‘becoming other, becoming different’ (Davis and Vicars, 2014: 748). Aged 13 I began refusing food and deliberately starved myself. Over the following years my tenuous relationship with food has resurfaced, usually in tandem with bouts of anxiety and depression. It has been suggested that ‘self-​formations like anorexia can be creative because through “being otherwise”, they create a distance from normalised ways of being, thereby opening up a space for critique of normativity’ (Brain, 2003: 7), although that doesn’t make it any more easy to live with them. Just 149

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as my adolescent ‘world was in urgent need of reinterpretation’ (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2000: 279), so, too, is my current academic deconstruction. Embarking on a PhD in education in 2003 at a UK Russell Group (that is, an ‘elite’, research-​focused) institution, I felt elated, albeit with caveats. Recalling the memory of being told in the final year of my schooling by careers teacher that ‘boys like me were not academically inclined and I should look for employment at one of the local fish processing factories’ that populated the Humber estuary was an enduring memory. During my doctoral studies, I encountered a community of scholars who, in explicitly articulating a social justice imperative in their work, embodied an educational transformative aim. I started to feel at home in a place that I had always believed was not for ‘folks like me’. My newly found sense of place was aided and abetted by my encounters with scholarship that gave me permission to ‘speak my particular truth’ (Ellis, and Bochner, 2000; Sikes and Goodson, 2003; Sikes et al, 2003; Sikes, 2017). As I learned to deconstruct the rigorous rising of method and attendant ideologies that habitually reward normative methodological processes –​particularly useful for warding off my imposter anxiety and for fracturing the membrane between public and private –​was Mills’ (1970) notion of the sociological imagination and Charles Richardson’s (2000) writing to make sense. Their ideas stimulated the emergence of my desire for a critical and transformative engaged academic life. On graduation from my doctoral studies, I wanted more. I sought out academic positions that I imagined would provide the space and place for this work to be undertaken. Little did I realise how 20 years later my academic career would feel like a Faustian pact. I have come to understand what Lauren Berlant (2011: 1) speaks of when noting when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing … that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. These kinds of optimistic relations are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially. Speaking critically about contemporary academic reality is underscored by ‘the terrifying possibility that whatever words [I]‌may use to clothe [my] fears, the fabric cannot protect [me] from them’ (Wood, 2007: 205). Writing my biographically positioned ‘truth’ that speaks back to the discursive practices and material conditions of everyday academic labour in higher education institutions continues to be a fraught affair. Briony Lipton (2017: 488) referenced as ‘cruel optimism’ the actual potential for advancement and equality within the academic profession, since ‘not all types of bodies, academic activities and knowledges are considered meritorious’. Brunila and Nehring, in Chapter 1 in this book, note how ‘affective capitalism 150

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means ambivalences, social isolation, heightened anxiety … as well as limited possibilities to speak and to be heard by ensuring that one implicitly learns to find mistakes in, and blame only, oneself. Kwame Anthony Appiah (1994) has suggested that the marginalised individual has to narrate another story, but I have never found writing easy –​never quite sure out of which voice I should speak, and none more so than now. As I started to think and write I came to recognise in the telling of myself a story of negotiating separation in the ways that I have acted, spoken about and represented myself as a gay man in education (Piper and Sikes, 2010). I have subsequently come to acknowledge how the effects of concealment and resistance were/​are being produced as a response to what Foucault (1972) considered systems of power/​knowledge/​discourses that constitute the subject in a social landscape. Resisting the nomenclature of the ‘normal’ has always demanded of me an expanded imaginary to be able to move beyond the individualistic to the systemic (Weis et al, 2009). In my endeavours to subvert the confessional tale (Saint Augustine of Hippo, 1876), I have drawn on the framework of critical scholarship and put to work Robert Hill’s (1996) concept of fugitive knowledge to interrogate the ruins (Lather, 2001) of my current ontological-​epistemological dis-​ease.

I am not my CV As Foucault states, ‘What is present reality? What is the present field of our experiences? Here it is not a question of the analytic of truth but involves what could be called an ontology of the present, of present reality … an ontology of ourselves’ (Foucault, 2010: 21). I have been writing and rewriting this chapter . Despite my best intentions, it has resisted my very best efforts to materialise on the page. I have spent many hours in front of my computer drawing deep cigarette smoke into lungs increasingly kippered by the writing process. I have been waiting for the words to come and find me. With the passing of each month I have questioned why, despite my best efforts, I could not find the language to describe what I was thinking. Nick Koeltzsch (2021: 1), drawing on the work of David Crossley (2006), points out how ‘Doing embodied (auto)ethnography means using the body as a research tool recognizing subjective experience and “reflexive embodiment”. Increasingly subject to the regimes of research measurement and impact factors, the academic individual who thrives in the audit culture of the corporate university does so by cracking the codes of what counts and is in relation ‘with the body which has been conceptualised as a material surface, as a flesh upon which the micro-​physics of power leave their mark’ (Garland, 2014: 373, emphasis in original). Little did I realise that my struggle to write over the past few months has, in part, been due to my re-​experiencing something of a crisis. I have started to feel the knowledge 151

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I was getting from my lived body was telling me I wasn’t up to it anymore. This experience is not unique in academic circles, and Andrew Sparkes (2007: 526) coined the term ‘Selfing the CV’ to describe the how academics at his institution were audited: • Four star: Quality that is world-​leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour. • Three star: Quality that is internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour, but which nonetheless falls short of the highest standards of excellence. • Two star: Quality that is recognised internationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour. • One star: Quality that is recognised nationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour. • Unclassified: Quality that falls below the standard of nationally recognised work. Or work which does not meet the published definition of research for the purposes of this assessment. Sparkes (2007: 529–​30) speaks of the affective and embodied consequences of being evaluated as a lacking academic: ‘They’ve told me I’m going to lose my job. They’re going to sack me.’ Jim watches his friend’s shoulders sink inside his jacket. Almost inaudibly, Paul sighs. ‘I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know.’ The ‘they’ Paul spoke of was the Joint Staffing and Research Committee. Over the previous four months, they had done an assessment of all the staff in the School of Educational Studies and placed each into one of three categories with regard to their research profile and the financial viability of the courses they taught on. Safest of all was Category 1: Low Risk. Category 2 was Medium Risk. Category 3 was High Risk, the risk being the risk of having one’s contract terminated. Those in Category 3 had been advised of the situation and meetings had been held with senior management to discuss voluntary severance arrangements. If they didn’t take this option, they had been warned that their contracts would be terminated anyway. ‘They say my history here doesn’t count for anything. They now say my research is not good enough. Not the right quality. Just not good enough. His voice thins and trails off. He gasps, ‘I’m not good enough’. Jim sees the tears glisten in Paul’s eyes and feels his own begin to swell, clouding his vision as he watches his friend’s muscular frame crumple in front of him. ‘Don’t believe the shit they are giving you. You are good enough. You are a good man.’ Holding Paul tightly, he says, ‘You are not your CV. You are so much more than your CV’. 152

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Grit Kirsten Koeltzsch (2021: 5) speaks of the ‘dialectical relationship between ourselves and our bodies. … We are our body and active introspection creates consciousness in a broad sense, above all, understanding of the self and others’. As I struggled to organise my thoughts on the page, I reflected on how my epistemic and ontological dissonance has always been most keenly felt when I am at the pointy end of disciplinary discourses. Affect is a re/​signifying presence in my identity as an academic worker. It bears the echo of my adolescent ‘compressed outbursts of anger, pain, rage’ (Law and Urry, 2004: 403). At the moment, in the writing of this chapter, I do not feel too much and cannot see too much beyond having the experience of vulnerability. My enunciation of a ‘vulnerable self ’ (Ellis, 1991 feels uncannily risky and dangerous, but, as Yann Martel (2003: 8) has suggested, ‘It often happens that we do not remember the first time we did something, or even any one particular time but remember only the repetition, the idea that we did the thing over and over’. Drawing on ‘the long history of self-​representational writing’ (Serfaty, 2004: 1), I offer my narration of having an experience of the neoliberal university as a collective sense/​ ability of contemporary academic life. Laurel Richardson (1990: 131) has pointed out, ‘narrativizing, like all intentional behaviour … is a site of moral responsibility’, and Margaret Vickers (2002: 164) has noted how it can be dangerous to write about what goes on in organisations because ‘telling it like it was (or is) threatens the status quo and powerful political, economic and social forces continue to pressure survivors either to keep their silence or to revise their stories’. Likewise, drawing on his own experiences of being ‘finalised’ by senior management at his university who took exception to an article he published in an academic journal, Andrew Sparkes (2018: 493) makes the following point: Those who challenge managerial constructions of reality as anything but a ‘self-​evident good’ (which is part of their academic freedom to do so) are defined, at best, as absurd or, at worst, as ‘trouble’ that needs to be brought back ‘into line’, ‘on task’ or ‘on message’ via greater managerial control and forms of persuasion that do not exclude intimidation and bullying to achieve the required compliance. As my insecurities surrounding personal and social value in the ‘new’ university increase, I am all too aware of how ‘the topic of the body and biopolitics [is] related to political systems’ (Koeltzsch, 2021: 4). I write with Jennifer Nias’ (2006) suggestion that emotions are rooted in thought, that separation of feeling from perception is not possible and affective reactions are connected to views of personal self, self-​esteem and professional efficacy: ‘emotions are not simply in teaching. They are also a response to the conditions under which it takes place and especially to the increasing 153

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frequency with which individual teachers have to defend their sense of who and what they are’ (Nias, 2006: 305, emphasis in original). I write from the understanding of academic work to be potentially revolutionary in its aim to critique, change and even destroy institutions, disciplines and professions that rationalise exploitation, inequality and injustice (Olson and Worsham, 2003: 13). I interpret how the nature of academic life has changed, how the demands of the academy constantly remind us of the ways the epistemic landscape of higher education has not only impacted on what we think but also how we have come to think of it and ourselves. As Kris Tilley-​Lubbs (2014: 269) has noted, ‘interpretation is formed through years of sociocultural, socio-​historical, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic events and circumstance’, and Arthur Frank (1995: 17–​18) reminds us how: Autoethnographers invite readers to ‘read with’ and ‘read themselves into’ stories, or to juxtapose them with the stories of their own lives, no matter how different or displeasing. Codependent as it may sound, these stories live with and for readers. They dwell in a relational space wherein ‘each, teller and listener, enters the space of the story for the other’. Sparkes (2021: 2), in his autoethnography of the audit culture endemic in contemporary academic life, noted how: academics are now estimated to be one of the most surveilled groups in history and can be ranked on more than one hundred different scales and indices that measure their value. … Many … feel under constant surveillance and experience their working lives as a series of administrative moments involving facts and figures to be collected and submitted for various assessments and audits either pending, happening or being autopsied. Faced with such increased scrutiny the figure of the ‘neurotic academic’ … has become emblematic of the contradictions facing the contemporary academy suffused as it is with anxiety. Unlike Sparkes, who suggests that the corporeality of laughter might be one way in which the process of becoming and being an artificial person within the audit culture of the academy might be interrupted, interrogated, resisted and refused, and who uses laughter in certain spaces to do this as a way of deconstructing the absurdity of metrics, I have, in recent times, found it harder to laugh at the unfolding spectacle of what feels like an academic circus. I keep telling myself ‘I am not my CV’ as I receive yet another email requesting I record my grant income, index and measure my recent publications, account for my timely successful PhD supervision 154

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completions, aggregate my impact. With each box ticked, I feel the double consciousness (Dubois, 1973) of being in deficit, of not performing my potential, and the possible reduction in research allocation and increase in teaching and administration haunts me like Hamlet’s father. I am told that if I want to research and write I should be doing it on my own time, and invariably, I spend most of my weekends in front of the computer. As Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan’s (see Chapter 2, this book) participants’ comment: ‘It is only through the donation of massive voluntary hours by academics that the essential work is being done. This leads to burn-​ out and illness and high stress among academics, but senior managers do not care. … The whole research machine … is built on academics’ sacrifice’. It feels like I shouldn’t complain, I should consider myself lucky as I still have a job. After all, as I keep being reminded by a senior leader, ‘Everyone is replaceable. Oh, I forgot I was working with adults –​what do you people want? You’re getting paid to turn up and do your job’. Many of my academic colleagues in Australia have been retrenched due to the COVID-​19 pandemic, and the loss of international student income has set in a motion a tsunami of institutional change and retrenchments. I have noted elsewhere ‘the enterprise of thinking about a post-​COVID world will require a new imaginary, in which beliefs, values and behaviour will be shaped by the verities of existence’ (Vicars and Pelosi, 2020: 3). In this chapter I understand that the discomfort I am feeling is a product of a much grander narrative that involves ruminating on Darwin’s suggestion of how (we) as (an academic) species will continue to survive. As we wonder about our own survival as teachers and researchers, the very pedagogical traits that define(d) us continue to disappear (Vicars and Pelosi, 2020). The dis-​ease I am feeling in my body is a by-​product of the neoliberal narrative connected to the conditions that have reconstructed academic subjectivities. ‘Coming out’ about how neoliberal discursive practices ceases to be an intellectual exercise in parrhesia (Vicars, 2019). My story is, I suggest, globally, ideologically and culturally situated. What is happening in Australia has already happened in the UK and other places. Feeling that I don’t quite measure up and all that matters is ensuring the university mantra is adhered to feels at times overwhelming. To be successful is to be strategic, to always have one eye on my citation impact, my h-​index, my Google Scholar metric –​this is what matters if I want to get ahead or just keep the job I have. The thing is I am not sure I do want to get ahead anymore. I am having trouble visualising the next 11 years of my academic life ‘till retirement chasing big ticket grants, trying to publish in Q1/​Q2 journals (because they are the only journals that count), saying ‘no’ to colleagues’ requests for book chapters or not accepting invitations to join interesting projects because they don’t count in the institutional research return. As I maintain the façade, once again, I feel that I am passing in the 155

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renegotiating of normative expressions of academic positionality, power, subjectivity and agency.

Here I go again: that uncanny feeling Cecily: Miss Prism: Cecily:

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn’t write them down, I should probably forget all about them. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us. Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened and couldn’t possibly have happened. (Wilde, 1986: 505)

Perhaps I am not well, I don’t feel well. I am tired. I am having difficulty sleeping again. Need to ask the doctor for sleeping tablets. My list of ’things to do’ is getting longer. Oh fuck another 20 emails and I still haven’t started the chapter. I am letting people down. Why can’t I concentrate? Why can’t I think? [Phone rings.] Ignore it. I don’t have the energy to talk to anyone. Perhaps I should have a lie down. No, that would not help. I don’t feel well. What is going on? My hands are tingling, my head feels strange. Am I having a heart attack? I wish I was having a heart attack then this would all be over. Go and lie down, take a break, it’s alright you can spare the time. Made an appointment with the doctor. I can feel it coming on again. Haven’t eaten for two days now –​not interested –​not even hungry anymore. Wonder how long I can keep this up without it buggering up the diabetes? I think I need to see the GP. I should ask to go back on the Prozac. Today is not a good day. I am going down … I can feel it. Three PhD student drafts have just come in –​ try and get them read by the weekend. There is that report to finish and the journal papers to process. Jo has invited me to her birthday party. I will have to cancel. I am not in the mood and I don’t have the time. What excuse can I make? I will say I am not well. I am not well –​I feel awful. Perhaps I will go and lie down. No, I have too much to do. I haven’t done anything on the paper. I can’t do this job. What made me think I could do this job? I am going to be found out. I am going to be fired. Then what will I do? I am going to be homeless. What will I do with the animals? What am I going 156

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to do? Go and eat something you will feel better? Not hungry. Don’t feel well enough to eat. Tested sugar –​was low –​I should really eat something to avoid a hypo. Feel sick. … I can’t eat anything now. Go and lie down. The doctor has upped the Prozac dose. Gone from 20mg to 60mg and has prescribed Valium for the anxiety. I have become the medicalised and transquilised academic. Got to wait another two weeks for the chemicals to settle. Note to self –​taking more than prescribed dose is not advisable. Perhaps the Valium will help? Note to self –​don’t take the Valium and Temazapam together. Doctor said he will make referral to see someone –​I think I should see someone. This is not getting better. Why so many fucking emails. Still haven’t read the PhD drafts. Started the chapter but it is not very good –​needs rewriting. I have nothing to say. Why did they ask me? I have nothing to offer. What made me think I could I do this job? What am I going to do? I don’t want to go back to a school. Haven’t been in a school for 20 years; they wouldn’t want me anyway. What am I going to do when I lose this job? Will have to sell the house. I could buy a caravan and live in that. Where, though? I knew this would end like this. Oh God what a mess. I am a failure. Go and lie down –​not that it helps. The tingling has come back. Feel sweaty again. It is not a heart attack. CALM DOWN. Wish it was a heart attack and it would all be over. Weekend spent in bed. Phone kept ringing –​ did not have the energy to answer it. Did not have energy to do anything. Didn’t eat. Sugars went low –​don’t care. Too many dark thoughts not that it matters. Wouldn’t do anything –​just thoughts. Who would look after the animals? Feels like I have run a marathon. Can’t face the computer. Sat staring at the wall for two hours. Kept promising myself in another 15 minutes I will get up. The day was spent in a series of another 15 minutes. Should try and get some sleep. Can’t sleep, can’t eat. When will the tablets kick in? Should make another appointment with the doctor. Got the Zoom tomorrow with the new students. Haven’t read the PhD drafts. Haven’t done any more on the chapter. Fingers tingling again. Try and get out of bed in another 15 minutes and feed the dogs. Dogs haven’t been walked for days. Why am I so crap? Jill rang tonight asking if I was okay. She said I wasn’t myself on Zoom. I looked ill and a bit unfocused, not that anyone would know, but she picked up that maybe something was wrong as 157

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I wasn’t my usual self. Spoke to the GP. He can’t get me a referral to see the psych –​apparently, they are overwhelmed and not taking on new referrals for the next seven months. Spoke to colleague who sees a psychologist. Got his number. Rang him –​no answer. He called me back and asked me a few questions. Said it sounded like I needed to be hospitalised. That it could be bipolar. I am not bipolar. Had to take dog for injection today –​had a panic attack in the vets and had to leave. Had to get home. Oh god –​what if I am becoming agoraphobic? Where have I gone? When am I coming back? What if I never come back? Got home and went to bed. Stayed in bed for five days. Have upped my Valium to three tablets –​ fuck it –​I don’t care. Phone keeps ringing –​word has got round and people are checking in –​very kind but I don’t want to talk to anyone –​I don’t have the energy. Sue offered to drive down from Melbourne –​no, no, no, I barely have the energy to get out of bed. GP has signed me off work for two weeks. He asked me to rate myself on a scale of 1–​10 how I felt. The diagnostic criteria for a Major Depressive Episode (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, APA, 1994) require that ‘five (or more) of these symptoms must be present nearly every day during a two-​ week period. At least one of the symptoms must be (1) depressed mood most of the day –’ yup; ‘(2) markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day –​’ yup; ‘(3) significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain, or decrease or increase in appetite –’​yup; ‘(4) insomnia or hypersomnia –​’ yup; ‘(5) psychomotor agitation or retardation –​’ WTF does that mean?; ‘(6) fatigue or loss of energy –​’ yup; ‘(7) feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt –​’ yup; ‘(8) diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness –​ ​’ yup; ‘(9) recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide –​’ yup. I don’t care about his fucking scale. The impact of institutional values and imperatives to perform the increasingly corporatised mission of higher education has become part of the contemporary academic ‘ethnoscape’ (Appadurai, 1996). The ‘new’ university, it could be argued, has formed a monstrous ecology, and the dominance of neoliberalism in higher education has required of its occupants a constant review, reconsideration and reinterpretation of what it means to be an academic worker. Robert Hill (2003: 21) has suggested ‘the phenomenon we now know as alienation, [is] the feeling of estrangement that comes from losing one’s place in self-​sustaining community’, and John 158

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Leavitt (1996) has affirmed the importance of affective associations, for they, ‘like semantic ones, are collective as well as individual; they operate through common or similar experience among members of a group living in similar circumstances, through cultural stereotyping of experience, and through shared expectations, memories, and fantasies’ (Leavitt, 1996: 527). Reading my journal entries back four weeks after they had been written, and with the advantage of the prescribed meds finally having started to take effect, I am now better positioned to make sense of how my internal psychological world was triggered by external socio-​cultural and institutional forces. As I tease out the meanings that I have come to attach to the intra-​ institutional neoliberal narrative, I start to question if I am claiming too much of my four-​week malaise could be accounted for by ‘some of the highly affective power relations of the neoliberal rationality of the academia and academic labour’ (see Chapter 12 in this book). In the past four weeks I have been moving in and out of knowing and unknowing, and immobilised through in-​action. I have, in moments of despair and anxiety, been uncertain whether ‘I’ would return. I have uncomfortably reconnected with the unknown and unknowable parts of myself. I have questioned my functionality as a human being with agency and whether I am little more than an amalgam of fucked-​up chemical reactions. Sigmund Freud (1987: 358–​9) noted how: forms of ego disturbance … are a harking back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-​regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply form the eternal world and from other people. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seem to confirm the old, discarded beliefs, we get a feeling of the uncanny, it is as though we were making a judgement. An unintended recurrence of the same situation but which differ radically from it in other respects also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of uncanniness. Freud (1987: 241) suggested ‘the uncanny would always as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in’, and uncertainty is a feeling with which I am all too familiar, and that has historically involved me in diffident acts of feeling my place in the world. Freud (1987) notes ‘the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (1987: 340), and ‘is undoubtedly related to what is frightening –​to what arouses dread and horror’ (1987: 339). He goes on to suggest, ‘We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of uncanniness which are most prominent’ (Freud, 1987: 356), and ‘Everything in unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (Freud, 1987: 345). 159

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Revisiting the closet: an uncanny neoliberal trope Freud (1987: 347–​8) has suggested: in telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately. Employing Eve Sedgwick’s (1990) allegory of the closet as a simultaneous trope of domination/​resistance for understanding the construction of subjectivities within the neoliberal university has helped me recognise the uncanny uneasiness, instability and precariousness of coming out and speaking about contemporary academic work. Just as my experience of my sexuality have been embodied, intimate and relational, so, too, has been my experience of neoliberal academia. Being inside the closet as a young Gay man taught me a lot about the cost of confronting monolithic social narratives, and while there is a narrative associated with ‘coming out’ that denotes truthfulness, empowerment and liberation, it has also been described as the ‘open secret’, and as such it bears similarities with Nehring and Brunila’s (see Chapter 12 in this book) description: We understand affective capitalism as a form of public secret (IPC, 2014), as something that everyone involved with academia is aware of in one way or another but does not necessarily talk about. … We approach affective capitalism with the idea of affective subjectivation (Valero et al, 2019), which describes the processes by which academics are inclined to turn themselves into manageable subjects within academic life. … As a form of subjectivation academic capitalism shapes not only our bodies and emotions, but also the way we think and feel about things and know in particular ways. (Valero et al, 2019: 5) Thinking of the uncanniness of the closet as a trope that promotes neoliberal relationality is to acknowledge, as Steven Seidman (2004) has posited, to be coerced into adapting to a society that systematically governs and enforces a (particular) way of life. Thinking of the neoliberal closet as a mechanism of silencing, as a tool in the arsenal of the regime of neoliberal normalcy has, in recent weeks, made me reconsider its effect on my reflection, action and movement as an academic worker. The neoliberal university does not, I imagine, want to hear too much about my anxiety and depression, just as my parents did not want to hear that they had a Gay son. Breaking my silence around my anxiety and depression ‘has in recent weeks made me think back to my adolescent anorexic self and how “being otherwise”, can 160

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create a distance form normalised ways of being, thereby opening up a space for critique of normativity’ (Brain, 2003: 7). Drawing on the notion of the closet to think about the affective dimension of neoliberalism has been useful for rethinking the closet as a site of concealed ‘entanglement … and my ability to affect and be affected by these entanglements’ (Haraway, 2016: 37–​8). Drawing on the work of Diana Fuss (1991), who has examined how sociocultural forces work to maintain and propagate binaries and why the hegemonic inside has been appropriated as the most desirable place to dwell, explains how the inside works hard to protect itself from the outside in perpetual fear that if the wall should crumble and the binary logic is disrupted, the underbelly of this carefully constructed fortification is ‘turn[ed] … inside out’ which ‘expose[s]‌its critical operations and interior machinery’ (Fuss, 1991: 1). My coming out of the neoliberal closet is affected by different types of reflection, in-​action and the back-​and-​forth psychic movement of the last four weeks. Mary-​Lou Rasmussen (2004: 146) delineates the practical considerations involved with ‘coming out’, and suggests how there is much more to lose by ‘coming out,’ than to gain. Sedgewick (1990: 81) writes that there is always a ‘double-​edged potential for injury in the scene of coming out, due to how the disclosure implicates the person who is told and how there is no control over how the revelation will be received and at certain times it is not feasible or safe’. Critics of the autoethnographic ‘I’ (Tolich, 2004, 2010; Delamont, 2007, 2009) might well wonder how my story situated in the senses and emotions can constitute ‘research data’. Elizabeth St Pierre (1997) has called such data transgressive, out of category, and does not fit but invites an evolutionary interpretation of wider shifting patterns. Adrianna Cavarero (2000: 1) has urged for the use of stories as a means of connection –​she says that they make experiences ‘coherent and tangible’ –​and Ronald Pelias (2005: 419), citing Trinh Minh-​ha (1991), invokes the notion of a ‘plural I’, that has the potential to stand in for many ‘I’s’. It is an ‘I’ that resonates, that resounds, that is familiar. James Perry (2000) has suggested how institutions can shape an individual’s beliefs and behaviour, and for many of us working in higher education, it would not be too unreasonable to suggest that to achieve success in the corporate university requires navigating a path between closely held individual values and the performativity of everyday academic obligations. The realisation that intellectual activity is a purposeful act that emerges from our values, passions and preoccupations, that it is not an innocent or distant academic exercise but an ‘activity that has something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions’ (Smith, 2001: 5), was my foundational understanding of what I was signing up to when I entered academic life, as I am sure it was for many who will be reading this. 161

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Don’t fuck the help: academic labour (in) the corporate university Pauline Lipman (2011), Henry Giroux (2014) and John Smyth (2017) have identified neoliberalism as a social, cultural and economic force that has structured the organisation of higher education institutions globally. Anastasia Christou (2016: 34), in her focus on ‘affective performativities, publics and possibilities’ … identifies oppressive spaces in the academic landscape where neoliberal institutions legitimate a culture of the disciplined knowledge producer/​worker through regulation, surveillance and restraint. As a result, academic[s]‌ [become] subjects of complicity, conformity and control, where any transgressive act of resistance is crushed and met with punitive and categorical classification of those seen as the ‘problematic trouble-​ makers’. As a result, such ‘trouble-​makers’ stirring the scene may not be promoted, may be given ‘dirty’ departmental work and even implicitly threatened with dismissal. Only two weeks ago I was told by leader in the college in which I work that ‘I would be in trouble if I didn’t start falling in line’. The next day I received a telephone call from an even more senior manager who informed me that ‘I would be removed from my course chair role if I couldn’t find a way to be more compliant’. While the neoliberal university prioritises entrepreneurship, advances the narrative of quality and ‘excellence’ in teaching and learning, it simultaneously retrenches ongoing staff and replaces them with sessional or teaching-​focused academics and increases class sizes. The continuous expansion of administrative tasks, the constant imperative to demonstrate impact and improvement have become the ‘lived experiences, deeply embedded in people’s daily worlds in colleges and universities’ (Rhoades and Slaughter, 1997: 9). As Tricia Kress (2021, in press) notes: In the neoliberal university, bodies are (in)convenient. The neoliberal university needs them to behave and embody the ideals of the neoliberal academic space. Bodies that don’t are subject to contortion (change yourself) or destruction (become discredited or be removed). My body intimately knows the neoliberal academic workspace and the oppressions that bodies like mine endure simply to remain members in good standing. Furthermore, my mind recognizes, however painfully or reluctantly, the insufficiency of my body in academic spaces where I need to align my appearance with academic expectations while also aligning my behaviour and my speech with the social expectations. 162

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Sparkes (2018: 495) recalls in a meeting with the Deputy Vice-​Chancellor (DVC) his experience of being discredited: This meeting with the DVC took place in October 2008 in her office and lasted for an hour. The first ten minutes of the meeting revolved around ROM panel’s interpretation of my grant application and award figures. During this time, I suggested there were other possible interpretations but was informed that the panel’s views were based on the objective data presented which were the facts in performative terms. Then the DVC made a strange comment given that the purpose of the meeting was meant to be dealing with the ‘objective’ data and ‘facts’ regarding my grant applications and awards. She uttered the following: ‘But, of course, our conversation about you was clouded by another issue’. This ‘issue’ was my article in Qualitative Research that I was then grilled about for the rest of the hour. Several times the DVC informed me that my article had ‘embarrassed the Vice-​ Chancellor’. She also included the following statements a number of times: ‘We are not sure which side you are on’, and ‘We are not sure if you are for us or against us’. I was also asked several times ‘Who pays your wages?’ By the end of the meeting I realised that, in Bakhtin’s terms, I was being finalised and that my days at the university were numbered after twenty-​two years of loyal service. I was correct in this assumption. Sara Ahmed (2015) has noted that psychological interior states of being are actually processes of cultural politics and world making, and that ‘What moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place’ (2015: 11). The cannibalistic neoliberal narrative (Kress and Lake, 2019) has the contemporary academic worker dwelling in a constant combative state, not only pitted against colleagues, but also pitted against themself. The imperative to do more, be more, give more is beyond anything Kafka could have invented. As Brunila notes (see Chapter 6, this book): Political agency in academia has meant understanding what it actually means to be a scholar at work in a neoliberal academia, including constant problematising and trouble-​making. … It is this nexus where the affective dimensions and obsession with happiness, wellbeing and positivity imperatives have emerged. … We called attention to the precariousness of neoliberal capitalism’s dominant reactive affect in the form of anxiety. We argued that anxiety and stress have become a public secret, a kind of taboo that nobody mentions and that all hide behind such that the apparent precarity of the individual is not revealed in the ‘wrong way’. The ‘right way’ in which this affect is enunciated is as a 163

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personal problem or deficit [to be sent on ‘stress management’ courses and ‘resilient’ courses to rectify this deficit]: the lack of strength of those who are not suited to win the competition of the fittest, and a definite sign of individual failure, one in which the intensities of affect operate as strategies of subjectivation and constitute research(ing) subjects. Anastasia Christou and Hania Janta (2019: 5) note: Such almost unbearable working conditions have created a deep crisis in universities through the very same structural impacts that have produced extensive psychosocial and somatic catastrophe amongst academics (and other university workers) that manifests in experiences of chronic stress, anxiety, exhaustion, insomnia and spiralling rates of physical and mental illness’ (Gill and Donaghue, 2016: 91). All these issues are part of a wider repertoire of academic life, one which is designated ‘crisis’ and replete with hidden injuries of the neoliberal university’ (Gill, 2010) but such new spaces are not simply a mosaic of subjective experiences of contemporary academic labour; they are collective realities that require a collective framework in coping with such strains.

So what have I learned from all of this? This chapter has taken an autoethnographic approach to theorising about the embodied and affective dimensions of being an academic worker in the neoliberalising university (Pelias, 2004). With the passing of time I am now in a better place to understand how recent events in my life bear traces of the relations between the broader cultural, social and political contexts and my life experiences (Chang, 2016). Tracing the troubling effects of neoliberalism through my experienced psychological and physiological vulnerabilities (Behar, 1996) will do little to transform the contemporary realities of academic life and labour as shaped by neoliberalism and more recently COVID-​19. Nick Crossley (2006) has noted how doing embodied (auto)ethnography means using the body as a research tool, and Grit Kirsten Koeltzsch (2021: 1) has articulated the benefits that are derived from reading the body as an interface between the social environment, society and scholarly work. Ivor Goodson (1993: 5) has remarked: Practice is a good deal more than the technical things we do in classrooms; it relates to who we are, to our whole approach to life. Here I might quote C. Wright Mills talking about scholars but it’s as relevant to any member of the community. He said ‘the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community … do not split their work 164

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from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such disassociation and they want to use each for the enrichment of others’. So I would want to argue for a form of research which links the analysis. Barbara Jago (2002: 733), in her autoethnographic story about depression, chronicled the experience of ‘emotional devastation, isolation and hopelessness, guilt and self-​loathing and paralyzing darkness’. She noted ‘One of the worst’ aspects of depression was the ability to watch yourself disappear, unable to act in self-​defence (Jago, 2002: 734). In the telling of her story, she encourages the development of an understanding of depression and urges a continued inquiry into the highly stressful academic culture in which we live and work. Similar to Jago’s reflections, I now wonder how ‘putting myself on display; risking personal and professional humiliation, what you will make of me in the telling of this [my] story’ (Jago, 2002: 738). Barbara Anderson et al (2019: 4), in their paper, deliberately set out to explore ‘the challenges that academics from minoritised backgrounds face in the contemporary neoliberal university’, and cite Margaret Thornton’s (2013: 128) definition of the ‘ideal academic’: ‘This normative masculinist standard favours those who are Anglo-​Australian, heterosexual, able-​bodied, middle class, not elderly, espouse a right-​of-​centre politics and a nominal mainstream religion, if any … when women and Others are measured against Benchmark Men they are invariably found wanting’. Being invariably found wanting is a feeling I have become accustomed to throughout my life in educational domains, and has produced less than ideal affects. Anderson et al (2019: 12) have claimed how the sharing of marginal stories assisted them to ‘reclaim the narratives that structure our professional lives’ and function as a decolonised practice (Dutta, 2018). My emotional battle(s) as a Gay man working in neoliberal education institutions is without teleology (Ahmed, 2014) but, as George Sefa Dei (2006: 11) has noted, telling our stories of education (can) function as a way to regain power and constitutes important sites of resistance; they possess: ‘the power to name issues for what they are [and] demonstrate an ability to use language as resistance, and to claim cultural and political capital that is necessary to challenge domination’. Mounting such a challenge remains risky, and I admit to being nervous about the reception of this piece in different strata of the academy, including my own institution. Note For Pat Sikes, who got me started and whose example keeps me going.

1

References Ahmed, S. (2014) ‘Selfcare as warfare’, Feministkilljoys, 25 August. https://​ femin​istk​illj​oys.com/​2014/​08/​25/​selfc​are-​as-​warf​are 165

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Ahmed, S. (2015) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, London: Routledge. Anderson, L., Gatwiri, B. and Townsend-​Cross, M. (2019) ‘Battling the “headwinds”: the experiences of minoritised academics in the neoliberal Australian university’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 1–​28. APA (American Psychiatric Association) (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th edn), Washington, DC: APA. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, London: University of Minnesota Press. Appiah, K.A. (1994) ‘Identity, authenticity, survival: multicultural societies and social reproduction’, in A. Gutman (ed) Multiculturalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp 161–​81. Augustine of Hippo, Saint (1876) Confessions (translated by J. Pilkington), Cleveland, OH: Fine Editions Press. Behar, R. (1996) The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blackmore, J. (2001) ‘Universities in crisis? Knowledge economies, emancipatory pedagogies, and the critical intellectual’, Educational Theory, 51(3): 353–​70. Brain, J. (2003) ‘Anorexia as a subversive bodily act: psychic incorporation or body narratives of the self ’. www.women.it/​cyber​arch​ive/​files/​brain.htm Bullough, R.V. Jr (2020) ‘ “Bestirring the quiet voice of ethically engaged reason”: public intellectuals, education and Ivor Goodson’, in P. Sikes and Y. Novacovik (eds) Storying the Public Intellectual: Commentaries on the Impact and Influence of the Work of Ivor Goodson, London: Routledge, pp 80–​8. Cavarero, A. (2000) Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, New York: Routledge. Chang, H. (2016) Autoethnography as Method (Vol 1), London: Routledge. Chauncey, G. (1994) Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, New York: Basic Books. Christou, A. (2016) ‘Feminism, crises and affect: women in academia contemplating publics and performativities’, Interface: A Journal For and About Social Movements, 8: 34–​44. Christou, A. and Janta, H. (2019) ‘Affecting solidarities: bringing feeling into feminism, empathy in employment and compassion in academic communities of crises’, Tourism Management Perspectives, 30: 232–​9. Crossley, N. (2006) Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society: The Body in Late Modern Society, London: McGraw-​Hill Education. Davis, I. and Vicars, M. (2014) ‘Across intergenerational masculinities: straight divisions, gay multiplications’, Qualitative Research Journal, 14(1): 79–​88.

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Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hill, D. (2003 ‘The Sturm und Drang and the idea of a literary period’, in D. Hill (ed) Literature of the Sturm und Drang, Rochester, NY: Camden House, pp 1–​40. Hill, R. (1996) ‘Learning to transgress: a socio-​historical conspectus of the American gay life world as a site of struggle and resistance’, Studies in the Education of Adults, 28(2): 253–​79. Hong, J., Greene, B. and Lowery, J. (2017) ‘Multiple dimensions of teacher identity development from pre-​service to early years of teaching: a longitudinal study’, Journal of Education for Teaching, 43(1): 84–​98. Jago, B.J. (2002) ‘Chronicling an academic depression’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 31(6): 729–​57. Kincheloe, J. and McLaren, P, (2000) ‘Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research’, in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp 279–​313. Koeltzsch, G.K. (2021) ‘The body as site of academic consciousness: a methodological approach for embodied (auto)ethnography’, Academia Letters, 36(4): 1–​5. Kress, T.M. (forthcoming) ‘“Self-​ishly” enacting social justice: self-​care as political warfare in the neoliberal academy’, in M. Vicars and L. Pelosi (eds) Storying Pedagogy as Critical Praxis in the Neoliberal University –​Encounters and Disruptions, New York: Springer. Kress, T.M. and Lake, R. (2019) ‘Dreaming of “nowhere”: a co-​ autoethnographic exploration of utopia-​dystopia in the academy’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52(9): 937–​46. Lather, P. (2001) ‘Postbook: working the ruins of feminist ethnography’, Signs, 27(1): 199–​227. Law, J. and Urry, J. (2004) ‘Enacting the social’, Economy and Society, 33(3): 390–​410. Leavitt, J. (1996) ‘Meaning and feeling in the anthropology of emotions’, American Ethnologust, 23(3): 514–​39. Lipton, B. (2017)’ Measures of success: cruel optimism and the paradox of academic women’s participation in Australian higher education’, Higher Education Research & Development, 36(3): 486–​97. Lipman, P. (2011) The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City, London: Routledge. Martel, Y. (2003) Self, London: Faber & Faber. Mills, C.W. (1970) The Sociological Imagination, Penguin: Harmondsworth. Mills, C.W. (1979) Power, Politics and People, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Nias, J. (2006) ‘Thinking about feeling’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 26(3): 293–​306. Olson, G. and Worsham, L. (eds) (2003) Critical Intellectuals on Writing, New York: State University of New York Press. Pachankis, J, (2007)’The psychological implications of concealing a stigma: a cognitive-a​ ffective-​behavioral model’, Psychological Bulletin, 133(2): 328–​45. Pelias, R. (2004) A Methodology of The Heart: Evoking Academic and Daily Life, Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Pelias, R. (2005) ‘Performative writing as scholarship: an apology, an argument, an anecdote’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 5(4): 415–​24. Perry, J.L. (2000) ‘Bringing society in: toward a theory of public-​ service motivation’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 10(2): 471–​88. Piper, H. and Sikes, P. (2010) ‘All teachers are vulnerable, but especially gay teachers: using composite fictions to protect research participants in pupil–​teacher sex-​related research’, Qualitative Inquiry, 16(7): 566–​74. Rasmussen, M. (2004) ‘The problem of coming out’, Theory into Practice, 43(2): 144–​50. Richardson, L. (1990) ‘Narrative and sociology’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 19(1): 116–​35. Richardson, L. (2000) ‘Writing: a method of inquiry’, in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds) The Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edn), Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp 923–​48. Rhoades, G. and Slaughter, S. (1997) ‘Academic capitalism, managed professionals, and supply-​side higher education’, Social Text, 51: 9–​38. Secor, A. and Linz, J. (2017) ‘Becoming minor’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(4): 568–​73. Sedgwick, E. (1990) Epistemology of the Closet, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Seidman, S. (2004) Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life, Routledge: New York. Serfaty, V. (2004) The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Sikes, P. (2017) ‘“But who is Mrs Galinsky, mother?”: from Nana Sikes’ stories to studying lives and careers’, in I. Goodson. A. Antikainen, P. Sikes and M. Andrews (eds) The Routledge Handbook on Narrative and Life History, London: Routledge, pp 405–​30. Sikes, P. and Goodson, I. (2003) ‘Living research: thoughts on educational research as moral practice’, in P. Sikes, J. Nixon and W. Carr (eds) The Moral Foundations of Educational Research: Knowledge, Inquiry and Value, Maidenhead: Open University Press/​McGraw Hill, pp 32–​51.

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Sikes, P., Nixon, J. and Carr, W. (eds) (2003) The Moral Foundations of Educational Research: Knowledge, Inquiry and Values, Maidenhead: Open University Press/​McGraw Hill. Smith, L.T. (2001) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People, London and New York: Zed Books Ltd. Smyth, J. (2017) The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology, New York: Springer. Sparkes, A.C. (2007) ‘Embodiment, academics, and the audit culture: a story seeking consideration’, Qualitative Research, 7(4): 521–​50. Sparkes, A.C. (2018) ‘Autoethnography comes of age’, in D. Beach, C. Bagley and S. Marques Da Silva (eds) The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education, London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp 479–​99. Sparkes, A.C. (2021) ‘Making a spectacle of oneself in the academy using the h-​index: from becoming an artificial person to laughing at absurdities’, Qualitative Inquiry, 27(8–​9): 1–​13. St Pierre, E.A. (1997) ‘Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data’, Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(2): 175–​89. Thornton, M. (2013) ‘The mirage of merit’, Australian Feminist Studies, 28(76): 127–​43. Tilley-​Lubbs, G.A. (2014) ‘Critical authoethnography and the vulnerable self as researcher’, Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 4(3): 268–​85. Tolich, M. (2004) ‘Internal confidentiality: when confidentiality assurances fail relational informants’, Qualitative Sociology, 27(1): 101–​06. Tolich, M. (2010) ‘A critique of current practice: ten foundational guidelines for autoethnography’, Qualitative Health Research, 20: 1599–​610. Trinh Minh-​ha, T. (1991) When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge. Valero, P., Mølbjerg Jørgensen, K. and Brunila, K. (2019) ‘Affective subjectivation in the precarious neoliberal academia’, in D. Bottrell and C. Manathunga (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Seeing through the Cracks, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 135–​54. Vicars, M. (2019) ‘“When all hope is gone”: truth, lies and make believe’, in D. Bottrell and C. Manathunga (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Seeing through the Cracks, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 83–​96. Vicars, M. and Pelosi, L. (2020) ‘Researching with the Sturm und Drang of COVID-​19: telling tales of teachers’ teaching’, Qualitative Research Journal, 20(4): 393–​403. Vickers, M.H. (2002) ‘Researchers as storytellers: writing on the edge and without a safety net’, Qualitative Inquiry, 8(5): 608–​21. Weis, L., Fine, M. and Dimitriadis, G. (2009) ‘Towards a critical theory of method in shifting times’, in M. Apple, M. Au. and L. Gandin (eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education, New York: Routledge, pp 437–​48. 170

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PART III

Performance

9

Academy in my flesh: affective athleticism and performative writing Silvia Gherardi (University of Trento), Michela Cozza (Mälardalen University) and Magnus Hoppe (Mälardalen University)

Introduction This chapter aims to explore the affective dynamics of contemporary academic capitalism that academia has gone through in neoliberal and market-​oriented times. After the introduction –​more than 25 years ago –​of the term ‘academic capitalism’ by Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie (1997), it is now widely used to understand the global reach of changes connected to processes of alliances between university, industry and government in higher education and research policies (Etzkowitz, 2016; Holmwood, 2016). We follow the definition of academic capitalism as a knowledge/​learning regime (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004) that shapes academics’ conduct while baring the roots of collective and democratic forms of participation. In particular, along the lines of Chapter 1 in this book, we are interested in exploring the ambiguities and ambivalence of academic capitalism that affects the psychic reality of academia, seducing those who work in it. For example, the expression ‘in the mood of data’ (Staunæs and Brøgger, 2020) expresses with great effect how data have become infrastructural to academic moods. Academic performance data, such as scorecards, barometers, graphs and other materialising media, have become part of academia and of us living in academia. They are designed to affect and direct behaviour through forms of exposure, comparison and self-​monitoring that are deeply entangled with a vulnerable affective economy. We intend to contribute to the critical literature that denounces the inequalities of academic labour and contrasts the voice of neoliberalism sustaining the political rationality of the market and market forms of relations (Jessop, 2008; Giroux, 2011; Bozeman and Boardman, 2016; Bottrell and Manathunga, 2019). In this chapter, we interpret the neoliberal, corporate academia as the icon of an affective economy in which affect takes the place of money. Within such a context, academic practices of management through affect produce intensities rather than identities.

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The theoretical framework of the chapter is delineated through the concept of affective economy, and is grounded in the literature on affective capitalism. Avoiding a definition of ‘what affect is’, it follows instead the traces of ‘what affect does’. We follow the Deleuzian interpretation of affect, as elaborated by Brian Massumi (2002) and widely adopted within post-​qualitative methodologies, where a precarious consensus on the meaning of ‘affect’ is constructed around the idea that it is processual, relational and situated. Affect can be described as a moment of intensity, a reaction in/​of the body at the level of matter, and affectivity is formulated in terms of ‘to affect/​being affected’, with modes of intensification, movement and capacities. We are also inspired by the works of Thrift (2004) and Sara Ahmed (2004), where affect is conceived as extra-​ discursive and extra-​textual. Moreover, to indicate to the reader our approach in this chapter to affect, we share the words of Simon O’Sullivan (2001: 128, emphasis in original), who writes that ‘affect is a more brutal, apersonal thing. It is that which connects us to the world. It is the matter in us responding and resonating with the matter around us. The affect is, in this sense, transhuman’. This chapter is to be considered an experiment in collaborative writing (Wyatt and Gale, 2014), in which we three authors write in turns, with the intention of performing the concept of academic affective athleticism in our lives and writing.

Affective athleticism and managing self-​managing In this chapter, we read ‘affective capitalism’ in the context of contemporary neoliberal academy, assuming that the term ‘affective capitalism’ refers to the affective structures of capitalism and new ways of making profit and exercising control in post-​Fordist capitalism. In introducing affective capitalism in a special issue of ephemera,Tero Karppi and colleagues (2016: 2) quote Massumi (2002: 45): ‘The ability of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is itself a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late-​capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory’. They go on to define affective capitalism as ‘a broad infrastructure in which the emotional culture and its classed and gendered history merge with value production and everyday life’ (Karppi et al, 2016: 5). The ambivalence and messiness of the interconnection of affect and capitalism is, in our opinion, better served by the term ‘affective economy’ (Bjerg and Staunæs, 2011), which links governmentality studies and the ‘affective turn’. The authors use the term in relation to the psy-​leadership trend, now spreading to educational institutions, which addresses the affective aspect of management practices with a focus on managing the intensity and quality of human relations. In our opinion, academia is a good example of an affective economy that works through the production of intensities, rather than identities, and whose 176

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main social process is the economisation of affect through management of the self-​management that has historically characterised academic work. Our aim in this chapter is to explore how ‘managing self-​management’ is done in practice and through bodies. The precarisation of academic jobs, the control of workloads through a ‘publish or perish’ logic, and the disciplining of academic bodies through the gendered embodiment of knowledge related to appearance and performance are only some of the practices in use in the academic context in that academics not only endure, but also actively produce with the management of self-​management. The management of self-​management, write Helle Bjerg, and Dorthe Staunæs (2011: 139) ‘works through complex intra-​actions between reflexivity and affectivity, within an ambiguous affective economy of both negative and positive affects. This ambiguity is the prerequisite for producing not only self-​managing subjects who can handle themselves in the actual situation, but also self-​improving subjects that create even better versions of themselves’. With the term ‘affective economy’, we wish to stress how the engineering of affectivity is the effect of recursive, intensifying practices of management and self-​management through affect. This means that individual acts do not produce the affective economy, but collective practices produce intensities of practices. Within this theoretical framing of the affective economy, we link the turn to affect to the turn to practice (Gherardi, 2017). Therefore, we shall consider how intensities work, in concrete and particular ways, how they mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective. Affective economies need to be seen as social and material, as well as psychic (Ahmed, 2004). Training the body and the soul for ‘academicity’ (Brunila, 2016) here refers to the core practice that anchors other practices (Gherardi, 2019) in the affective economy of contemporary academia. In fact, Kristiina Brunila’s concept of ‘performing academicity’ (a concept derived from Petersen, 2008) stresses how the becoming of a professional self is a process, where being a culturally intelligible academic is ‘understood as a citational and reiterative discursive practice within multiple and contradictory power–​knowledge relations’ (Brunila, 2016: 386). We shall enlarge this understanding of academicity, taking into consideration not only discursive practices but also the socio-​materiality of situated practising, in which such materials as ‘publications’ have agency when entangled with academic bodies, discourses and other socio-​materialities. We can then look at academic training as a regulated process of repetition, involving control, self-​management and passion, where the body and its affective capacity is central. To illustrate this process of ‘becoming with’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 [1980]), we propose elaborating the concept of ‘affective athleticism’. Gilles Deleuze draws the term ‘affective athleticism’ from the title of an essay by 177

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Antonin Artaud (1964), in his book Le théâtre et son double, in which the dramatist outlines a novel method of conditioning the actor’s body through breath control techniques. Artaud writes that we must grant the actor a kind of affective musculature that correlates with physically localised feelings. The actor is a real physical athlete, but with this surprising corrective that the organism of the athlete corresponds to a similar affective organism, and which is parallel to the other, which is like the double of the other, although he does not act on the same plane. The actor ‘is an athlete of the heart’ (Artaud, 1964: 195), and just as the athlete’s body must be trained to organise and conquer the physical attributes of her/​his body, the actor must train his/​hers to develop a similarly muscular virtuosity and affective control. Deleuze modulates Artaud’s concept in a subtle but significant way. Affective athleticism is described as a process of shaping the forces of ‘sensation’ into sensible and durative form. For Deleuze (2014), sensation is distinct from the human subject who experiences it: sensation is simply vibration. Just as Artaud’s affective athleticism allows the actor to traverse the orders of the physical body and immaterial emotion, Deleuze proposes that sensation passes from one ‘order’ to another, from one ‘level’ to another, from one ‘domain’ to another. In What is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994) take up the concept of affective athleticism and sensation again, writing that ‘sensory becoming is the action by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-​other (while continuing to be what they are)’ (1994: 177). We can easily draw an analogy between the affective athleticism of the actor, and what in another domain of activity –​academia –​is required to harmonise with academicity ‘in the right way’. Becoming a recognisable and passionate subject in academia (Davies and Petersen, 2005; Petersen, 2008) means learning how to present oneself according to gender and appearance, speak jargon, write in the appropriate way, think and feel in a professional submissive way and contribute to the diffusion of an ethos of passionate attachment to academia in the face of its normalised misbehaviour. Moreover, if the academic fails to produce the right kind of academicity, the responsibility remains with the individual. How do passionate attachments to particular practices of staging academic identity, including notions of right and wrong, competence and incompetence, come about? How are some of these passionate attachments socially sustained, materialised by norms, rules and physical objectivation? How do they colonise the flesh, while other notions are more easily rejected? How is the desiring subject produced? Academic affective athleticism is a concept that enables us to inquire at the same time into (a) the training of academic bodies, just as athletes train their bodies to meet standards of excellence, and (b) the development of an affective musculature, as actors train for a performance in which their 178

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embodied knowledge of how to affect and be affected by an audience is realised. In considering performance in relation to art performing, we like to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of affective athleticism in relation to art and the sensations that art induces, since we wish to focus on the socio-​materiality of disciplined bodies and induced affects that contribute to the reproduction of an affective economy through the managing of self-​ managing practices. In analysing the performance artwork Que le cheval vive en moi, in which an artist and a horse shared blood, Leon Hilton (2013: 508) describes how ‘the “affective athleticism” of the performance –​the intense and intensive movement that arises at the point “where thought rejoins the body,” and where the human passes through the animal to rejoin the immanent plane of matter itself –​is also its most radical aesthetic intervention’. In fact, we wish to paraphrase the title of Hilton’s analysis, The Horse in My Flesh, to describe how another non-​human entity, the academy, is inscribed in human flesh. Academic affective athleticism illustrates the vibration of ‘the academy in my flesh’. The concept of ‘flesh’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 1968) is relevant for an affect and practice lens, since it foregrounds the human’s pre-​discursive experience, which is prior to the schema of rationality and language. With this concept, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty describes the intermingling of subject and world as intelligent embodiment and the interrelationship of inner and outer, the mutual mingling of touching and the tangible, the seer and the seen, the toucher and the touched. Flesh points to the circulating capacity of affecting and being affected by the sensorial. In the next section, we experiment with the image of the ‘academy in my flesh’, focusing on publications as the main artefact connecting the inner and outer world of academicity, and with the use of the concept of ‘academic affective athleticism’ to interpret how academic bodies are shaped by specific practices and disciplined to manage self-​management.

Practices shaping academic athleticism Publications are the main artefacts through which a researcher becomes a recognisable subject in academia. Publishing is perhaps the most important practice to learn when entering the academic scientific community, crucial to learn in order to advance. In this regard, academic practices are imbued with a rhetorical fetishisation of making knowledge visible through outputs and traceable practices, including participation in research projects, publications, being named on grants, supervising research students, and other ‘markers of esteem’ that literally and metaphorically raise individual profiles, and constitute the self as currency. To be research 179

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inactive, by implication, is to be invisible and in deficit according to current audit logics. (Garforth, 2012: 279; original emphasis) Hence, academic writing is full of affective implications that are not limited to the process of publishing but extend to the socio-​material relationships within the wider academic infrastructure. Writing, and then publishing, are ‘experiences’ in the sense of referring to ‘academic subjects who constitute themselves and are constituted as experiencing subjects’ (Brunila, 2016: 387). This makes sense, especially in relation to the ‘publish or perish’ logic: I publish, therefore I am. This machinic circulation of affects and effects shapes important aspects of who we are as academics, but it is not something external to us. ‘We are necessarily imbricated in the machine’s assemblages’ (Henderson et al, 2016: 6), which actively constructs what counts as ‘fact’, as well as determining what objects to fetishise. The following vignette illustrates the process of academic athleticism as it becomes inscribed in the flesh. Vignette 1 The transition period between completing a doctorate and finding a permanent academic job can be one of the most challenging periods of any academic career. Every academic career path is different, depending on the disciplines as well as on contextual factors related to the university to which you belong. For example, it might be normal to spend several years gaining post-​doctoral experience, often in a series of fixed-​term posts, before finding a permanent academic role. For the luckiest, the passage from PhD student to lecturer is painless, occurring like an automatic promotion onward to the academic career peak, full professorship. In this climbing journey, sooner or later a question occurs that worms into and affects one’s own thoughts: how to advance? How can I make the next step? Securing a permanent position is thus not necessarily the end of the academic adventure, at least not for those aspiring to reach the top of the mountain, career-​wise. For me (Michela) the question was: how can I make the step from senior lecturer to associate professor? I considered it ‘natural’ to ask this of senior colleagues who already did so. They explained that I would have to meet with the research director, and receive their approval to apply. A negative opinion would not prevent anyone from applying for a specific position, but it would be unwise, and go over badly with the faculty board. On the same day I pondered all this, I happened to meet the research director in the breakroom. Quite common in Scandinavian workplaces, the breakroom is especially important in Sweden, given its association with the Swedish fika, or coffee break, tradition. Fika is a social phenomenon, a

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legitimate reason to set aside a moment for quality time with coworkers, friends or family. So why not start a fika conversation with my research director? After exchanging the usual courtesies, I did not hesitate to ask for a meeting: ‘You know, I’m considering applying for the associate professorship, and I was informed that you are the responsible for assessing my curriculum and recommending my application. Should I send you my resume so we can meet?’ I was confident in expecting an answer along the lines of, ‘Yes, do that!’, which would have brought me back to my office to write the application, strongly motivated and determined to submit it as soon as possible. The research director shattered these expectations with words that remain engraved in my memory: “Well, you know it depends on your publications and on the impact factors of the corresponding journals”. ‘Publications’ and ‘impact factors’ suddenly acquired a material concreteness, like bullets, bouncing in my ears. They violently clashed with the vivid embodied memory of the fatigue accumulated to date, building an international and interdisciplinary scientific career marked by a constant effort to adjust my work to different literatures, methodologies, languages and academic practices. However, it took a fraction of a second for me to rationalise my emotions and translate them into the only words I dared to pronounce at that very moment: “I don’t agree: you know very well that I’m working at the boundaries of different fields, and that my publications often address niche topics that do not have the same thematic resonance as themes discussed in big communities like yours”. But my words did not soften the research director’s take, and nor did the fika smooth the rough edges that the conversation revealed. “Indeed, Michela, they are exceptions” (meaning, ‘the works targeted to those niches cannot be considered as important as publications in high-​ranked journals’). After all, I should have guessed: the research director’s view on what matters, what, literally, counts as scholarly virtuosity, was common knowledge. This short consultation continued, but the words ‘publications/​impact factors/​high-​ranked journals’ had already affected my enthusiasm, and reconfigured the scenario I was expecting. Climbing now appeared harder than expected, despite my arduous years of prior training, in another country, at another university. That day the air was rarefied more than ever before. This story is told from the perspective of one of the authors (Michela) who experienced what Hugh Willmott calls the ‘strangulating effect’ (2011: 431) of an academic environment increasingly regulated by metrics, algorithms and calculative practices (see also Chapter 10, this book). Becoming an associate professor, and becoming an academic in general, is a climbing journey, an academic adventure towards the top of the mountain. It is an embodied experience that produces intensities, a vivid bodily memory of the fatigue, while the subject projects him or herself in ‘relationships of difference and displacement’ (Ahmed, 2004: 120) at the boundaries of different fields. Becoming an academic 181

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is a flesh-​and-​blood process of knowing (Bispo de Souza and Gherardi, 2019) ‘arising out of and continuously enmeshed in webs of actions’ (Wacquant, 2015: 2) to adjust him or herself to perform academicity ‘in the right way’. Other metaphors may describe how academic careers are not standard paths, and how personal stories intertwine with work life in an unpredictable and heteroclite way, producing intensities that ‘affect and move us in different ways’ (Brunila, 2016: 388). Despite its inevitable subjectivity, this vignette typifies the dynamics of the neoliberal, corporate academia. ‘Universities are not separate worlds, but reflect the societies they are part of. They are like micro models of political economies participating within broader webs of power’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2014: 6), embedded in the ‘technocracy of metrics’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2014: 13). Nowadays, scholarly and scientific work is increasingly regulated by situated practices that constitute expertise and subjects through specific technologies of governance. The power is delegated to objects like metrics to calibrate research quality and, accordingly, to define what matters to affirm one’s own scholarly virtuosity. Lists of academic journals, and ‘list fetishism’, are deemed to ‘discriminate quality in a manner that conveys an impression of impartiality and objectivity’ (Willmott, 2011: 430). Hence, such objects have a certain moral authority because they are assumed to impose the criteria of scientificity (Introna, 2016). However, objectivity inscribed in research practices as a value ‘serves to evacuate political objections but also passion, commitments, rage, and many other gendered, and racialised, affects’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2014: 9). Indeed, academia has historically built its authoritative voice on a male subject embodying the norm ethnicity of ‘whiteness’ (hooks, 1994), at the risk of marginalising those who do not perform the ‘right identity’ or who do not appear to be appropriately repeating and confirming the norm (Petersen, 2008). Exceptions prove the rule of Grand Theory, which is concerned with ‘developing generalities, typologies and abstractions’, and ‘if we try to engage in research that is different to the norm, there is a danger that we are criticized and rejected for not contributing to theory, not doing rigorous (ie, “scientific”) research, and end up in the far corner institutionally and academically’ (Cunliffe, 2018: 1429–​30). Such academic practices enact infrastructural barriers that are inherently conservative and especially ‘biased against new, unorthodox, and interdisciplinary paths, knowledges or approaches that tend to appear first at the margins of disciplines’ (Star, 2002: 109). The tension between resistance to all forms of ‘domination’ (Baaz et al, 2017) –​including the commodification of knowledge, the fetishism of algorithms, the discursive truth-​regimes and normative orders of status quo –​and the ‘prostitution of scholarship’ (Ingold, 2011: xiii) to build an acceptable CV trains academics in a daily practice of affective athleticism in an attempt to meet peers’ and managers’ expressed (and unexpressed) 182

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expectations. It is an ongoing performance made of rules and procedures to create, learn and apply, dashing between meetings, abundant templates and spreadsheets to complete, email correspondence (sometimes requiring a response within 24 hours per university regulations) and so on, and so forth, until the air rarefies. The metaphor of ‘asphyxiation’ (Willmott, 2011: 438) invoked in the first vignette is not at odds with the implications of academic fetishist practices to manage subjects and their artefacts in a predictable, time-​saving, and apparently objective, way. Academic athleticism is also embodied and embedded in other affectively intense objects, as illustrated in the next vignette. Vignette 2 While pondering how to approach this chapter, I (Magnus) happened to read a review of a new book about the collars of formal frock coats (Sigroth-​ Lambe, 2019): Both teachers and students started to wear academic coat collars in the mid-​1800s. A special embroidery in silk was attached to the collars. The local tradition of academies and universities determined the patterns. Today, there are only two embroiderers who master the art of embroidery on coat collars, where one is active in Lund and one in Uppsala. In the book, Tom Lundin, who is otherwise a professor emeritus at the medical faculty, has gathered facts about the academic coat collar’s background, appearance, and use today, as well as historically. No wonder that this newspaper article appears in Uppsala, site of Sweden’s oldest university (dating back to 1477), I thought, nor that the two embroiderers were situated in Uppsala and in Lund, home to the country’s underdog university, itself founded in 1666 (in order to make southern Sweden more Swedish and less Danish, according to legend). Despite lacking embroidery on my own collar, I had previously noticed these special distinctions, and understood their vague connection to seniority, without paying them much notice. Instead, 10 years ago, I was quite happy to merely pass my dissertation and earn the right to wear a doctoral hat, the most prominent academic sign of my promotion at Åbo Akademi University (ÅA), Finland, where I received my PhD. As a member of the business school faculty, I am sorry that I did not get to wear a sword, which would have been cool. Nor was I granted the further privilege of being permitted to choose execution by sword, in the event of being sentenced to death. I suppose that in such circumstances I would simply be shot. Nonetheless, I am happy to say that I didn’t receive a death sentence, and my colleagues 183

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instead presented me with the insignia of the business faculty to wear on my hat, something I very much appreciated. Back in Sweden, working as university lecturer, I learned that modern ÅA was not so old as I believed. Legend states that ÅA was founded, most importantly, before Lund, in 1640 (this time, in order to civilise what was then Eastern Sweden). Instead, ÅA was founded in 1918, and the older institution moved to Helsinki in 1827, where it became Helsinki University, a story my colleagues at ÅA somehow failed to tell me. After my return to Sweden, it also became apparent that I had no real use for my doctoral hat, except for very special occasions, such as formal dinners and social events. In fact, in everyday life, I lacked the most prominent sign of my doctorate, the ring proving to cognoscenti that I am, so to speak, ‘married’ to science. As this crippled feeling lingered on, I went to a goldsmith and ordered a ring, where I had to choose the right kind of pattern of oak leaves that represented the faculty of my PhD. Strangely, no one asked me for a diploma, or proof of my right to wear such a ring. I simply paid and walked out with it. Does the same go for embroidered collars, one might wonder? Do you just order and pay for them, or is there a specific procedure to acquire this specific sign of prominence? I didn’t find an answer to this question in Tom Lundin’s book (2019), but I noticed that his book is just one volume of ten published by the University and Student History Society.1 This series includes lessons about ‘ribbon tails’ (frackband, supposedly for carrying your imaginary sword), student farce traditions, student songs, other academic and student societies and stories about leaving Uppsala. Even considering these few topics, becoming and being an academic in Uppsala appears much more involved than having the right to buy a ring or a doctoral hat. Finally, I can also disclose that ordering your embroidered frock coat collars requires no special procedure. You simply pay, just like with the ring. No proof whatsoever is required. When I call her and ask, Annika Karp2 –​the tailor in Lund who specialises in academic embroidery –​tells me that anyone showing up wearing unearned collars would be noticed, and the ensuing public disgrace prevents misuse. I am also welcome to place an order, she says, when it is time for me to show my own collars. Then she hangs up. Post-­​­vignette 2: wearing the wrong collars? As one might suspect, this second vignette was written by a different author (Magnus) than the first (Michela). The two of us differ in academic background and interests, country of origin and gender, to mention a few things. Most noticeably, however, in our vignettes and our approach to texts, we do not fully share a point of departure, or language. We also relate differently to the literature used for this chapter, as well as to the theme of 184

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the book. Our differences became quite clear working on this text, where I (Magnus) have struggled to fit myself into the apparent tradition established by the exclusive club of researchers who seem theoretically more closely related to this book’s theme. But my relation to the subject rather comes from my practice as a scholar, or, to use the terms of this book, how I feel the sickness of academia ‘in my flesh’. Occasionally, I resent having to adapt in order to fit in. Sometimes I become childish, and, just to be contrary, do unexpected and inopportune choices. Why can’t I just grow up? Of course, I am aware of this glitch in my persona. It is why I seek opportunities to develop my self-​management skills in areas identified as academic weakness (and by God, are they not plenty?). It is why I wanted to be part of this chapter. I wanted to explore (and discipline?) myself in less-​ travelled terrain, and learn from those more experienced than myself. Every time I turn my attention to the project, the intensity rises, and with it my concern: how do I make our collaboration a rewarding one, and not shame my co-​authors? How do I balance self-​control with passion, not to say anger and resentment? Experiencing and overcoming these intensities is important. You will thus find no attempt here at a clear theoretical dissection of the above vignette. Instead, I move into the twilight zone, as the vignette takes a life of its own and turns into a post-​vignette, not sure of its status, or of what this part tries to be. Am I wearing the wrong collar? Turning back to the second vignette, it describes a variety of practices to which academics not only attend as part of their profession, but also organise their lives around, and even write books about. Many of these practices are deeply connected with seniority and tradition. Experience indicates quality, but sometimes age alone seems to matter. Age has a value in itself, where newcomers are expected to follow the present trajectory till death, and into the afterlife. A university founded in 1477, 1640, 1666, or situated in a town with 16th-​century Tudor houses, as described in the introduction to this chapter, means something and provides an affective academic atmosphere. Writing a book about leaving your historic university town behind is not at all absurd, but somehow expected. Departure and loss stir affect. Metaphorically, Elvis has left the building, and thus has his flesh lost attachment –​the building is less Elvis and Elvis is less building. Academicity is thus not bounded to an academic profession, but is instead a state of becoming, being and leaving, and saturates our lifeworlds, our retirement and our afterlives. Publications like the books in the vignette not only spread research results; they also memorialise and uphold ideas inscribed as important, sometimes centuries ago, that still have an affective presence and currency. We, the academics, uphold this market, and have done so for a long time before neoliberalism or the marketisation of education. Of course, market and influence exist, but it would be naïve not to recognise the old, stale pond we swim in. 185

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As academics, we express ourselves and therefore create artefacts that evolve in time and feed a core marketplace for affective capitalism in academia. What drives affect can, to some extent, be attributed to the intimate relation between academicity and a specific use of language, usually described in this context as objective theory detached from subject. Yet they remain attached. Both theories and their concepts instead appear as ‘quasi subjects’ in the academicity we pursue, and they do that as their use stirs affect. But can I use a specific concept, such as ‘quasi subjects’, freely? What was Bruno Latour’s intention when writing about the concept, and does that matter? Is there a mainstream of thought that determines the ‘correct’ use of the concept? What right do I have to express the concept, even to love it … and what affects do these last few sentences stir in you, as a reader? Does this text make sense to you, interest you, make you angry, bewildered or something else? Is your stomach active, does your heart rate change, as mine does while I search body and soul for the right expressions? Do you now feel ashamed for me, or, having detached yourself from what you read, are you indifferent? Theorising, which in this context can also be viewed as the organisation of sought micro intensities, is a most value-​laden word, incapsulating potential affect for whomever it touches. Lines are drawn, connections made and bridges burned. Whom should I quote and refer to, in order to stir desired affects? Maybe this is the most ‘athletic’ practice of academia, the ability to internalise and express patterns of concepts, but also the related names. Therewith we surround ourselves with echoes that create intensities in our texts, and communication as with ghosts of Christmases past. You probably sense them here, too, even those not explicitly mentioned. Rereading myself, I spot favourite ghosts like McLuhan, Dickens, Shakespeare, Weick and DiMaggio and Powell –​all men, sorry to say, but they have my love. And one might ask: are we not all pursuing affective paths towards becoming echoes ourselves? Deleuze, Deleuze, Deleuze, Deleuze ... While we do this, we invite others to use us in their attempts to capitalise on our theorising, as assets in the public domain, assets that we happily supply. Each quote and reference raises the intensity, but is also a nail in our own personal coffin, labelled ‘academicity’, stagnation, conformity. Adjusting the perspective, each time we reference or cite another, we grant space and influence to the ghosts that surround us. Still, we must do so to connect with a collective stream of thought, peers living and dead whom we can make contact with, an important part of the training to be real, true and trustworthy academics. To do any less than what we understand is expected risks jeopardising that connection, and we must fine-​tune our senses to perceive when we are out of line, and shape up. If we do not, we no longer appear as peers, and thus lose currency in the academic marketplace. This is a most frightful calamity. Without peers, you have nothing, you are nothing, 186

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and no one sees your embroidered collars, earned rightfully or otherwise. You cannot publish if you do not exist, and no one will be there to carry your coffin. Why can’t I just grow up? Academic training is accordingly more than a life’s work, as it affects all aspects of our lives and even afterlives. It permeates our lives and deaths, loves and hates, and for this reason we must adhere to traditions already in place, for who can bear ‘the whips and scorns of time’ or a deathbed realisation of their own imminent oblivion … who? So, if we seek the vicious capitalist or manager responsible for this bounded practice of academicity, we better look in the mirror. And if we look very carefully, we will probably see the bars of the iron cage that we ourselves forged, and notice the hammer and the chisel we hold, and hear the echo of the approaching undertaker’s footsteps. Post-­​­vignettes: affective athleticism in the era of COVID-​19 6:45 AM:​Eating breakfast. Reading emails. Trying to orient among the never-​ending flow of posts on Teams regarding how to make on-​campus courses digital. Everything is in Swedish … it might take hours to translate. I give up. Accompanying my daughter to school. Academicity saturates my lifeworlds. We are overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic that is dramatically affecting humanity by foregrounding its multiple vulnerabilities, as well as the fragility of the neoliberal society that academia embodies widely. How is this more-​than-​ever-​messy world affecting academia and its principle of productivity? Acting as an academic in the times of COVID-​19 is an embodied process of learning how to deliver educational value despite all, because the capitalist infrastructure of knowledge production works in a continuous cycle, and the customers are waiting. ‘I’ve lived through many disasters. … Your peers now trying to work as normal are going to burn out fast’, says one academic on Twitter. ‘I’m not sure what kind of problems might arise … since the whole world has gone digital’, says a manager of mine. 8:15 AM:​Answering urgent emails while Outlook reminds me that I have to write: publications are waiting for me. Why do I persist in setting these annoying reminders? I delegate them the responsibility to discipline my time, that’s why. I see the bars of the iron cage that I forged myself. 187

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Social platforms are filling up with stories of academics asked to athletically cope with the emergency by reinventing courses (but quality should not be compromised, managers remind them), reprogramming research activities, and, accordingly, rearranging their private life in this period of social distancing, home schooling and ‘smart’ working. The intensities of academicity are unbearable in my flesh. The outbreak is intensifying the management of self-​management. 9.17 AM:​Finally writing, but … a student’s email drags me back into current events. These days it’s hard to disconnect: how dare I isolate myself while the world goes mad? What if my students can’t conduct their data collection, due to the circumstances? I send an email to my managers, and spend time reading and replying, reading and replying. My husband is coming with our 10-​month-​old son: smiling, changing the diaper, feeding him, smiling. Back to writing. Academicity saturates my lifeworlds. Due to the specific circumstances, performing academicity means being flexible now more than ever. But can’t the current demand for flexibility easily become a request for more ‘agility’ in the long run? Like multiskilled triathletes, academics are called on to carry out multiple tasks, so that the team is competitively nimbly. We should perform our entrepreneurial self to keep delivering the university services today, to celebrate ourselves as heroes tomorrow: that’s what a proud manager says. How inflexible will this organisational request, not only to project our own individual and collective body in malleable ways but also to quickly acquire a ‘sense of purpose, control, and lightness of touch’ (Gillies, 2011: 208) in a messier world, become? For the time being, let’s play the game, advises the same academic on Twitter. 11.30 AM:​Remote meeting with other managers to discuss if the new PhD student is allowed to move to Sweden due to the international safety measures. Back to writing. Time to feed my son. Having lunch and listening to news. Anguish. Fatigue. Should I keep writing? I see the bars of the iron cage that I forged myself. 188

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Like a gymnast, I strive to coordinate my whole body to contribute to this collective endeavour. It is a matter of solidarity during global, ecological, posthuman crisis. This emergency is nothing but a demand to change the way we approach the world, work and Others. It is an opportunity to problematise the management practices that inform the process of becoming an academic. Problematisation ‘can open up spaces for resistance and, indeed, for counter conduct’ (Gillies, 2011: 216). ‘In the face of incitement to be nimble and in constant motion, we need to remember the common human need for stability, security, and stasis’ (Martin, quoted in Gillies, 2001: 217), being-​pausing-​thinking rather than endless becoming-​performing-​delivering.

And now? How can I conclude this chapter? Here the ‘I’ is Silvia, a retired professor from the traditional academy, departing in the face of changing academic practices. Mine was also the pen that began this chapter, and was supposed to conclude, according to our original plan, as pictured in the photograph taken by Michela in early May 2019 (see Figure 9.1). Moreover, the materialisation of our plan on the blackboard of a meeting room in Mälardalen University was preceded by an intense email traffic with this book’s editors, intense exchanges regarding possible collaboration with Michela and Magnus, and an exciting time of readings for creating a common ground to write the yet-​unwritten.

Figure 9.1: The original writing plan

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The whole story began on 18 December 2018, when I received an invitation for a book project on affective capitalism in academia from Daniel Nehring (whom I did not know then). Soon after, I began a conversation about academic capitalism with Michela, Magnus and Daniel. It was only in October 2019 that I met Daniel, and his partner Mengwei, in Shanghai, where we strolled around in the French Concession and had a lovely dinner with their friends, Paolo and Xuhan. By the end of October 2019, Michela, Magnus and I had the plan for the chapter (Figure 9.1) and a tentative first draft, even before the book contract was signed. We completed two further drafts. Two months later, in January, news of COVID-​19 made me worried for my new friends in China, and it was hard to believe that they were not allowed outside their homes. How could I imagine that in two months’ time, in March 2020, it would be my turn to be confined at home? My journey to Sweden was cancelled, my co-​authors Michela and Magnus worked from home, and the Swedish government trusted ‘individual social responsibility’ in the face of the pandemic. The world is no longer the same. On 22 March 2020, I received the new draft of the chapter from Michela, and have agonised since then over the writing of the conclusion. I cannot go back to the plan … it looks so meaningless now, after how the ensuing time’s deep impact on our collective writing process. And I am struggling with myself to find an expressive form that transgresses the cannon of academic writing. Now I realise how deeply engrained in my flesh the habit of writing in a linear academic way truly is, when writing my subjectivity in the text … yes, but with moderation. I love reading about ‘writing differently’, and did some small experiments of my own in the past, but now I cannot authorise myself to transgress the boundaries of what I learned as the proper way of writing for an academic book. I sense the effect of my 40 years’ academic career in my bones, in my fingers. At this moment, a fire brigade jeep is passing on the small lane of a mountain village, where I am comfortably writing in the open air, and from a megaphone a deep male voice pronounces: “PLEASE NOTE that for health and safety reasons it is mandatory to stay at home in compliance with the instructions received … I REPEAT”. Can this text ignore what is happening in its con-​text? But such deliberate ignorance is one of the writing rules that we obey to when we learn academicity! Maybe affective athleticism is all about this: the way one learns to authorise a subjectivity inscribed in a text that de-​territorialises its author from the historical, moral, political and affective con-​text, and re-​ territorialises her/​him as the writer in an ‘appropriate’ academic site. And there is one more thing: it is not all about writing, since writing is entangled with the ‘appropriate’ affect. The difficulty that I now face is that I am no longer the same author (Silvia) who wrote the above introduction. This text so long in production affected my subjectivity, and my subsequent writing is 190

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affected by the process. I did not expect to become multiple authors within the same text. Should another co-​author be added? A Silvia Gherardi 1, together with Silvia Gherardi 2? This is the definition of schizophrenia, and, quoting Félix Guattari’s (1995) schyzoanalysis, will not help! I have to (I want to!) accept the complexity of my own feelings, and accept Michela’s invitation to being-​pausing-​thinking. When I think of the writing process, and of the forces that affected the developing text, I identify the ‘being’ with Magnus, in the way that he more or less intentionally dove into the writing, and returned changed to its surface. The ‘pausing’ is the incredible circumstance that made this text agentic and affecting. Pausing is a luxury in academic life, since the rules of the game, and the affective athleticism required to play, create an obstacle course, where one deadline is followed by a second, and so on. And the ‘thinking’ is what I like most! While writing, I come to realise that the part of a text called the ‘conclusion’ acts as a way of looking backwards. It reminds me of a story by Karen Blixen, entitled ‘The Stork’ and published in Out of Africa (2015 [1937]). The story goes like this. One night a man, who lived by a dammed pond full of fish, was awakened by a terrible noise, and set out in the dark to find the cause. He headed north and then south, but in the darkness, running up and down, back and forth, guided only by the noise, he repeatedly stumbled and fell. At last, he found a leak in the dam, where water and fishes were escaping. He set to work plugging the leak and only when he finished went back to bed. The next morning, looking out of the window, he saw with surprise that his footprints had traced the figure of a stork on the ground. At this point Blixen asks herself: ‘When the design of my life is complete, will I see, or will others see a stork?’ The narrator accompanies the story with a design on the sand, and the magic of the fable is that the man who lived by the pond concentrates an entire life in one night, and is able to see it the next morning. Blixen comments that the narrator is the only one who sees the design formed by his steps, since the man of the pond is too busy in what he is doing: life is lived forward and understood backwards. Adriana Cavarero (2014: 3), commenting on Blixen’s story, writes that fiction –​unlike philosophy –​‘reveals the meaning without committing the error of defining it … it reveals the finite in its fragile uniqueness, and sings its glory’. In looking back at our experience writing this chapter, I act as the narrator of the stork’s story, except that rather than a stork on the sand, I point to the footprints we left on the paper, and refrain from defining them. Rather, the meaning of our story is hidden in the process, how we started with the concept of affective athleticism, how this concept affected 191

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us as authors, and how we left behind the assumption of treating it in the ‘usual’ rational way, and slowly the concept ‘illustrated’ itself, becoming performative. The text made us as authors since, like the man in Blixen’s story, only in hindsight do I/​we see what we did. Being unintentional and beyond our full awareness, what we did is what Alecia Youngblood Jackson and Lisa Mazzei (2012) call ‘thinking with theory’. With this term, the authors invite creation of a language and a way of thinking that is at once methodological and philosophical, plugging theory and data into one another, as in the conceptual play of Deleuzian zig-​zag. They state that plugging in to produce something new is a constant, continuous process of making and unmaking, since certain connections only emerge in-​between theory and data and –​we may add –​in becoming with one another. Who is talking now, then? Is Michela or Magnus or Silvia, or a collective author that has emerged from the performative writing? In thinking with theory together, we have explored practices of academic capitalism. This text illustrates how the process of academic athleticism has become inscribed in our flesh. Starting from embodied experiences of academic capitalism has allowed us to figure out where it comes from, which are the traces that it has left and what questions can be formulated to interrogate the changes that academia is going through in neoliberal and market-​oriented times. Such thinking is incompatible with academic athleticism that asks for constant performing. Here, art comes again in our support to conclude. Fathia Mohidin3 is an artist living in Sweden who has made the gym a political place for talking about how bodies are shaped, performed and exhibited as machines to be managed with discipline on a regular base. In a recent interview, released on the occasion of the exhibition ‘The Poetics of Pressure and Flow’ (Västerås Konstmuseum, 2022), she was asked about her concept of the gym as a political place. She responded: There are many ideas about how we’re supposed to be, how we’re supposed to look and move. … The more we build up our bodies and endure our own wellbeing, the more we can achieve –​in accordance with principles of a capitalist growth system. … I’ve thought a lot about objects in relation to the body. What am I supposed to do with these objects, what are they supposed to do to me? These words resonate with how we have used the concept of academic ‘affective athleticism’ to describe what is required in academia to become a ‘fit body’, a body that fits into the academic capitalism. Rephrasing Mohidin’s words, we may ask ‘What are we supposed to do in academia and what do these expectations do to me, to us?’

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Responding to such questions requires us to cool down our academic musculature. Hence, let’s take a breath and pause! Notes Universitets-​och studenthistoriska sällskapet: www.studen​this​tori​ska.se Annika Karp: http://​ann​ikak​arp.se 3 Fathia Mohidin: www.fathia​mohi​din.com 1 2

References Ahmed, S. (2004) ‘Affective economies’, Social Text, 22(2): 117–​39. Artaud, A. (1964) Le théâtre et son double, Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Baaz, L., Lilja, M. and Vinthagen, S. (2017) ‘Resistance studies as an academic pursuit’, Journal of resistance Studies, 1(3): 10–​28. Bispo de Souza, M. and Gherardi, S. (2019) ‘Flesh-​a nd-​b lood knowing: interpreting qualitative data through embodied practice-​based research’, RAUSP Management Journal, 54(4). https://​doi.org/​10.1108/​ rausp-​04-​2019-​0066 Bjerg, H. and Staunæs, D. (2011) ‘Self-​management through shame: uniting governmentality studies and the “affective turn” ’, ephemera, 11(2): 138–​56. Blixen, K. (2015 [1937]) Out of Africa, London: Penguin. Bottrell, D. and Manathunga, C. (eds) (2019) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education (2 vols), Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Bozeman, B. and Boardman, C. (2016) ‘Academic faculty in university research centers: neither capitalism’s slaves nor teaching fugitives’, The Journal of Higher Education, 84(1): 88–​120. Brunila, K. (2016) ‘The ambivalences of becoming a professor in neoliberal academia’, Qualitative Inquiry, 22(5): 386–​94. Cavarero, A. (2014) Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, London: Routledge. Cunliffe, A.L. (2018) ‘Wayfaring: a scholarship of possibilities or let’s not get drunk on abstraction’, M@n@gement, 21(4): 1429–​39. Davies, B. and Petersen, E.B. (2005) ‘Intellectual workers (un) doing neoliberal discourse’, International Journal of Critical Psychology, 13(1): 32–​54. Deleuze, G. (2014) Francis Bacon, Logique de la sensation, Paris: Le Seuil. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987 [1980]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994) What is Philosophy?, New York: Columbia University Press. Etzkowitz, H. (2016) ‘The entrepreneurial university: vision and metrics’, Industry and Higher Education, 30(2): 83–​97. Garforth, L. (2012) ‘In/​visibilities of research: seeing and knowing in STS’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 37(2): 264–​85. 193

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Gherardi, S. (2017) ‘One turn … and now another one. Do the turn to practice and the turn to affect have something in common?’, Management Learning, 48(3): 345–​58. Gherardi, S. (2019) How to Conduct a Practice-​Based Study: Problems and Methods (2nd edn), Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Gillies, D. (2011) ‘Agile bodies: a new imperative in neoliberal governance’, Journal of Education Policy, 26(2): 207–​23. Giroux, H.A. (2011) ‘The disappearing intellectual in the age of economic Darwinism’, Policy Futures in Education, 9(2): 163–​71. Guattari, F. (1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-​Aesthetic Paradigm, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Henderson, L., Honan, E. and Loch, S. (2016) ‘The production of the academicwritingmachine’, Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 7(2): 4–​18. Hilton, L.J. (2013) ‘ “The horse in my flesh”: transpecies performance and affective athleticism’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 19(4): 487–​514. Holmwood, J. (2016) ‘The university, democracy and the public sphere’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(7): 927–​42. hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, New York: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, Abingdon: Routledge. Introna, L.D. (2016) ‘Algorithms, governance, and governmentality: on governing academic writing’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 41(1): 17–​49. Jackson, A.Y. and Mazzei, L. (2012) Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data across Multiple Perspectives, London: Routledge. Jessop, B. (2008) ‘On academic capitalism’, Critical Policy Studies, 12(1): 104–​9. Karppi, T., Kähkönen, L., Manneuvuo, M., Pajala, M. and Sihvonen, T. (2016) ‘Affective capitalism: investments and investigations’, ephemera, 16(4): 1–​13. Latour, B. (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lundin, T. (2019) Akademiska frackkragar, Uppsala: Universitets-​ och studenthistoriska sällskapet. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Merleau-​Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. O’Sullivan, S. (2001) ‘The aesthetics of affect: thinking art beyond representation’, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 6(3): 125–​35.

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Petersen, E. (2008) ‘Passionately attached: academic subjects of desire’, in B. Davies (ed) Judith Butler in Conversation: Analyzing the Texts and Talk of Everyday Life, London: Routledge, pp 55–​68. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2014) ‘Think we must, again! Notes from Academia Inc. Keynote lecture –​Soiré de Sophia Avond’. www.sop​hia.be/​wp-​cont​ ent/​uplo​ads/​2018/​07/​Think-​We-​Must-​2014-​M_​-​Puig-​de-​la-​Bella-​ Casa.pdf Sigroth-​Lambe, S. (2019) ‘Föredrag om akademisk högtidsdetalj’ (‘Lecture on an academic ceremonial detail’), Upsala Nya Tidning. www.unt.se/​kul​ tur-​noje/​fored​rag-​om-​akadem​isk-​hogtid​sdet​alj-​5293​653.aspx Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Slaughter, S. and Rhoades, G. (2004) Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Star, S.L. (2002) ‘Infrastructure and ethnographic practice’, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 14(2): 107–​22. Staunæs, D. and Brøgger, K. (2020) ‘In the mood of data and measurements: experiments as affirmative critique, or how to curate academic value with care’, Feminist Theory, 21(4): 429–​45. Thrift, N. (2004) ‘Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect’, Geografiska Annaler, 86B: 57‒78. Västerås Konstmuseum (2022) ‘Conversation between Anna Ihle and Caroline Malmström in advance of the exhibition The politics of pressure and Flow, 2022’, Västerås Konstmuseum, Sweden. Wacquant, L. (2015) ‘For a sociology of flesh and blood’, Qualitative Sociology, 38: 1–​11. Willmott, H. (2011) ‘Journal list fetishism and the perversion of scholarship: reactivity and the ABS list’, Organization, 18(4): 429–​42. Wyatt, J. and Gale, K. (2014) ‘Introduction to the special issue on collaborative writing as method of inquiry’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 14(4): 295–​7.

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Getting texts done: affective rhythms of reading in quantified academia Juhana Venäläinen

Introduction ‘Lack of time’ is perhaps one of the most persistent expressions of anxiety in academic work today (Crang, 2007; Gill, 2014; Vostal, 2016). It is an affective illustration of a dog chasing its tail; no matter how hard we push, we rarely ‘get things done’ (Allen, 2001; see also Gill, 2010; Gregg, 2016, 2018). The relentless pondering over whether we did enough is, on the one hand, brought about and catalysed by the precarious employment settings and fierce competition within contemporary academia (Gill, 2014, 2017; Brunila and Hannukainen, 2017; Allmer, 2018; Brunila and Valero, 2018). On the other hand, the unsettled self-​talk is a part of a vicious circle that gives rise to self-​reinforcing experiences of insufficiency (Gill, 2010; Mannevuo and Valovirta, 2019; see also Chapter 8, this book). This affective composition is clearly structural, that is to say, somehow beyond personal, but it is still experienced individually, as if it were in researchers’ own hands to rationalise their working patterns so as to cope with impending rhythmic dissonances. Individualised attempts to optimise work processes, to straighten out confused rhythms and to compensate for the chronic lack of time by working more ‘efficiently’ go hand in hand with the general evolution of academia into a huge measuring machine (Burrows, 2012; Murphy, 2015). With quantified academia, I refer to the meticulous efforts of standardising and measuring the inputs and outputs of scholarly activities as well as organising academic work with the guidance of these measurements (Crang, 2007; De Angelis and Harvie, 2009). As sociologist Roger Burrows (2012) describes, this trend of ‘metricisation’ is expressed in the roles that ‘numbers … are playing in our contemporary constitution as “academics” ’ (2012: 356; original emphasis). In this chapter, I examine the affective dynamics of quantified academia through a particular subset of scholarly work: academic reading. Throughout history, reading has kept its place at the unquestionable core of academic proficiency and professional identity, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Reading is a curious case in point, as it seems to challenge the 196

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general trajectory towards the ‘quantification of everything’ (Dyson, 2013). Whereas writing is already at the heart of measurable academic production, reading appears as much more uncountable and much less monitored. Reading lacks a standardised unit of measure –​something akin to the power of the h-​index (Burrows, 2012; see also Chapter 5, this book) –​by which researchers could be compared based on how much or how ‘well’ they read. Exactly because of this relative invisibility, reading retains a degree of uncaptured potential for conceiving of academic life differently and thus, for transforming the experience of everyday ‘academicity’ (Charteris et al, 2015; Brunila, 2016). In the analysis for this chapter, I propose a set of affective rhythms as conceptual tools for exploring how academic reading feels today. The term ‘affective rhythm’ (see Gibbs, 2015) opens two important insights into the workings of affective capitalism in academia: first, how affects that contribute to moulding scholarly subjectivities are organised temporally; and second, how temporalities of academic work are collectively experienced and made sense of. Three rhythms will be examined: insufficiency (drowning in text), jumpiness (getting distracted) and hastiness (reading ‘efficiently’). Each rhythm expresses a particular dimension to reading as a pivotal academic activity. The purpose of this enquiry is to experiment with a handful of intuitively formulated and experimental concepts (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991) to try and see how they might resonate with the ambiguous but widely shared sentiments that ‘everyone involved with academia is aware of ’ (see Chapter 1, this book). This is also how the term affect is understood here: as unbound ‘gut feelings’ (Kinnunen and Parviainen, 2016) that do not have the stability of an emotion but rather are glimpses of ever-​transforming entanglements of the discursive and the material (Barad, 2007). Affects, in this sense, are a part of our social practice (Wetherell, 2015; Raudaskoski and Klemmensen, 2019) and our bodily knowledge (Blackman and Venn, 2010). They are not autonomous from cultural meaning-​making (contrary to Massumi, 1995), but neither are they predetermined by language.

From jottings to collaborative autoethnography As the researcher-​activist collective Precarias a la deriva writes, we have to ‘begin with ourselves to not get stuck on ourselves’ (2004: 11, author’s translation). This chapter follows a similar methodological credo in assuming that critical insights into affective capitalism are accessible through the tacit knowledge available to academics in their quotidian practices. The ‘data’ for this chapter consist of autoethnographic reflections developed in tandem with textual excerpts from Twitter and Facebook posts, blogs, news articles and informal conversations at and outside work.1 Few of these materials were collected exclusively for research purposes (thus the quotation marks 197

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around ‘data’). Mostly, they were just private jottings at first, and only later assumed the function of research material. While I collected the data by myself, the research process also implies a collaborative dimension. My cited colleagues did not participate directly in the writing or analysis process or gave formal research interviews, but they still made an important contribution to making sense of how we feel as academics. This method reflects the idea of understanding the affective implications of academic capitalism as public secrets: things that we as researchers observe, know and share but do not usually say out loud (Valero et al, 2019). To study how people spontaneously reflect on a topic that they do not supposedly talk about may sound paradoxical. However, I maintain that it is precisely through such accidental bits of discourse that tacit collective knowledge can often be unveiled. The sporadic verbalisations here and there –​sort of collegial anecdotes –​can crystallise ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) that go beyond subjective interpretations. Extending the ethnography of the self to include other reflecting ‘selves’ can be understood as collaborative autoethnography, which is ‘simultaneously collaborative, autobiographical, and ethnographic’ (Chang et al, 2013: 17). Collaborative autoethnography builds on subjective and shared experiences but is also continuously informed by theoretical reflection. The co-​ constitution of the personal and the collaborative in this method resonates with the observation that even when illustrating academic life through other people’s words, the excerpts often articulate my subjective experience as well: I have participated in the same conversations; I have shared, retweeted and commented on the same posts; I have ‘been there’ and felt ‘the same’. Before proceeding in the analysis, the narrating ‘I’ and ‘we’ must be briefly contextualised. This ‘I’, a 38-​year-​old native Finnish white male from a non-​academic family background, has been working at a mid-​sized Finnish university for about 10 years: sometimes salaried, sometimes with a grant, sometimes through other arrangements. Currently, this ‘I’ works as a tenured associate professor in cultural studies. Even though his current position can be understood as relatively stable and even privileged in academic hierarchies, he still feels and vividly remembers the precarious undercurrents of academic employment. There are some specificities worth mentioning about the Finnish context of higher education as well –​the national ‘we’ of this inquiry. Even with the increasing importance of external and project-​based funding (Kauppinen and Kaidesoja, 2014; Brunila and Hannukainen, 2017) and the expanding managerialist tendencies (Mannevuo and Valovirta, 2019), Finnish universities are still closely aligned with the public sector. They became independent legal entities in the Universities Act Reform of 2010, but they still receive most of their funding from the government (Eurydice, 2020). The trend of marketisation in Finnish universities is relatively recent and partly in a 198

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nascent stage (Valero et al, 2019). Instruction is free of charge for EU/​EEA citizens, and the tuition fees that have been collected from other international students since 2017 only play a marginal role in the overall funding (Ministry of Education and Culture, 2022: 61). However, the sluggishness in the quantitative markers of marketisation (see Kauppinen, 2015) does not imply that these institutions are not deeply economised (Peetz, 2019). Economisation, as a logic and mode of discourse, is expressed in the penetrating practices of quantification, streamlined managerialism and expanding instrumental rationality –​globalised features that reflect the academic ‘we’ in a broader, transnational sense (Jessop, 2018).

What counts in quantified academia? When critically discussing the quantification in today’s academia, it is typical to receive a counter-​argument that universities have always been measured and assessed. But, as Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie (2009) observe, this might not be the case. On the contrary, the higher education sector has taken a remarkable leap towards measurability in recent decades. Universities have traditionally subscribed to a notion of academic freedom that largely eschewed measurement. Even if universities did measure, it was done in ways that were nuanced, local, context-​specific and largely self-​imposed. As De Angelis and Harvie put it: ‘measure, as we would now recognise it, simply did not exist’ (2009: 10). Today, the scope and variety of measurements are extensive. Hundreds of ‘metric assemblages’ (Burrows, 2012) guide academic work in its different aspects, from teaching to research and beyond. Measurement serves the purpose of standardising performance, which allows the university managers, public officers and policymakers to compare researchers and research institutions. At the same time, measurement provides a yardstick that can be utilised –​and is widely utilised –​by individual researchers to manage their own working patterns (Jauhiainen et al, 2015). Instead of trying to plot the full picture of these metrics and their complex interrelations, this chapter focuses on a particular case, academic reading, as a peculiar perspective on the broader dynamics of measurement and non-​measurement. Through the lens of managerial practices, reading is a relatively invisible activity that easily escapes the surveillant gaze. In contrast, written outputs, whether they are tweets, blog posts, policy briefs or journal articles, are already comprehensively tracked and counted in research projects. Nevertheless, the fact that researchers are less intensively monitored for their reading than their writing does not render reading an untouched area of academic freedom. Quite the contrary, the notion that one’s reading patterns are primarily one’s ‘own choice’ embodies how ambiguously power, affects and subjectivation are entangled in academic work –​and what kind of liberty 199

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this entanglement suggests. Researchers do not have to be forced to read: in fact, many love it anyway (Mannevuo, 2016), and would prefer to dedicate a larger part of their working time for it if they only could.2 Despite the general trend towards quantification, reading eludes enumeration, even ridicules it. Researchers may, of course, have their personal reading lists, reading diaries or even numerical reading targets, but the special quality of academic reading has not yet been captured by the metric assemblage. While written research outputs are being increasingly quantified, it is more ambiguous how reading can be measured. There is no equivalent of the h-​index for the books read, nor is there a section for ‘reading merits’ or ‘awards in reading’ in the standardised curriculum vitae templates used in applying for research funding (TENK, 2020). Measuring performance is elemental in quantifying academic work; this is not only about the administrative challenge of getting the data right for calculating financing allotments, but it is also a general frame of metricisation that dictates what counts and what matters in quantified academia (Brew, 2015). In performance management, universities attempt to produce the kinds of outputs that the funders quantify –​and this does not include reading. In the Finnish context, the majority (about 55 per cent) of universities’ expenses are covered through the core funding model in which the Ministry of Education and Culture allocates funding to universities based on their teaching and research indicators. In the model for the years 2021–​24, 42 per cent of financing is based on teaching, 34 per cent on research and 24 per cent on ‘the objectives of education and science policy’. Each category is further broken down into discrete measurable activities. For example, the number of scientific publications constitutes 14 per cent of the core funding (Ministry of Education and Culture, 2019). An idealistic discourse posits that the funding indicators should be monitored mostly by senior management and less, if at all, by individual researchers. In practice, this demarcation is difficult to maintain. In the context of academic self-​management, researchers have a lot of leeway in organising their work as they wish, but also a lot of responsibility for setting and meeting targets. Put bluntly, not many researchers can afford to ignore funding indicators or to actively revolt against them if they want to safeguard their position and advance their career. However, the capacity of measurements to steer academic work still depends on the extent to which the researchers themselves believe in the metrics. In effect, the chain of influence from abstract measurement to quotidian decisions on organising work does not rely primarily on coercion (such as demanding the researcher produces a certain number of outputs per year) or direct incentivisation (such as paying bonuses for high-​level publications) but on the infusion of metrics into the very academic ethos, and further, on the foundational aspiration of researchers to do what is 200

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good, what is right and what is expected from them. Managing with metrics operates with persuasive control, not (primarily) with disciplinary power (Deleuze, 1992). Indicators that quantify research as published ‘outputs’ represent researchers as writers, not as readers. Since reading is not a process covered by the funding indicators, it is quantified only secondarily. In this manner, the core funding model encourages reading inasmuch as it is necessary for producing publications (or teaching). From the perspective of funding metrics, there is no room to ‘read for reading’s sake’. Nevertheless, this very kind of non-​ instrumental, non-​predetermined curiosity is indispensable to academic work and for conceiving new ideas. Within this skewed structure, finding time for reading becomes the responsibility of individual researchers who have to optimise their work time to allow for this non-​incentivised activity (see the discussion on ‘invisible gifts’ in Chapter 7, this book). In the following three sections, I will analyse the difficulties in doing this –​making time for reading –​through exploring three affective rhythms that today shape academic literacies: insufficiency, jumpiness and hastiness. Insufficiency (drowning in text) According to a colleague’s tweet, ‘One of the most central issues of research politics of our time is this: universities are no longer sites of reading as they have become sites of the intensive production of texts, which no one has time to read’ (Rautiainen, 2019). In the late 2010s, about 2.5 million new scientific articles were published annually (Boon, 2017). The magnitude of publishing has become enormous even within a single academic discipline. Yet, from the perspective of the researchers writing the articles, many publications receive regrettably few citations, readers, comments or other tangible forms of impact. From the perspective of the researchers reading the texts, then, there are always too many articles to be read, and there is always the risk that relevant texts will get lost among the mere quantity. An irony is that researcher-​writers and researcher-​readers are just two aspects of the same people: they (we) are so busy publishing that they (we) find it hard to find time to read what has been already written. An article published in Nature in 2016 is about a conservation-​planning postdoc working in Canada who is clearly a proficient academic reader but still worried (Landhuis, 2016). She explains how she vigilantly follows different information channels for new reading: scanning tables of content, selecting a carefully chosen roster of scientists to follow on Twitter, searching for reading recommendations on mailing lists and Facebook pages and receiving updates on Google Scholar. On top of that, she attends reading seminars, allots time to read papers and organises a journal reading club. Even when prudently allocating 6–​8 hours per week to all of this, she reflects 201

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that it is ‘easy to feel like you’re barely keeping your head above the flood of information’ (Landhuis, 2016: 475). This postdoc’s efforts to rationalise her working patterns illustrates how reading is not only a scholarly pleasure but also a burden and a potentially stressful aspect of academic work. The contradiction between the ideals about how much (and well) one should read and the time available for reading gives rise to an affective rhythm of insufficiency. Reading becomes a task to be handled carefully to avoid drowning in text. In this article in Nature, research publications are referred to with a distinct vocabulary: the volume of scientific publishing is causing a ‘flood’ and an ‘overload’; researchers are ‘getting overwhelmed’ and ‘clogged’ by the ‘time sink’ of trying to follow the pace of new research. Still, the professional ethos requires that researchers try to ‘stay current’, ‘stay on top’ and ‘stay abreast’ in order to ‘become more effective scientists’ (Landhuis, 2016, pp 457–​8). As Ineke van der Valk (2003) argues in the context of immigration discourse, such metaphors imply an experience of losing control –​in this case, losing a grip on the expected pace of academic reading. While the cited example comes from the natural sciences, researchers in the social sciences and humanities are not immune to the feeling of not reading enough either. Instead, the prevailing prestige of extensive scholarly formats, such as the scientific monograph, indicates that in the social sciences and humanities, there might be a twofold insufficiency: not reading in sufficient quantities and not reading qualitatively well enough. When confronting the rhythm of insufficiency, researchers must ruminate on whether they read too much (consuming time from producing measurable outputs) or too little (leading to problems in ‘staying current’) –​or perhaps both, swinging in a ‘constant ambivalence between anxiety and self-​ development’ (Valero et al, 2019: 142). Similarly, researchers must consider whether they read fast enough to keep up with the pace of publishing, or whether they already read too hastily, approaching texts merely as collections of potential citations rather than expressions of potentially revolutionary scientific ideas. Through this perpetual balancing, reading becomes a focal site of affective subjectivation (Valero et al, 2019) and a paradigmatic case of academic self-​management. Technological solutions, such as artificial intelligence-​based literature reviews, have been proposed and are already in use for coping with the deluge of text. For example, Iris.ai, a ‘learning science assistant’, has been offered to students and staff for use at several Finnish universities. The demand for such a service is explained by the increasing time required to scan through the flow of potentially relevant information. Therefore the assistance of machine learning is required to ‘navigate the ever-​g rowing mountain of scientific knowledge, and to help researchers keep pace’, says CEO and co-​founder of Iris.ai, Anita Schjøll Brede, in an interview (Lomas, 2016). Even without 202

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machine learning, instances of algorithmic power (Peters, 2015; Pasquale, 2016; Bucher, 2018), along with the digitalisation of academic publishing, have thoroughly reconfigured the user interface of academic reading in recent decades. Instead of browsing through journals and books in the traditional taxonomies of library shelves and bookstores, it is now common to find one’s way to a text either through a keyword search in an online database or a link shared in social media (Venäläinen, 2020). Jumpiness (getting distracted) So far in this chapter I have implied that academic reading refers to reading research publications. However, what we as academics actually read during a single workday, week or academic year is much more varied. We read a lot and in numerous genres: not only monographs or journal articles but also grant applications, student essays, news articles, qualitative and quantitative research data, emails and chat messages from colleagues. Provocatively, one could ask whether reading research is an exception to the rule in the big picture of academic literacies. Admittedly, the text-​centric quality of academic work does not distinguish it from the rest, as dealing with texts is the shared foundation of many white-​collar professions. What really sets research work apart is the twofold role of texts as outcomes and means of thought, as well as the essence of research publications as highly condensed expressions of extensive thought processes. This holds especially true for the social sciences and humanities, where a research publication is rarely just a ‘report’ of experiments conducted elsewhere, but the very site where the original experiments of thought take place. Thus, producing academic texts is highly labour-​intensive. A proficient newspaper journalist can easily publish several ‘articles’ per day, but for a researcher, a journal article might be the culmination of years of planning, fieldwork, data processing, reading, writing, editing, revising and proofing. Correspondingly, academic reading is not just a mode of reading among others but requires extraordinary focus, absorption and perseverance. The oft-​told anecdote of the Persian philosopher Avicenna illustrates the meticulous efforts that researchers must put into understanding scholarly ideas through texts. Avicenna, it is told, read Aristotle’s Metaphysics 40 times, learned it by heart, but did not understand the book until finally reading a helpful commentary by another philosopher, al-​Farabi (Bertolacci, 2001: 267). The affective rhythm of jumpiness illustrates how much energy it takes to immerse oneself in serious academic reading when we are simultaneously pulled into heterogeneous paces of communication. We juggle with textual rhythms, which may be repetitive, unexpected, prolonged, sudden, determined, improvisatory, fast or slow. This temporal variation may prove genuinely 203

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rewarding, render work more diverse, and even foster experiences of ‘temporal sovereignty’ (Wajcman, 2015: 164). However, the very same polyrhythmicity (Lefebvre, 2004) also becomes an imperative, an instance of forced freedom that makes it difficult to properly take care of things that we consider valuable in academic work –​to ‘take care of ourselves’ (Foucault, 2005) as researchers. When the affective rhythms disagree, and the information flood escalates into panic (Berardi, 2009: 43–​6), the easiest solution, as the ‘productivity’ gurus often warn, is to digress oneself into the endless lists of minor to-​do items. An evident problem in coping with the incommensurable temporalities of academic work is, then, how to manage the rhythms in a way that prevents the short-​sighted pursuit of ‘outputs’ from consuming energy from the activities that require dedication and perseverance. Jumpiness poses a risk especially for intensive research reading that would benefit from a peaceful environment. In so-​called productivity literature (Gregg, 2018), social media and email are often mentioned as the most perilous time sinks and sources of interruption, and this applies convincingly to the temporalities of research work. The hurried rhythms and the ‘always on’ quality of digital communication do not respect the integrity of researchers’ reading time; instead, they require constant presence and immediate attention. To understand the feelings of indispensability and the experience of not being able to let go, it is worthwhile considering the moments where the digital communication technologies collapse and create a momentary space of forced offline work. In March 2017, a failed security update at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, prevented all their staff from receiving or sending emails for one week (University of Jyväskylä, 2017a, b). Even though the system downtime was shorter than the out-​of-​office autoreplies that many employees would set up for their vacations, an outage of such length caused by an external problem is unusual, and based on the reactions, was also considered exceptional by those affected. As a university researcher working at the University of Jyväskylä reflected in a Facebook post: My email as well as all the other accounts from the University of Jyväskylä have been out of order since Wednesday morning. … I have to say that this creates a special feeling of an extra holiday. Only after email is down, does one recognise how large a part of the feeling of workload arises from the daily e-​mail traffic of tens of messages. (A private Facebook post, translated here and cited with permission) The tangible foregrounding of the supposedly indispensable role of email, as well as the temporary collapse of the ideological element linked to it, can bring about a sense of emancipation that encapsulates both the admission of addiction and a moment of ‘real utopia’ (Olin Wright, 2010; Eskelinen, 204

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2020); in other words, a glimpse of academic life without the oft-​lamented burden of communication. Likewise, a malfunction of a technology that we have learned to take for granted, such as email, sheds light on the deep-​rooted habits of academic work. A sudden failure can forcefully demonstrate how deeply dependent we are on quick-​paced digital communication. Hastiness (reading ‘efficiently’) As the website designer and developer Sandipan Mukherjee states, ‘No one wants to wait for anything, isn’t that right? The same is also applicable when we are reading articles. We want to get the solution to our problems as quickly as possible’ (2018). Transformations of academic reading are not only brought about by performance management, but also through profound changes in the broader media environment. The production and consumption of texts within academia are continuously influenced by textual practices in the surrounding literary cultures, media cultures and forms of digital communication. In a relatively short time, ‘papers’ have become digital files, ‘journals’ have been converted into websites and the ‘whiteboard’ has been reintroduced as a video conferencing feature. Along with the transforming materialities of communication (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, 1994), quotidian rhythms of writing and reading have been influenced, for instance, by the short formats adopted from instant messaging and social media. To give an example of how new media forms reshape textual practices, let us briefly consider the notion of ‘reading time’ as it has evolved in online communication. Reading time, concisely defined, is a mechanical estimate of how many minutes, on average, it would take to read a certain text. This figure is given, for example, in the beginning of a blog post. The first sporadic mentions of reading time can be found from 2010 in the context of web design (Cray, 2010). The blogging platform Medium included the feature in 2013, and in the last few years, it has started to become ubiquitous in online publishing –​including some popular science platforms. The quantified concept of reading time renders reading as an expense. When the potential reader makes the decision of whether to jump into a text or not, they can estimate whether they can ‘afford’ to use a certain amount of time for reading the piece at that specific moment. Announcing the reading time not only serves the hasty reader but also assumes that readers are hasty to the extent that they need to plan their reading with the precision of a minute. The hastiness of the reader in a digital environment cannot only be explained by the fact that online texts are often read on small screens, but it can be perceived as a wider reflection of how our relationship with texts, scales and time changes. If the environment of reading is experienced as fragmentary, distractive or otherwise noisy, it can be challenging to focus on long texts, regardless of whether they are on screen or paper. Sociologist 205

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Filip Vostal, in his study of ‘accelerating academia’ (2016), cites an interview with a professor who said that she could not remember when she last read an academic book. Instead, the professor ‘dips in’, ‘reads a little bit that might be relevant’ and then ‘goes to the next thing’ (Vostal, 2016: 134). This impatience agrees well with the changing media sphere; as we adapt ourselves to texts in the range of a few hundred characters (tweets, instant messages) and a few thousand characters (blog posts), a written work to the extent of hundreds of thousands of characters (such as an academic monograph) feels almost inconceivable.

From discordant rhythms to appropriated time As exemplified by the three affective rhythms, insufficiency, jumpiness and hastiness, the quantification of academia and the influence from digital and online textual practices gradually nudge academic reading into what Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier (2004 [1985]) refer to as ‘linear time’: a time that is abstract, measured and supposedly homogeneous. Even though reading is not formally encapsulated in the metric assemblage of academic work, practices of reading are still reshaped by the surrounding temporalities and the assumed requirement to optimise all work processes in their all aspects. When adjusted for linear time and the imperative of productivity, reading shifts from being an end to being a tool; to being a factor of production for something else –​namely, publishing. This shift to linearity constructs a new ideal: reading only as much as is needed for a given end, and not any further. In contrast, ‘cyclical time’, which naturally includes low tides, hesitations and unexpected bypaths –​the kind of reading without a predefined purpose –​comes to be understood as a hindrance to performance, as something to be trimmed away. The push towards linear time, the persistence of cyclical habits, the embryonic attempts to resist given rhythms by experimenting with alternatives and the hasty paces adopted from the cultures of digital communication together constitute the messy assemblage of rhythms in which the academic literary life is now organised and experienced. Sociologist Oili-​Helena Ylijoki (2015) describes the critical tension in this setting as an opposition between two main logics: ‘project time’ and ‘process time’. While project time is ‘tightly scheduled, linear, decontextualised, predictable, and compressed’, process time appears as ‘unbound, multi-​directional, context-​dependent, emergent, and timeless’ (Ylijoki, 2015). Importantly, Ylijoki also notes that this dichotomy does not appear uniformly for everyone in academia but is stratified by power relations and characterised by an arrangement where the ‘dominance of project time sharpens the stratification of academic research’. How are these temporal asymmetries, then, negotiated by precarious academic workers? One symptom of how performance management trickles 206

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down from managerial parlance to the individual researcher is the concern for personal time management. For example, academic writing guidebooks (see, for example, Jensen, 2017; Sword, 2017) can be seen as manifestations of performance management at the personal level. Management techniques that were intended to be used at an institutional level (such as measuring the impact of publications) easily convert into tools of self-​governance, although masked under the rubric of self-​help (Rimke, 2000; Illouz, 2008; Nehring et al, 2016; Tiaynen-​Qadir and Salmenniemi, 2017). The never-​resolving contradictions and the ever-​ongoing self-​talk are the two components through which academics are primed to submit themselves to fulfil the quantified demands of knowledge production, instead of just following their traditional notions of scientific autonomy. Following the analysis by Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie (2009), we can argue that the quantification, neoliberalisation and neo-​Taylorisation of academia have strongly contributed to an affective structure that is characterised by self-​blame, self-​optimisation and persistent insufficiency. Compelling expectations of measurable outputs make it difficult to enjoy the temporal flexibility available in academic work. Amid conflicting temporalities, researchers strive to create ‘appropriated time’ for reading, to use a term mentioned passingly by Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier in their essay on rhythmanalysis (2004 [1985]). This is time ‘that forgets time’ and ‘during which time no longer counts’ (Lefebvre and Régulier, 2004 [1985]: 76). They write: The time that we shall provisionally name ‘appropriated’ has its own characteristics. Whether normal or exceptional, it is a time that forgets time, during which time no longer counts (and is no longer counted). It arrives or emerges when an activity brings plenitude, whether this activity be banal (an occupation, a piece of work), subtle (meditation, contemplation), spontaneous (a child’s game, or even one for adults) or sophisticated. … It has several traits of self-​creation or of a gift rather than of an obligation or an imposition come from without. It is in time: it is a time, but does not reflect it. (Lefebvre and Régulier, 2004 [1985]: 76–​7) Parallel to Lefebvre’s and Régulier’s rather poetic description, but basing their analysis on research interviews, Oili-​Helena Ylijoki and Hans Mäntylä (2003) identify ‘timeless time’ as one of the core temporal perspectives through which academics experience their work. In timeless time, work patterns are not governed by external necessities but stem from academics’ own enthusiasm, fascination and immersion in work. (Ylijoki and Mäntylä, 2003: 62). What could this reappropriation of ‘timeless time’ then imply for reading? Some tentative suggestions arising from my collaborative autoethnography are: 207

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• taking and making time to read as one wishes, and as we wish, collectively; • intentionally prioritising reading over other tasks (even writing); • allocating ‘time blocks’ for reading in one’s personal calendar, telling colleagues about this, and even scaling up the practice into a local campaign (‘Fridays for reading’ or similar); • cultivating the courage to defend the unhurried cyclical time from the seemingly urgent requests appearing in linear time; and • unashamedly celebrating the new appropriations and seeking to normalise them. Admittedly, these suggestions disturbingly resemble the tips and tricks proposed in ‘productivity’ self-​help books. However, the difference might be in focusing on collective action and a structural change rather than just on personal transformation (see also Chapter 6, this book). Sustainable and equitable approaches to reappropriating reading can and should make academia a better place to read for all, not just for the ones who thrive in the game of personal time management. It is certainly easier to imagine alternatives than to implement them. What’s more, the alternatives may bring about new contradictions or escalate existing dilemmas. Anthropologist David Syring (2015: 57) describes the problematic aspects of academic ‘time off’, such as vacations, which are commonly used for catching up with research work for which there was not enough time during the academic year. Similar to Rosalind Gill (2010), Syring notes that there is a troubling sense of guilt and unwarranted privilege in complaining about academic work schedules. Reading, with its association with leisure time, is one of the practices that strikingly exemplifies this odd sense of being privileged and precarious. It is easy to drift into a twofold self-​blame: first, of not being able to read enough; and second, of not doing ‘real work’ in the rare moments of immersed reading. Syring writes: One of my friends, a computer programmer, chides me with comments such as, ‘So, bet work was hard today. What’d you do? Put in two, three hard hours of reading, then called it a day?’ This kind of teasing often silences me, not because there is truth in the specifics, but because it points to the fact that I have control over my time and workflow in ways that few workers in the contemporary global economy do. (Syring, 2015: 57) Appropriating time implies taking back control of the effective, while not necessarily quantifiably efficient, use of academic freedom. It is an unruly strategy that will obviously face criticism but which cannot evolve without experimentation. As Mike Crang (2007) argues, we need new ways of ‘narrating different timescales, rhythms, and temporalities that offer a 208

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vocabulary for slowness, for reflection, and for nonlinear paths’ (Crang, 2007: 514). Appropriating time for reading is an expression of ‘minor’ and ‘molecular’ politics (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) at the level of the everyday, of reworking the notion of work in quantified academia. Simultaneously, appropriating time is about repurposing the very tools of measurement to better fit our purposes. As Bruno Latour and Vincent Lépinay suggest (expounding on Gabriel Tarde’s ideas), we should not merely fight against established measurements but attempt to invent new measures that go ‘beyond measurable’ (Latour and Lépinay, 2009).

Conclusion This chapter aimed to shed light on the experiences of contemporary academic work through affective temporalities of reading. Reading is fundamental to scholarly work but also increasingly marginalised by a metric assemblage that emphasises writing (and publishing) as the primary academic ‘output’. Whether reading too little, too much, too fast or too slow, the time and pace of reading always seem to be at odds with the linear rhythms of performance management. By examining variegated temporalities of academic reading and trying to make sense of how they feel to us as academics, it is possible to better understand and unpack the ambivalent expectations that the individual researcher/​reader faces. Studying the affective rhythms of academic reading affectively, that is, engaging our ‘gut feelings’ (Kinnunen and Parviainen, 2016) in making sense of the current state of affairs, opens up a perspective that partially circumvents the neoliberal structures of feeling of academic capitalism. Reading in quantified academia can be understood as a ‘minor’ practice in the Deleuzian–​Guattarian sense: it is not ‘liberation as opposed to submission’ but rather a ‘flight of intensity’, a prepolitical space that evades interpretation and calls for collective experimentation (Brinkley, 1983: 13–​ 14; Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 13). However, observing that academic reading is less quantified, and perhaps even less quantifiable, should not serve to idealise the modes of reading as they currently appear. Sustained collegial efforts are needed for developing workable approaches to appropriating time for non-​instrumental, less instrumental and ‘alternatively instrumental’ ways of reading, as well as for understanding how various affective rhythms of reading contribute to the processes of ‘becoming academics’ (Brunila, 2016). Acknowledgements This chapter builds on an article published in Finnish as ‘Ajattelun riitelevät rytmit: kirjallisen elämän temporaalisuuksia mitallistetussa yliopistossa’ (‘Discordant rhythms of thought: temporalities of literary life in the quantified university’; Venäläinen, 2020) in the volume Kirjallinen elämä 209

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markkinaperustaisessa mediayhteiskunnassa (Literary Life in a Market-​Based Media Society), edited by Elina Arminen, Anna Logrén and Erkki Sevänen (Vastapaino, 2020). Notes For private communication, the people affected have permitted the use of cited excerpts in an anonymised form. 2 The traditional system of academic ranks in the UK, which uses the title of reader for the second-​highest position between a senior lecturer and a professor, captures well the notion of reading as an important and beloved scholarly activity. Historian Mary Beard, lamenting the abolition of the title ’reader’ in Cambridge, recalls a colleague of hers for whom becoming a reader was ‘his happiest promotion: it meant the validation of his colleagues’ and ‘an important part of what we actually did’ (Beard, 2020). 1

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Performance management: Western universities, Chinese entrepreneurs and students on stage Amir Hampel

At the start of the 2013 film American Dreams in China (Chan, 2013), we meet an ambitious youth named Cheng, and watch as he fails to obtain a visa to attend graduate school in the US. Cheng is a fictional version of Yu Minhong, founder of China’s largest private educational company, New Oriental. We see Cheng wandering the streets of Beijing, his dreams crushed, reading Dale Carnegie’s seminal works of self-​help psychology. In the film, as in reality, the frustrated student transforms into an educational entrepreneur. Cheng founds a chain of English schools in which teachers address packed auditoriums with the enthusiastic performances of self-​ help gurus. These teachers model a passionate, confident style of self-​ presentation, a performance that might help some of their students gain admission to universities in the US. We see Cheng, now comfortably seated in his executive office, advising a student that ‘Confidence is the most basic requirement of American Culture’ (Chan, 2013). Social theorists have described self-​assurance and internal motivation as key characteristics of the entrepreneurial (Bröckling, 2016) or enterprising self (Rose, 1999). This neoliberal figure takes risks, invests in themself, and builds a personal brand. In this chapter, I suggest that the ability to perform this kind of subject is valuable less as an entrepreneurial asset than as a form of cultural capital. By examining how students from China learn to perform for US universities, we can reveal how affects of confidence and passion are not only embedded in neoliberal ideologies of self-​making, but are also written into cultural scripts for performing one’s identity. The ability to put on this performance has become a global currency, and, for many students worldwide, it is a precondition for receiving an elite education. Studying how Chinese students learn to sell themselves to foreign universities can also illuminate forms of affective work that academics perform on a daily basis. In classrooms on and offline, at conferences and in grant applications, academics are performers. Academics are not only called on to perform well on quantifiable metrics of academic productivity, 216

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but also to perform their ‘academicity’ (Petersen, 2007; Brunila, 2016) in everyday settings by displaying qualities that mark their belonging and their worth. Academics also perform for the public, giving short presentations on stage or in front of a video camera. As they sell themselves and their ideas, enterprising academics become adept at a particular affective repertoire. By regularly ‘staging academic identity’, scholars exercise the ‘affective musculature’ (see Chapter 9, this book) needed to convey their solid scholarship and social impact in the accepted language of visible confidence and enthusiastic passion. In China, secondary and tertiary students who want to study abroad are training these same affective muscles. College application consultants and programmes run by foreign universities are teaching Chinese students how to construct their identity in terms that are legible to US institutions. In addition, a cohort of young Chinese entrepreneurs, often returned from studying abroad, is teaching their peers how to embody personal qualities that can help their academic careers. I classify these young educators as social entrepreneurs, since they seek to address social problems through for-​profit enterprises. Although these entrepreneurs are in the business of education, they view themselves as cultural activists and modernising reformers. By promoting an entrepreneurial individualism, they set themselves against Chinese families and schools, and a cultural tradition that they view as inimical to personal autonomy. Because autonomy signals modernity and membership in an international elite, Chinese youth are susceptible to interpellation as insufficiently confident and passionate. This post-​colonial and class-​based shame provides revenues for Western higher education institutions as well as opportunities for educational entrepreneurs. This chapter will introduce several young Chinese entrepreneurs, who I met between 2012 and 2014 while conducting ethnographic research on self-​help psychology in Beijing. Educational entrepreneurs in China often have links with self-​help culture, which provides arguments for the importance of inner passions and personal convictions. In addition, popular self-​help training programmes teach techniques for developing a confident style of self-​presentation, often through public speaking. My research focused on why youth in self-​help groups are trying to become confident, extrovert and ‘interesting’. I discovered that group members often discuss how the flaws of Chinese education have stunted their own personal development. They often contrast their experiences with a foreign, Western education that they imagine could have nurtured their individual passions, thus helping them to develop self-​confidence (Hampel, 2017, 2020). In this chapter, I focus on several episodes from my fieldwork, all of which centre on educational entrepreneurs. These figures model the kind of subject that US universities are seeking to recruit, and they illustrate the kind of affective training that Chinese students undergo as they prepare to study 217

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abroad. Many Chinese students appear as neoliberal subjects: they are adept at self-​management and invest in themselves. However, they lack forms of cultural capital that appear as objectively valuable affective registers. Affects produce economic effects not only because discourses of passionate, engaged work can be used to extract labour, including from idealistic or alienated Chinese youth (Zhang, 2015), but also because these discourses entrench social privilege and Western cultural hegemony. Critics have analysed how discourses of self-​realisation are closely tied to social class (Kusserow, 2004; Tokumitsu, 2015). In addition, scholars have shown how US educators regard certain ways of speaking (Cameron, 2002) and feeling (Jung, 2007) as more rational or professional based on their cultural biases. This chapter will show how US universities seek students who can perform entrepreneurial selfhood not only because they are greatly influenced by capitalist ideology, but also due to cultural frameworks that value liberal ideals of authenticity and autonomy, and also specify what these qualities should look like. This chapter highlights how students and academics are evaluated on their ability to present themselves using a standardised affective repertoire. Since a confident and passionate style of self-​presentation signals belonging in a liberal and Western elite, the ability to display these affects shapes college admissions and academic careers, as well as how people view themselves. Additionally, I hope to draw attention to how this regime of subjectification is spreading worldwide as US higher education institutions, and their graduates, work to reproduce the value of particular affects. Because forms of self-​presentation vary widely, asking a seemingly simple question, ‘Tell me about yourself ’, can be a form of cultural imperialism.

Entrepreneurial students as academic commodities As the largest market for international education, China plays a key role in academic capitalism. Universities are busily setting up study abroad programmes and branch campuses worldwide. Although the COVID-​19 pandemic has slowed this global expansion, branch campuses have continued to operate in-​person or online. As of 2017, universities had established at least 249 international branch campuses: institutions from the US and UK have established the most, while China hosts the greatest number of campuses (Escriva-​Beltran et al, 2019). In addition to 12 foreign universities with campuses in China, approximately 1,000 foreign higher education institutions are operating academic programmes in cooperation with local universities (Mok, 2021). Most of these programmes have opened since 2010, as the Chinese middle classes expanded at the same time that Western universities were seeking new sources of revenue and prestige. Although there are geopolitical motivations for international educational expansion (Wilkins, 2020), Western university 218

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leaders generally view internationalisation primarily as a source of income (Waters, 2006; Robertson, 2010), a tool for branding (Kleibert, 2021) and a platform for recruitment. Branch campuses often direct undergraduate students back to the main campuses for part of their programme, or for graduate studies (Wilkins, 2020: 316). Thus, international campuses are potential sources of academic talent, and they also help generate a cosmopolitan identity that has value for the home institution and its students. China is not only the top site for branch campuses, but also by far the largest source of international students. Every year hundreds of thousands of Chinese students study abroad, with large numbers going to Australia, the UK, Canada and especially the US. These countries attract students because English is commonly studied in China, and because the US and UK dominate university rankings, which are themselves the products of national and institutional power (Pusser and Marginson, 2013; Ordorika and Lloyd, 2015). Over a third of study abroad students in the UK, Australia and the US are from China (Altbach, 2019). Because these students typically pay full tuition, many university budgets now depend on them (Bound et al, 2020); administrators are anxious about demographic, political or technological developments that could reduce these enrolments (Altbach, 2019). As cash and intellectual talent flow to Western countries, international education reinforces international hierarchies (Hansen and Thøgersen, 2015) while deepening social stratification within the sending countries. Many students who enrol in foreign universities or programmes are not only looking for quality professional or academic training, but also for an education that marks them as members of the social elite (Waters, 2007; Fong, 2011; Tsang, 2013). As Chinese students compete for admittance to selective universities abroad, they are both consumers and commodities. Educational consultants in China teach students how to market themselves by crafting personal narratives that are easily intelligible to admissions officers abroad. These consultants instruct students to demonstrate their internal motivation and authentic enthusiasm through their personal statements and in admissions interviews. These performances draw on subjects’ capacity to be affected by their own ideas, morals and convictions, and to respond to display these affects vigorously and visibly. Thus, as they write their admissions essays, students are already anticipating forms of contemporary academic labour that involve selling one’s personal passion and social consciousness. As academics scramble for jobs and grants, they sell themselves as confident innovators, eager to change the world. These sales pitch are moral claims, declarations of virtuous and hard-​working, idealism. Popular advice on writing US research statements and grant applications tells applicants to position themselves as ‘heroes’ (Kelsky, 2015). To borrow from Erving Goffman’s analysis of everyday life as a performance, academics are regularly called on to act as ‘merchants of morality’ (1959: 251). As academics are called 219

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on not only to reflect on, but also to publicise their social impact, academic work draws close to social entrepreneurship. For social entrepreneurs, idealism is both a source of conviction and a marketing strategy. The social entrepreneur is a recent figure; however, the practice of presenting passionate convictions to an interlocutor has a long and complex history in Euro-​American culture. Through this history, public speaking has become linked not only to entrepreneurship, but also to liberal ideals of citizenship (Boromisza-​Habashi et al, 2016). Carefully managed self-​presentation, often focused on innovation and social impact, has become integral to academic careers in an age of mass media and personal branding. The TED Talk is a paradigmatic example of a contemporary academic commodity, a format enabling scholar entrepreneurs to sell their ideas in an easily consumed package (Shumar, 2016). Universities encourage academics to produce extremely short presentations of complex research. For example, since 2008 competitions for 3-​minute research presentations have become popular worldwide (Rossette-C ​ rake, 2020: 576). Competitive speakers not only sell their intellectual achievements, but also usually refer to a higher justification for their work (Rossette-​Crake, 2020: 580). Scholars are pushed to polish their work down even further, to an elevator pitch. At conferences, as the number of participants has boomed, the time for presenting and discussing research has shrunk (Parker and Welk, 2014: 175). Ideas and topics become taglines in these crowded markets. These forms of public self-​presentation, by academics, administrators and students, have a clear affinity with capitalist logics of commodification, competition and branding. Universities are extremely concerned with their image (see Chapter 1, this book), and advertising research findings is beneficial for the university. Thus, academics’ efforts to present their research to a broader audience advance both their own careers and their university’s image. Subject to similar logics, Chinese youth who want to study at competitive international universities realise the importance of staging a confident, passionate identity. If they have difficulty performing these affects on cue, they often regard this as a personal failing. There is a huge market for teaching entrepreneurial, Western styles of self-​presentation in China. Steep social hierarchies and intense educational competition lead Chinese students to anxiously search for competitive advantages, including the cultural capital needed to perform their identity to foreigners in an intelligible and appealing manner. In addition, for urban Chinese youth, autonomous, passionate self-​ making appear modern and cosmopolitan. In Western countries, passion for one’s work is a mark of social distinction (Tokumitsu, 2015; McRobbie, 2016), as is the confidence that comes from privileged belonging: while both of these affects figure prominently in normative therapeutic discourses, their relation to social hierarchies is often disguised. In China, however, discourses 220

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of modernity and progress explicitly align these elite forms of selfhood with a moralised project of national rejuvenation through self-​improvement. Educational entrepreneurs in China often regard themselves as cultural reformers, since they hope to teach creative expression and personal conviction in a culture that they see as inimical to individual autonomy. In foreign, elite forms of self-​p resentation, these entrepreneurs see empowerment and liberation. On the other hand, when foreign institutions address them as lacking in creativity or autonomy, post-​colonial shame in relation to imagined, confident Westerners make Chinese youth eager to reform themselves. Like youth in self-​help groups, by focusing our discussion on affects we risk mystifying social class and neocolonial relationships. However, by viewing affect as a form of cultural capital, we can analyse how class is reproduced through everyday, embodied experiences of anxiety and power that support industries including self-​help psychology and college application consulting, industries that are explicitly selling affective training. First, we examine a conference where Chinese students were preparing to apply to US universities. Then, in order to get a sense of the cultural politics that are attached to self-​presentation within China, we meet two young, US-​ educated entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs are referred to by pseudonyms.

‘Tell me about yourself’ In the summer of 2013, I attended a conference in Beijing that was organised by several Chinese undergraduates. They put together this two-​day event with the aim of helping outstanding high school students apply to foreign universities. The organisers invited several speakers, and enlisted the services of a large educational consulting firm that helps students apply to study in the US. Over lunch, I ask one of the main organisers of the conference, a college student back from the US for summer vacation, why he wanted to put together this event. He tells me that Chinese students are poorly prepared for studying abroad. He says that because they often don’t choose their field of study, Chinese students lack passion and therefore don’t excel in their studies. The organiser explains that he is particularly concerned because his peers lack the ‘soft skills’ to succeed abroad, both socially and academically; he notes that he himself studied public speaking as preparation for going abroad. By analysing this conference, we can see how Chinese students who want to study in the US are taught that they should craft a clear and easily communicated identity, built around their personal, interior and explicitly justified passions. The first invited speaker demonstrates how educational pursuits in China are fuelled by post-​colonial shame and nationalist pride, and shaped by Confucian moral frameworks. Fifty students are sitting in the large, new auditorium. They are wearing formal clothes, the boys in shirts or suits, 221

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the girls in professional dress. The speaker wears a shirt with a Chinese collar and buttons. He tells the students to study hard, for the nation, and so that they can repay their parents, who have sacrificed so much to raise these little ‘pandas’. The speaker launches into an extended discussion of the dragon, the totemic symbol of the Han people. It’s time, he says, for Chinese people to stop ‘being cows and horses’ (an idiom referring to hard labour), and to become dragons. The filial pandas and nationalist dragons are conjured in order to motivate these students to study hard, for their parents and their nation. As the speaker infuses individual educational careers with collective ambitions, local affective structures are channelled into reproducing globalising, entrepreneurial forms of subjectivity. As in the first speech, the next speaker presents personal and national success as closely intertwined. However, this speaker spends nearly all his time on stage explaining to the students that their future depends on learning to control their image. The speaker is a Taiwanese man who presents himself as an entrepreneur, and claims to have had a distinguished international consulting career: he drops the names of some prominent world leaders he claims to have advised. Later on, he tells me that he runs a corporate self-​ help psychology training centre. In his lecture he describes a previous life as a Taipei taxi driver: how he kept his taxi clean, and how he wrote ‘Taiwan’s best taxi’ on the window. He offers students a somewhat redundant, three-​ pointed formula for success, based on self-​presentation, image and exposure. One must not only be self-​assured, he says, but also attract attention. In fact, echoing personal branding coaches who promote ‘the unrelenting pursuit of attention’ (Hearn, 2008: 205), this enthusiastic speaker states that a person must talk on every possible social occasion: he explains that speaking allows people to benefit from feedback, to build social connections, and, above all, to be visible. That afternoon and the following day, the conference events are run by educational consultants, who are former admissions officers and doctoral graduates from top universities in the US. Many people working in educational consulting companies in China have themselves been involved in Western academia, and many have turned to consulting because of the precarity of academic jobs. Some have decided that consulting is more lucrative and secure than academia, while others work for consulting companies part-​time as they struggle to establish academic careers. These consultants, both foreign and Chinese, teach Chinese students to present themselves to universities in the US, performing cultural scripts that display their confidence and passion. After lunch, students flit around the conference centre carrying poster boards and markers. The consultants have divided them into teams that are competing to design a product, a logo and a sales pitch for imagined investors. This game creates an entrepreneurial fantasy, within which 222

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students practice corporate ‘social skills’ of collaboration and presentation. The exercise is also supposed to promote creativity, and it is common in the creativity competitions and classes that are proliferating worldwide. In the pedagogy of creativity, now a priority for Chinese universities as for their counterparts elsewhere, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship are consciously intertwined (Sun, 2011). Universities value innovation as they seek to collaborate with industry, as do academics who are called on to attract funding; however, innovation is often about packaging rather than substance. Ulrich Bröckling, a sociologist who studies entrepreneurship, suggests that what is perceived as innovative largely depends on manufacturing distinctions rather than on actual invention or discovery (2016: 104). Bröckling suggests that in order for an idea to be recognised as creative, ‘Being decisive is the element of difference’ (2016: 111). This analysis suggests that to a large degree, in a competition to be perceived as innovative, confident presentation skills are key to success. Just as contemporary academia often encourages innovations that that are clearly legible and easily marketable, US universities are teaching students to perform their creative individuality in a highly standardised manner. In between sessions of group work on marketing a product, students are learning how to sell themselves. The students are split into several groups, and shuffle into conference rooms to receive lessons on interview skills. The consultants teach them that they need to speak up, to leave an impression, and that they need to be interesting. During the first session, a former admissions officer from an elite US university tells the students that when he examined applications, it would only take him ‘five seconds’ to determine if a student was interesting. He then explains that the answer to the question ‘Tell me about yourself ’ should never be a life history; in China, a common approach to self-​introduction involves discussing one’s hometown, education and workplace (Hampel, 2017: 450). The consultant wants students to articulate a more individualistic and interior form of identity, explaining that they should present their personal interests and passions. He also guesses out loud that many of these students can’t explain what their interests are, or why these things interest them. The next day, during mock admissions interviews, the consultant displays a particular, liberal theory about personal interests. He tells a student ‘You never had to choose’, explaining that this is why he doesn’t know his own passions, or perhaps doesn’t have any. This assessment may seem presumptive, but it is presumably based on the consultant’s professional experience. In his work helping Chinese students present themselves to admissions officers, he has interpreted cultural obstacles using a liberal framework in which personal interests emerge from individual autonomy. Through the work of admissions counsellors, students are taught, both implicitly and explicitly, that they must present themselves as affectively engaged and consciously self-​directed. In 223

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this, they are not unlike their professors, whose managers address an essential self that is both emotionally sensitive and rationally controlled (see Chapter 1, this book). The splits between feeling and thought, outer behaviour and inner self, are some of the most enduring, and criticised, features of Western thought. These dichotomies remain foundational to liberal understandings of authenticity and agency. As they learn to construct their identity within this largely foreign cultural framework, Chinese students are instructed to draw on both affective and intellectual resources. For the admissions counsellors, a convincing personal narrative requires both a pathos and a logos. The counsellor explains that students need to demonstrate emotional engagement with their work, but also that they need to provide explicit justifications for liking certain subjects. According to the consultants I spoke with, it can be difficult to elicit these accounts in terms that are culturally acceptable and recognisable. For example, on their admissions essays Chinese students may say that they like a subject because they had a good teacher, or because they have an aptitude for it; consultants judge these as insufficient reasons, because they do not demonstrate the students’ pre-​social, interior and therefore authentic interest. At another extreme, in an attempt to please US audiences, some students write unrealistic narratives of personal triumph and individualistic self-​realisation. Consultants recognise that a convincing performance of self is more nuanced. Logically, performances may be more successful when students can become proficient in a kind of ‘deep acting’ (Hochschild, 1983), managing their emotions to match their role. If students want to sell themselves as interesting individuals, then they should try to be authentically affected by their own passions and ideals, at least for long enough to put on a show. Students are not only learning that they must have passionate interests, but also that they must perform them. At this conference, the students have received a consistent message that they need to appear confident, whether before admissions officers, taxi customers or judges in the creativity contest, playing the role of potential investors. Students are told that they must attract attention in the classroom and indeed in general. Despite this pressure, or because of it, many of the students doubt their ability to put on the required performance. One after another, students in the conference room describe feelings of social anxiety and ineptitude. One engineering student says “I want to be more comfortable in groups”, and another says that he is troubled by his inability to talk to strangers. As one student talks about his shyness, the consultant interrupts and tells him to make eye contact. Another student expresses a common sentiment: “I need to get more social experiences because I focused on study too much.” Several students say that they came to the conference in order to improve their confidence. One rising eleventh grader, who tells us that he had worked on a television production, is not like the others. He states that he is very confident, saying 224

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“I like to talk with strangers, so they can feel my confidence and comfort.” But for him, no less than for the shy students, confidence is an important key to his identity, not least in the eyes of the Westerners who will decide if he can fly abroad. If articulating what you love has become a requirement for admission, or for employment, then anything other than passion and confidence feels like a problem. You are not supposed to experience quotidian confusion, or have difficulty in formulating clear and easily explained goals. Lack of confidence on stage might stem from shyness, from an understandable fear of powerful interlocutors, from cultural unfamiliarity and from social experiences of marginalisation based on gender, ethnicity, class or immigration. Regardless of the complex social factors that underlie personal confidence, once people view a confident stage presence as the key to success, they easily perceive everyday experiences of doubt and anxiety as critical threats and personal challenges. The very young event organiser, who expresses concern that his peers lack passionate interests and confident social skills, is one of many Chinese reformers returned from overseas who are teaching their peers how to perform their identity. In the following section we will unpack how the kind of performances that they promote encode culturally bound, liberal ideas as well as social privilege. We will also examine how Chinese social critics articulate affective critiques of educational practices. Educational reformers in China, influenced by Western psychology, regularly state that confidence and passion should emerge from classroom discussion and from participation in extracurricular pursuits. Since Chinese students have fewer opportunities to engage in these activities in comparison with their imagined peers in Western countries, critics allege that Chinese students fail to develop healthy and valuable affective capacities. Thus, while foreign consultants perceive that Chinese students lack personal autonomy and that this grievously hinders their development, Chinese social reformers are often inclined to agree.

Imagining confident students Xu, a woman in her twenties, founded an educational company after returning to China from her undergraduate studies in the US. She tells me that her company works with top middle schools in Beijing, running programmes in which students develop their ‘creativity’ and ‘leadership’ by studying social issues. Xu shares a parable with me. Some of her students needed to develop research projects in order to apply for an educational programme in the US. One mother planned an elaborate project for her son. When asked why she didn’t let her son create his own project, the mother flatly stated that her son has no thoughts of his own. Xu sees a clear message: “If the kid really has no thoughts, it must be because of parents who never let him do what he wanted to do!” Xu tells me that Chinese parents 225

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are ‘over-​protective’, using the English word. She explains that this is why their children fear failure, don’t know right from wrong, never grow up and lose the ability to think independently. Against the background of Chinese government policies promoting innovation, and the emergence of new labour markets that encourage individual initiative, educational reformers in China often express concern that children are not taught how to think and act for themselves (Naftali, 2014). Due to these national projects, structural changes and professional concerns, affective aspects of education play an important role in contemporary Chinese cultural politics. For their part, when they feel confused or anxious, rather than passionate and confident, youth often blame Chinese families and schools. In the US, Xu tells me, children have time to play and do what they want. In China, many teachers, parents and students reflect on Chinese education from the perspective of an idealised West, where children are autonomous and therefore confident. Books on North American and European education are popular in China, including a bestselling book in which the author argues that US schools promote the ability to express one’s inner self, thus leading to confidence, entrepreneurship and happy self-​actualisation (Woronov, 2006: 44). The concept of self-​expression has complex cultural roots that intertwine with romantic movements and with democratic models of public participation. In addition, in the US the value of self-​expression is most strongly endorsed by the middle and upper classes (Kusserow, 2004), where it is associated with autonomy and individuality. Particular understandings of autonomy have derived their currency and value from specific cultural and social backgrounds. Largely heedless of these origins, psychologists and educators in China generally associate autonomy with modernity, and many are trying to reform parenting and educational practices that they perceive not only as shamefully backwards, but also as national liabilities. Popular parenting and education materials circulating in China typically assume that Western children, and especially American children, are all confident. An article from a parenting blog titled ‘Why is every American child so confident?’1 begins with this assertion: ‘American children, no matter if their grades are good or bad, if they are ugly, tall or short fat or skinny, every one struts arrogantly, is spirited, anyone at all thinks they are very special, is a character. In other words, these children are all extremely confident.’ The unnamed author of this article suggests two reasons for this confidence: first, children in the US have ample opportunities to perform in front of others, and second, they receive a lot of praise. The author incredulously recounts how she saw American teachers encourage children that blabber on, telling them that they have unique views. The author associates confidence with an individualistic, liberal, democratic American culture, telling her readers to allow their children to make choices and to include them in family decision-​ making. Again, we see a liberal theory associating autonomy with confidence. 226

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The author describes her shock at the indiscriminate encouragement that she sees in American schools. However, she depicts such instruction as a refreshing alternative to Chinese education, which she depicts as a nightmare of being disciplined by parents and shamed in front of classmates. Social critics, such as this author, allege that Chinese culture shapes children’s affective dispositions in ways that reduce their competitiveness. These critiques often mobilise the concept of self-​esteem, which is a major concern in recent Chinese literature on parenting and specifically on producing high-​achieving students (Kuan, 2015). As Chinese educators discuss the role of self-​esteem in learning, they continue historical debates about the use of shame in Chinese parenting and formal education (Fung, 1999). Today, these cultural critiques gain urgency because they implicate children’s futures, imagined as unfolding in a global arena. By focusing on the perceived affective deficiencies of Chinese children, educational reformers easily lose sight of the fact that particular affects have value largely because they are embedded in middle and upper-​class American performances of the self. US classrooms are a key site in which cultural differences in self-​ presentation become identified as problems. Educators in the US have been concerned that Chinese international students have trouble participating in the classroom (Ross and Chen, 2015). Although dialogue undoubtedly has didactic value, styles of learning vary individually and culturally, affectively and cognitively (Kim and Markus, 2002). The idea that education best proceeds through dialogue reflects egalitarian and democratic ideals, with classroom discussion modelling a form of citizenship centred on participation in public debate. When students from China and elsewhere have difficulty participating in class, some American instructors view them as the voiceless products of illiberal, authoritarian, hierarchical societies (Siltaoja et al, 2019: 88). However, when students from China are reluctant or unable to participate, it may be because they are encountering foreign models of education, because they face linguistic hurdles, and because of the personal risks inherent in expressing their views in front of their classmates (Siltaoja et al, 2019). Classroom participation grades make a virtue out of confidence, and confidence often comes from cultural belonging and from privilege. Although it is common to speak of self-​confidence, confidence not only comes from within; confidence is an index of security and belonging. In order to perform confidently for others, people need cultural familiarity with their audience. Even if they have access to an audience, not everyone is able to express their ideas in a manner that will be favourably received and evaluated, or even understood. These aspects of habitus, often misidentified as personal traits, not only affect student participation grades but also the ability of many academics to effectively give talks, to network or to present their ideas in writing. Furthermore, styles of self-​presentation are shaped by gender, class and ethnicity. Women, minorities and immigrants are especially 227

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affected by the fact that cultural and social variation in self-​presentation affects life chances. They may be less comfortable with self-​promotion or with public confrontation, unable to pursue these effectively, or ignored when they do speak. It is difficult to be confident in a world where you cannot unreflectively perform as expected, and where you have not had opportunity to polish your stage presence. The article about American children imagines that students in the US all have access to ‘platforms’ (pingtai) on which they can develop their enviable self-​confidence. In the article, public performance appears as an oddly reified, aspirational commodity, and performance is imagined as a key part of egalitarian, democratic American education. The author claims that institutions in the US strive to provide equal opportunities for students to participate in all activities; they say that in America anyone can play on the team or act in the play, and everyone will cheer for them. The author’s perception of American inclusivity is the exact opposite of what Korean anthropologist Hyang-​Jin Jung notes in her study of a US high school. Jung saw that most students were excluded from activities, and she perceived that self-​expression was primarily encouraged in classes for gifted children (2007: 154). Furthermore, participation in extracurricular activities has long been correlated with social class, and, as school budgets are being cut, this trend seems to be deepening (Snellman et al, 2015). The article about American children is describing a fictional place, but it does reflect American’s fictions about itself, aspirational visions of inclusivity that endure even in schools that are organised around competitive and institutionalised individualism. Beginning in the 1950s, if not before, college deans in the US hoped to recruit extroverted, gregarious people, qualities that they associated with students who participated in athletics and other extracurricular activities (Cain, 2012: 28). This emphasis on extracurricular activities not only represented mainstream corporate anti-​intellectualism (Whyte, 1956: 105), but also expressed the ideals of a liberal education that could create broadly informed, well-​rounded democratic citizens. However, this ideal undermines itself, insofar as not everyone has a chance to develop their confidence, or their passions for creative pursuits. The opportunity to practise non-​ academic skills is unequally distributed, and these skills are crucial for college applicants seeking to differentiate themselves from other students. There may be justifications for admitting students with diverse talents; however, the requirement that potential students describe their personal interests and passions undoubtedly presents a class barrier to an elite education, disguised by moral ideals about liberal education. In China, perhaps even more than in the US, access to extracurricular activities depends on social class (Ma and Wright, 2021). In fact, educational competition in China is so intense that in July 2021 the government 228

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announced a set of restrictions on education companies, in part because expensive private classes and tutors are fuelling social inequality. Programmes such as those run by Xu, who teaches social engagement at top high schools, may be conveying important lessons about social responsibility, but they are definitely perpetuating Chinese class hierarchies while teaching elite students how to please liberal Western sensibilities. None of this is to discount the concerns of Chinese parents, psychologists, as well as many teachers and even national leaders (Kuan, 2015: 67) who lament the narrowness and competitiveness of Chinese education. Young adults often complain to me that Chinese schools have not provided them with platforms for practising self-​presentation skills. Large numbers of students are actively seeking out such platforms. Between 2011 and 2013, debate leagues expanded into cities all across China, organised and sponsored by American educational companies in cooperation with the Communist Youth League. Companies selling debate pitch their product as a way to increase confidence and creativity. In the popular self-​help groups that I studied, young professionals practise public speaking, usually in English. In recent years, China’s two most popular educators have both been unconventional English teachers: Yu Minhong of New Oriental and Li Yang from Crazy English.2 Both like to tell triumphant narratives of overcoming their shyness in order to achieve success. In Li Yang’s mass classes, students are encouraged to shout loudly in English (Woodward, 2008), practising confidence more than vocabulary. In these varied settings, studying English is not only a way to acquire cosmopolitan linguistic skills, but also a kind of dramaturgical and affective training. Chinese students’ eagerness for this training suggests how affects can serve as proxies for, and mystifications of, cultural capital and social privilege. Let us meet one final US-​educated entrepreneur. His example will demonstrate the broad appeal and wide reach of interventions that aim to teach confidence and passion in China, and illustrate the role of US universities in promoting a particular, culturally contingent affective constellation.

Dancing on dreams I first met Li Bo when he came to a public speaking club in Beijing, where I was conducting research on youth in social skills training programmes. Li Bo was born in China but spent much of his life abroad, and holds a US undergraduate degree. As the founder of an educational company, Li Bo embodies the cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial aspirations of many of the young professionals in the audience. In his speech at the club, Li Bo presents a rapid succession of loosely associated ideas from psychology and behavioural economics, centring on the theme that the key to success is controlling one’s mind. His explicit messages are that we must have dreams and a sense of purpose, be creative and be confident risk takers. In addition, Li Bo shares 229

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an affectively charged personal narrative of developing confidence through an artistic performance. Li Bo recounts how, during his undergraduate studies at an elite US university, he participated in a volunteer programme funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This brought a dozen students to a high school in China, where they taught various subjects using art. More importantly, Li Bo explains, their mission was to impart lessons about self-​confidence and the importance of having dreams. In Western countries varied social interventions have aimed to increase individuals’ confidence, motivation and self-​esteem in order to increase economic productivity and to address social problems (Cruikshank, 1999; Davies, 2015). In China, I encountered numerous charitable organisations that reproduce neoliberal ideologies of personal enterprise, identifying economic initiative with psychological traits such as autonomy and self-​realisation. As a student volunteer in China, Li Bo himself was both an agent and a subject of these ideologies that view confidence as a key measure of the self. Li Bo participated in a dance performance: he describes dancing on stage as psychologically transformative, taking him out of his comfort zone and thus liberating him. He encourages the audience in the public speaking club to ‘use art and develop your confidence’. Li Bo also explains that goals are easier to achieve if you really believe in them, demonstrating that he regards authentic passions as vital to achieving success. In this speech, public performance, confident risk taking and authentic ideals appear as mutually reinforcing and ultimately, as entrepreneurial assets. When Li Bo and I meet for lunch, I realise that he has carefully studied the craft of selling his ideals. Like his personal narrative, his mannerisms suggests that he was not born a confident performer. At first his eye contact is fleeting, his awkward gaze perpendicular to mine. His style of conversation is choppy, punctuated with non-​profit buzzwords and meta-​linguistic: he explains what he’s going to say subsequently, although usually these bullet points are lost in a rapid flight of words. It is clear that he has experience pitching projects, and that he reflects extensively about himself and how he might be perceived. He seems to always be thinking about what other people might be thinking, and has justifications for his views and actions ready at hand. Any inquiry I throw out immediately bounces back in the form of a carefully rehearsed answer. In this manner, Li Bo shares the development of his ideology and his career, which are centred on his interest in using ‘art and science for unleashing human potential’. Li Bo maintains that personal passions are key to creating a better world. He says that because China does not have a reliable rule of law, the ‘human factor’ has an especially important role to play in improving society. As an example, Li Bo offers the idea that if people valued work as a creative expression of the self, this would help to alleviate China’s food safety 230

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problem: at the moment, he says, “people who make food don’t really care about making good food.” Li Bo sees individual responsibility as a way to address social problems, even though he obliquely recognises that this logic absolves the government of responsibility for regulating the food supply. Scholars have framed volunteerism and civil organisations within a neoliberal shift in governance in which social issues are to be addressed with private solutions, absolving the state of responsibilities (Fisher, 1997; Lacey and Ilcan, 2006). Critics have also pointed out that moral affects are political resources that governments can use to promote volunteerism, making up for cuts in social services (Muehlebach, 2012; Hoffman and St John, 2017). From these critical perspectives, the social entrepreneur appears as an ideal neoliberal agent, depoliticising social problems. In addition to directly running social interventions in China, US universities are supporting Chinese social entrepreneurship in several ways. First, the US college curriculum increasingly emphasises innovation and social engagement, and the idea that social issues can be entrepreneurial opportunities. Some Chinese students in the US, or enrolled in US academic programmes in China, absorb this lesson. Second, US universities are directly teaching students soft skills, such as presentation skills, with which to market their innovations and interventions. Third, within China, the massive market for overseas education produces subjects who are eager to study these foreign moral scripts and forms of self-​presentation. When they graduate from US institutions, people like Xu and Li Bo return to China to promote social entrepreneurship, presenting confidence and passion as a path to individual success and a mode of modernising cultural reform. Within China, various actors regard these affective capacities as vital to a project of improving the nation, both materially and morally, to create a modern, developed country that can catch up with an imagined West. Thus, ideas about work, citizenship and personal identity that have liberal cultural roots are being used to address Chinese anxieties and aspirations, gaining new meanings within a history of modernist reform and against local moral horizons. Social entrepreneurs can certainly help people, and, within limits, they may even contribute to building China’s civil society. Officials in China are promoting civic consciousness, but they fold volunteerism and social entrepreneurship into state projects (Zhao, 2012; Lai et al, 2015). Educational interventions that teach students to be entrepreneurial are well in line with official interests. Thus, even as educational entrepreneurs view themselves as liberating young people and as cultural reformers, they reproduce exploitative, neoliberal logics, while reinforcing the central value of education as a form of social distinction in China. Chinese officials, educators and parents want to promote innovation and confidence. Li Bo and other educational entrepreneurs bundle their concerns into neat, actionable pedagogical programmes. Li Bo’s company works with top high schools in 231

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Beijing, including experimental high schools that are supervised not by local authorities but directly by the Ministry of Education. Li Bo learned the importance of confident expression through a dance performance, and, no doubt, by studying business at a university in the US. He now has audiences at the highest levels of the Chinese government, and his pedagogy of self-​confidence and passionate dreams could reach the 200 million students in Chinese primary and secondary schools. He has also helped to design a training course on social engagement for the China branch campus of a US university. Li Bo’s activism is highly recursive: he is an entrepreneur selling entrepreneurship, an innovator teaching innovation. He finances his own autonomy by selling the ideal of autonomy, while obscuring the linguistic, cultural and financial capital that has enabled his freedoms. Young, international and entrepreneurial, Li Bo knows the power of confidently constructing an identity around clear propositions and ideals. Many young people in China are prepared to hear his message: that you need to know who you are, and you must be ready to tell the audience.

Captured ideals In an age of global markets and attention economies, confident passion can bring economic reward. However, since Western countries control enormous cultural, financial and symbolic resources, it is easy to lose sight of how particular affects gain value. Ironically, liberal ideals of self-​determination undermine themselves, as people worldwide are told that they must be confident, innovative and engaged, that they must be authentically themselves by conforming to liberal, or neoliberal, understandings of agency and citizenship. When students from US universities return to their countries of origin, they find people eager to learn how to put on entrepreneurial performances that index Western culture and social privilege. The pandemic and political tensions have reduced the global flow of students; the long-​term consequences of the virus and of anti-​globalisation are difficult to predict. However, travel restrictions may herald a world with more international branch campuses, so that students can study in their home countries, as well as even more online education. Ironically, reduced physical mobility may allow Western norms of self-​presentation to expand even more efficiently. A perspective from China highlights how forms of self-​presentation are shibboleth that excludes people not only from the global South, but also within Western countries and within academia. Somewhat ironically, if Chinese international students return to China as academics, their performance of autonomous conviction may become a liability. Chinese performance management regimes are intense, both in terms of quantitative output and in demands for controlled self-​presentation. However, in Chinese educational institutions, confidence is often less important than tactical 232

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use of relationships, and passions must often find their outlet through official channels. A view from China can also highlight how the neoliberal, entrepreneurial self builds on affective structures that have deep cultural foundations. It is especially worth investigating the many links between performances of self and liberal understandings of personal autonomy. Confidence and passion are intertwined with widely held ideals of democracy and of self-​determination; as these affects become instrumentalised through managed performances, academics are indeed being ‘governed through freedom’ (Rose, 1999: 72). Furthermore, in an age of extreme politics and existential threats, the imperative to change the world seems pressing: cloistered scholarship is not enough, and public engagement feels vital. Because of these dense entanglements of habitus, neoliberal ideology and liberal ideals, it can be difficult to challenge the affective standards by which universities recruit students and manage academics. There are many reasons to muster our confidence and seize the stage for our personal projects. After all, we are acting on our convictions. Aren’t we? Notes ‘Meiguo Haizi Weihe Gege Zixin’, Xuezuo Wanmei Fumu, WeChat public account (accessed 24 November 2015). 2 When Li Yang admittedly beat his wife, Kim Lee, in 2011, his image suffered, but his schools still survive. 1

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Cameron, D. (2002) ‘Globalization and the teaching of “communication skills” ’, in D. Block and D. Cameron (eds) Globalization and Language Teaching, London: Routledge, pp 67–​82. Chan, P. (2013) American Dreams in China [Zhongguo hehuoren], Hong Kong: Edko Films. Cruikshank, B. (1999) The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davies, W. (2015) The Happiness Industry: How Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-​being, London: Verso. Dyson, E. (2013) ‘Esther Dyson on the attention economy and the quantification of everything’, 14 January. https://​www.econt​alk.org/​est​her-​ dyson-o ​ n-t​ he-​attent​ion-​econ​omy-​and-​the-​qua​ntif​i cat​ion-​of-​eve​ryth​ing/​ Escriva-​Beltran, M., Muñoz-​de-​Prat, J. and Villó, C. (2019) ‘Insights into international branch campuses: mapping trends through a systematic review’, Journal of Business Research, 101: 507–​15. Fisher, W. (1997) ‘Doing good? The politics and antipolitics of NGO practices’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 26: 439–​64. Fong, V.L. (2011) Paradise Redefined: Transnational Chinese Students and the Quest for Flexible Citizenship in the Developed World, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fung, H. (1999) ‘Becoming a moral child: the socialization of shame among young Chinese children’, Ethos, 27(2): 180–​209. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Anchor Books. Hampel, A. (2017) ‘Equal temperament: autonomy and identity in Chinese public speaking clubs’, Ethos, 45(4): 441–​41. Hampel, A. (2020) ‘Globalising personality: a view from China’, in D. Nehring, O.J. Madsen, E. Cabanas, C. Mills and D. Kerrigan (eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures, London: Routledge, pp 219–​32. Hansen, A. and Thøgersen, S. (2015) ‘Introduction: Chinese transnational students and the global education hierarchy’, Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, 8(3): 1–​12. Hearn, A. (2008) ‘Meat, mask, burden: probing the contours of the branded self ’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(2): 197–​217. Hochschild, A.R. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hoffman, L.M. and St John, H.R. (2017) ‘ “Doing good”: affect, neoliberalism, and responsibilization among volunteers in China and the United States’, in V. Higgins and W. Larner (eds) Assembling Neoliberalism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 243–​62. Jung, H.J. (2007) Learning to Be an Individual: Emotion and Person in an American Junior High School, New York: Peter Lang. 234

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Kelsky, K. (2015) The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide To Turning Your PhD Into a Job, New York: Crown. Kim, H.S. and Markus, H.R. (2002) ‘Freedom of speech and freedom of silence: an analysis of talking as a cultural practice’, in R.A. Shweder, M. Minow and H.R. Markus (eds) Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp 432–​52. Kleibert, J.M. (2021) ‘Geographies of marketization in higher education: branch campuses as territorial and symbolic fixes’, Economic Geography, 1–​23. Kuan, T. (2015) Love’s Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Kusserow, A.S. (2004) American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lacey, A. and Ilcan, S. (2006) ‘Voluntary labor, responsible citizenship, and international NGOs’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 47(1): 34–​53. Lai, W., Zhu, J., Tao, L. and Spires, A.J. (2015) ‘Bounded by the state: government priorities and the development of private philanthropic foundations in China’, The China Quarterly, 224: 1083–​92. Ma, Y. and Wright, E. (2021) ‘Outsourced concerted cultivation: international schooling and educational consulting in China’, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 1–​23. McRobbie, A. (2016) Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries, Cambridge: Polity Press. Mok, K.H. (2021) ‘Managing neo-​liberalism with Chinese characteristics: the rise of education markets and higher education governance in China’, International Journal of Educational Development, 84: 1–​9. Muehlebach, A. (2012) The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Naftali, O. (2014) Children, Rights, and Modernity in China: Raising Self-​ Governing Citizens, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ordorika, I. and Lloyd, M. (2015) ‘International rankings and the contest for university hegemony’, Journal of Education Policy, 30(3): 385–​405. Parker, M. and Weik, E. (2014) ‘Free spirits? The academic on the aeroplane’, Management Learning, 45(2): 167–​81. Petersen, E.B. (2007) ‘Negotiating academicity: postgraduate research supervision as category boundary work’, Studies in Higher Education, 32(4): 475–​87. Pusser, B. and Marginson, S. (2013) ‘University rankings in critical perspective’, The Journal of Higher Education, 84(4): 544–​68.

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Robertson, S.L. (2010) ‘Corporatisation, competitiveness, commercialisation: new logics in the globalising of UK higher education’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 8(2): 191–​203. Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ross, H. and Chen, Y. (2015) ‘Engaging Chinese international undergraduate students in the American university’, Learning and Teaching, 8(3): 13–​36. Rossette-​Crake, F. (2020) ‘ “The new oratory”: public speaking practice in the digital, neoliberal age’, Discourse Studies, 22(5): 571–​89. Shumar, W. (2016) ‘ “Being TED”: the university intellectual as globalised neoliberal consumer self ’, Learning and Teaching, 9(2): 89–​108. Siltaoja, M., Juusola, K. and Kivijärvi, M. (2019) ‘ “World-​c lass” fantasies: a neocolonial analysis of international branch campuses’, Organization, 26(1): 75–​97. Snellman, K., Silva, J.M. and Putnam, R.D. (2015) ‘Inequity outside the classroom: growing class differences in participation in extracurricular activities’, Voices in Urban Education, 40: 7–​14. Sun, H. (2011) ‘The 3-​3-​3 framework and 7P model for teaching creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship’, Journal of Chinese Entrepreneurship, 3(2): 159–​66. Tokumitsu, M. (2015) Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness, New York: Regan Arts. Tsang, E.Y. (2013) ‘The quest for higher education by the Chinese middle class: retrenching social mobility?’, Higher Education, 66: 653–​68. Waters, J.L. (2006) ‘Emergent geographies of international education and social exclusion’, Antipode, 38(5): 1046–​68. Waters, J.L. (2007) ‘ “Roundabout routes and sanctuary schools”: the role of situated practices and habitus in the creation of transnational professionals’, Global Networks, 7(4): 477–​97. Whyte, W. (1956) The Organization Man, New York: Simon & Schuster. Wilkins, S. (2020) ‘Two decades of international branch campus development, 2000–​2020: A review’, The International Journal of Educational Management, 35(1): 311–​26. Woodward, A.R. (2008) ‘A survey of Li Yang Crazy English’, in V.H. Mair (ed) Sino-​Platonic Papers, 180(April): 1–​71. Woronov, T. (2006) ‘Chinese children, American education: globalizing child-​rearing in contemporary China’, in J. Cole and D. Durham (eds) Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp 29–​51. Zhang, X. (2015) ‘One life for sale: youth culture, labor politics, and new idealism in China’, Positions: Asia Critique, 23(3): 515–​43. Zhao, M. (2012) ‘The social enterprise emerges in China’, Stanford Social Innovation Review, (Spring): 30–​5. 236

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What’s the point? A few thoughts instead of a conclusion Daniel Nehring and Kristiina Brunila

Introduction: writing about academic capitalism This book may be read in several ways. It may be read as an expression of its authors’ affectively charged, visceral encounters with academic capitalism. At this level, each of its chapters speaks for itself, and it seems remiss to impose an overarching interpretation. Moreover, this book might be read as a contribution to academic debates in sociology, in education, in cultural studies, and in related fields, on affect, on academic capitalism and on the conceptual relationship between the two. We already mapped this conceptual territory a little in Chapter 1, and indicated where we see this book’s innovative contributions in intellectual terms. This opens up space, on these final pages, for a brief reflection on the politics of writing about academic capitalism. In other words, here we are concerned with the question of what this book might mean, written against the backdrop of academic capitalism’s hegemony and released into an already oversaturated market for academic books. Put differently once more, this seems to be a good time to sketch a sociological analysis of critical and reflexive scholarly writing on academic capitalism. The texts on the preceding pages have been written, converted into a book, marketed, circulated, sold, bought and read within the institutional system of global academic capitalism. Therefore, their meaning, as well as the extent to which they are capable of carrying meaning at all, can be usefully analysed in reference to this institutional system. In the following, we sketch some trains of thought that may lead to such an analysis. The question therefore is: what’s the point in us writing and you reading this book? Academic capitalism has, under various labels, been a topic of analysis, debate and critique across the social sciences and humanities for decades, from the beginnings of neoliberal governments’ efforts to inflict creative destruction on higher education systems around the world (Edwards, 1989; Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Hao and Zabielskis, 2020). While the debate continues, the marketisation and commodification of higher education has continued unabated (Hu and Krishna, 2009; 237

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Holmwood, 2017). Meanwhile, those strands of scholarly debate that claim to have had a significant impact on higher education governance and management (Etzkowitz, 2014, 2016) often stand apart from more critically minded enquiry (Giroux, 2014; Holmwood, 2014), both in their descriptions of academic organisations and academic labour and in their normative visions of what universities should be. Against this backdrop, what meaningful impact, if any at all, might a new book on academic capitalism achieve?

Scholarship as a process of meaning-​making This book approaches academic capitalism, as the dominant institutional framework for academic labour from the perspective of affect theory. Each of its chapters offers a distinctive account of the value systems of contemporary academia, of the ways in which such value systems may resonate across bodies, and of how these resonances may be incorporated into management strategies, processes of profit generation and structurations of hierarchy. In other words, each chapter opens a window into the affective economies (Ahmed, 2004) of academic labour. In the first place, this is significant in intellectual terms, in so far as the affective potencies of academic capitalism have so far arguably received insufficient attention in social research. Our analytical terrain here aligns well with Donovan Schaefer’s characterisation of affect theory: Affect theory is an approach to history, politics, culture, and all other aspects of embodied life that emphasizes the role of nonlinguistic and non-​or paracognitive forces. As a method, affect theory asks what bodies do –​what they want, where they go, what they think, how they decide –​and especially how bodies are impelled by forces other than language and reason. It is, therefore, a theory of power. For affect theory, feelings, emotions, affects, moods, and sensations are not cosmetic but rather the substance of subjectivity. (Schaefer, 2019: 1; original emphasis) This characterisation draws attention to its location in territory that has long remained beyond the attention of social researchers. It therefore stands in obvious contrast to classical definitions of social enquiry, as in Max Weber’s account of sociology as a discipline concerned with the explanation of social action, characterised by definable subjective meaning (Weber, 2019 [1922]: 78ff). Given the preter-​rational, preter-​cognitive force of affect, its theorists place frequent emphasis on its resistance to easy definition, as in Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg’s account of affect as ‘found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-​body, and 238

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otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 1; original emphasis). Each of the chapters in this book elucidates how these intensities and resonances are fed and exploited by the machinery of affective capitalism. In this sense, each chapter gives narrative form to the affective life of scholars and, by extension, of universities. In doing so, it potentially builds a frame of meaning around the sometimes inchoate and visceral ways in which we pass through academic life day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second. Why only ‘potentially’? The answer to this question rests in the sociality of narratives and the meanings by which they come to be understood. Narratives and the stories they carry1 organise the social realities in which we experience ourselves, our interactions with others, and the material structures of the human world: ‘Every day we tumble into a deep labyrinth of narrative realities. So, while people certainly can make their own stories, they rarely do so under conditions of their own choosing’ (Plummer, 2019: 26; original emphasis). Narratives are social facts. This assumption draws attention to processes of narrative power. Ken Plummer characterises narrative power as ‘a relational and dialogic process oscillating and undulating throughout the social world and working to patterns the degree of control people experience and have over their own lives and the lives of others’ (2019: 30). In this sense, narrative power describes processes of socio-​cultural and political regulation, as well as social relationships of domination and subordination (Plummer, 1995). Narrative power is created, sustained and sometimes transformed through an array of institutional infrastructures, from the formal processes by which higher education policy is defined, to the organisational logic according to which your managers organised the activities of your last staff away day. It is bound up with an array of social inequalities, forms of exclusion and opportunities for resistance, and it is intrinsic to struggles for human value (Plummer, 2019: 42ff, 161ff). The capacity of scholarship to generate meaning is therefore circumscribed by relations of narrative power. This means that the organisational and interpersonal relationships of academic capitalism will frame in important ways how this book may come to be read.

Academic capitalism and the decline of meaning For a narrative to carry meaning for anyone other than its author, in one way or another, it must be published, circulated, read, thought about, interpreted and passed on. It is not at all certain that much of this will occur in the case of scholarly narratives, in the form of conference papers, journal articles, books, book chapters, research reports, and so on. One reason for this lies 239

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in the hierarchies that stratify academic labour in modern universities. Not everyone is given the same chance to speak, or to be heard. Of course, these hierarchies historically transcend the advent of academic capitalism. For example, in Science as a Vocation, originally a speech given at the University of Munich in 1918, Max Weber is explicit as to the gendered and class-​based prerequisites for an in some sense a successful academic career. His argument is concerned with the ‘career of the young man who is dedicated to science’, and he bluntly acknowledges the ‘plutocratic prerequisites’ for such a career (Weber, 2007 [1922]: 129f). Discussing the historical development of higher education in South Korea, Terri Kim (2005) points out that nationality and ethnicity differentiated access to academic careers during Japan’s colonial domination of Korea, from 1910 to 1945. Other examples easily come to mind (Fisher, 2016; Esnard and Cobb-​Roberts, 2018). Nonetheless, academic capitalism places its own distinctive constraints on what can be said and what comes to be heard in academic life today. One such set of constraints has much to do with the bureaucratic focus of academic capitalism. Its proponents highlight the enhanced capacity of universities to contribute to economic, technological and social development, once incorporated into the capitalist marketplace. Thus, Henry Etzkowitz, discussing academic capitalism under the label of the ‘entrepreneurial university’, claims: The ‘capitalization of knowledge’ is central to a new academic mission, linking universities to users of knowledge more tightly and establishing the university as an economic actor in its own right. Academic institutions, like MIT and Stanford, are viewed as a source of economic and social development in ever more direct ways and have become models to aspire to and emulate. Established academic institutions, like Yale, aspiring ones like the University of Plymouth in the UK, rising ones like Twente University in the Netherlands, and traditional ones like the National University of Singapore, shape their structure and identity as entrepreneurial universities. … Academic involvement in technology transfer, firm formation and regional development signifies the transition from a research to an entrepreneurial university as the academic ideal. These developments have focused attention on universities, viewed now as potential engines of regional economic development. (Etzkowitz, 2014: 223f) Etzkowitz has himself blurred the boundaries between the worlds of academia and business. A sociologist, he holds various academic appointments, while simultaneously leading the Triple Helix Association and the International Triple Helix Institute, an association and a consulting firm set up to 240

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entrepreneurially promote his work (Triple Helix Association, 2017). His characterisation of the ‘capitalization of knowledge’ in the preceding quotation renders, in our assessment, a rather partial description of profound organisational transformations at a diverse range of universities. Writing of a ‘new academic mission’ and the ‘ideal’ of the entrepreneurial, the spin here is to portray the commodification of higher education as an expansion in the uses of academic knowledge, which is systematically tied to its amended role in economic and social development. In Etzkowitz’s account, the rise of academic capitalism thus gives scholarship a new, enhanced meaning. Etzkowitz writes persuasively, but the rationale underlying his endorsement of academic capitalism seems questionable, here and elsewhere (see, for example, Etzkowitz and Zhou, 2008; Etzkowitz, 2011; Etzkowitz et al, 2012). Specifically, Etzkowitz fails to acknowledge a wide range of consequences that the economisation of the university has had. In this regard, his work seems emblematic of the narratives constructed, by governments, policymakers, academic managers, academics and other interested parties, to justify economisation across the last few decades (Gaffikin and Morrissey, 2008; Kavanagh, 2009; Göktepe-​Hultén, 2010; Gustavs and Clegg, 2016). Specifically, what is missing amidst the careful analyses of the benefits of reconstructing universities as engines of economic development is careful attention to other, more problematic, effects. These include, but are not limited to: 1. Privatisation: The detachment of the university from the public sphere and, where present, democratic politics (Giroux, 2014; Holmwood, 2016). 2. Precarisation: The de-​stabilisation of academic labour, by way of the retrenchment of long-​term academic employment (Levin and Shaker, 2011; Discenna, 2017; Ullrich, 2019). 3. Metricisation: The re-​definition of the objectives of academic labour, by means of the expansion of performance management regimes to govern scholarship at universities (Kauppinen, 2013; Hackett, 2014; Paasi, 2016). 4. Surveillance: The ongoing surveillance of academics, to monitor conformity with and the achievement of performance targets (Kallio et al, 2015; Herrmann, 2017). These developments have been much discussed in critical analyses of recent developments in higher education, and they arguably do not need to be unpacked in detail here. The point, rather, is that there remains a deep chasm between such critical analyses and the scholarly and public narratives that serve to legitimise the economisation of higher education. To a large degree, the latter seem to be concerned with the rhetorical legitimisation of academic capitalism, rather than with the careful, truly nuanced analysis of the entrepreneurial turn. Henry Etzkowitz, one prominent proponent 241

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of the ‘entrepreneurial university’, thus simply does not engage with the outlined, problematic consequences of academic capitalism. Given the prevalence of sociologically thin rhetoric about ‘entrepreneurial universities’, it seems important to reframe public debates about higher education, universities, scholars and students, and the work they do. One of the potential contributions of this book lies here, as it draws attention to the ways in which academic capitalism penetrates into the deepest, preter-​ cognitive, preter-​emotional layers of academic life. However, such a reframing is complicated by the operational logic of universities under conditions of academic capitalism. If you have spent a significant period working at a university during the past 20 years, you will know that hard-​charging entrepreneurialism very often does not lie at the centre of the daily work that academics, administrators and their managers do. Rather, you are likely to have noticed that you have been spending more and more time filling in forms of dubious utility, strategically planning work on research grant applications or journal articles to meet your performance targets, responding to the latest time use survey by the business consultancy that your line manager hired to monitor and improve your performance, and so forth (Jemielniak and Greenwood, 2013; Collini, 2017). One sociologically fruitful way to think of academic capitalism is therefore as a bureaucratic mechanism of self-​justification. Such self-​justification operates by way of powerful narratives, of impact, policy relevance, the student experience, entrepreneurial scholarship, and so forth. These narratives play a central role in producing the entrepreneurial university, co-​constructing an institutional reality for academics, students, academic managers, administrators and policymakers to inhabit, while obscuring other, less desirable features of academic life today. Henry Etzkowitz’s much cited, highly selective account of the ‘entrepreneurial university’ may be read as one instance of this narrative reality. Motivated and justified by such rhetoric about universities as growth engines, since the 1980s, governments around the world have defunded public education, while simultaneously demanding that universities demonstrate their ongoing contribution to social and economic development (Giroux and Giroux, 2012; Giroux, 2013; Letizia, 2016; Jessop, 2017b). Universities have passed on these demands to academics, by creating quantitative systems of ‘metrics’ to track performance –​amounts of money raked in in research grants, numbers of journal articles published per year, journal impact factors, h-​index scores, student satisfaction scores, numbers of social media followers, tweets and re-​tweets, and so on (Kallio et al, 2015; Etzkowitz, 2016). The purpose of these metrics is to enable academics and their managers to legitimise their work and the continuation of their employment. With variations between national academic systems and universities, the metricisation and continuous surveillance of academic work 242

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has created a pressure-​cooker organisational environment, defined by the need to accumulate performance scores as quickly as possible, to keep one’s job and progress in one’s career (Hu and Krishna, 2009; Berg and Seeber, 2016). Along the way, they have failed to deal with extant inequalities, of race, ethnicity, gender, and so on, in academic spaces, and engendered new modes of inequality (Andrews and Palmer, 2013; O’Hagan et al, 2019; The Queer Diaspora Collective, 2019). From the perspective of narrative power, this matters, because it makes it difficult for narratives such as those in the present book to be heard. Within the current configuration of academic capitalism, it does not matter particularly much what you write. What matters is where your writing is published, what the publication’s impact factor is, how frequently your work is cited and contributes to your h-​index score, and other instrumental considerations of the sort. In other words, what matters is how the ‘output’ of your labour posits you, by way of accumulated metrics, vis-​à-​vis your peers in institutionalised hierarchies. Some systems by which research, and by extension researchers, are judged, such as the British Research Excellence Framework (REF), do rely on the qualitative evaluation of research, rather than on sheer numbers.2 However, its objective still is the condensation of scholarship into the metric of ‘starred quality levels’ (Research Excellence Framework, 2020). Thus, your arguments, ideas, theories and methods hold no intrinsic meaning. What matters, to your line manager, your academic department and your career, is the number of stars that your publications are awarded, as marks of perceived quality. Dariusz Jemielniak and Davydd J. Greenwood perceptively note that the neoliberal remaking of higher education has converted scholars and other inhabitants of the academic world into ‘meritocratic strivers’: One way lens for understanding the reforms is to analyze the cultural production of actors in these neoliberal schemes. The neoliberal system converts students, faculty, administrators, and policy makers into specific kinds of social actors: meritocratic strivers who seek to climb the ladder of success higher and faster than their direct competitors. These neoliberal persons together interact to produce a university system in which all are instrumental strivers constrained to follow tracks laid out for them. This is the death of higher education, not a reform of a system. (Jemielniak and Greenwood, 2013: 73) Many of us will not identify with this portrayal. Nonetheless, these observations certainly speak to the state of academic publishing today. Our publications have become tools of bureaucratic self-​justification, as we are assessed by our managers, compete with our peers, try to hang on to our jobs, gain professional advancement, and so on. 243

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This is not all there is, of course, and our books and articles may still stimulate genuine debate, in academic life and in public life at large. The notion of academic publications as tools of bureaucratic self-​justification does matter, however, as it suggests that the former have, at least tendentially, come to be evacuated of intrinsic meaning. This arguably makes it more difficult for scholarly narratives to be heard and to acquire currency and binding power in academia and in public life (Plummer, 2019). This loss of intrinsic meaning is compounded by the speeding up of scholarship under conditions of academic capitalism. Continuous bureaucratic pressure on academics to justify their employment has arguably exacerbated the publish-​or-​perish culture at many universities, leading to the explosive growth in the number of academic publications in recent years. Mats Alvesson, Yiannis Gabriel and Roland Paulsen illustrate this development with impressive figures: Since the 1990s, the amount of academic publishing has grown immensely, even allowing for the rapid increase in the number of academics. According to UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics, the number of tertiary education teachers in the USA rose from just under one million in 1999 to nearly 1.6 million in 2013. Similar rises have been taking place elsewhere, as higher education has become a global industry. What has outpaced even the rise of academics has been the rise in academic publications. It is estimated that in 1996 over one million academic articles were published, whereas in 2009 the number had increased to a million and a half (about one new article every twenty-​two seconds). Between 200 and 300 new scientific journals are published each year, amounting to a total of more than 12,000 … without including countless e-​journals and other online publications. (Alvesson et al, 2017: 4) In line with our preceding argument, they conclude that bureaucratic short-​ term demands for ‘outputs’ have entailed a proliferation of ‘meaningless research of no value to society and of only modest value to its authors –​apart from in the context of securing employment and promotion’ (Alvesson et al, 2017: 4). At the same time, increasing performance pressure on scholars also reduces their time to read, think and engage in creative intellectual work (Menzies and Newson, 2016). Alongside other institutional pressures (Jessop, 2017a, b), an overflow of scholarly work waiting to be read, academics’ lack of time to actually read and an excessive emphasis on publications’ prestige ‘metrics’ may therefore explain why critical publications on academic capitalism have not acquired much narrative power, and why they have not sustained effective resistance against the economisation of the university. This assessment raises questions about the significance of scholarly arguments such as those presented in this book. 244

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So, what’s the point? Our foregoing argument suggests that this book on its own is unlikely to have a transformative impact on academic life. Nonetheless, it matters both in intellectual terms and in terms of the politics of academic labour. Assessing the state of contemporary sociology, Michael Burawoy characterises it as an ‘inconvenient truth’: Just as sociology arose with civil society in the 19th century to oppose market anarchy and political tyranny, so once again the mission of sociology lies in opposing the rise of utilitarian and economistic thought. Against neoliberal orthodoxy, sociology poses as an inconvenient truth, along with its neighboring disciplines such as anthropology and geography, and along with dissident economists and political scientists. (Burawoy, 2014: 153) This assessment might extend to this book’s multidisciplinary narrative about affective capitalism in academia. It extends the intellectual territory on which academic capitalism is debated, by highlighting its affective currents in original ways, from a diverse range of theoretical and empirical perspectives. In doing so, it suggests inconvenient truths about what universities are today and how we inhabit them. Speaking from subordinate positions, the accounts in this book contest the dominant narrative reality of academic capitalism by drawing attention to its tensions and contradictions. In doing so, these accounts may contribute to the long-​term project of shifting narrative power and contesting the taken-​for-​g ranted assumptions of academic capitalism, as to what universities can and should be. Therefore, what ultimately matters are the long-​term effects of such inconvenient truths. Scholarship today has become focused on short-​term gain; we too often publish –​as quickly as we can and must –​within the narrative currents of our time, in search of immediate recognition. In the process of doing so, what falls out of focus are the long-​term consequences of building a body of knowledge and thought. While critical analyses of academic capitalism may not ignite intensive debates at universities and in public in the present, they may do so in the future, in connection with effective forms of academic and political activism (Burawoy, 2014). The present book might be read as a contribution to such a future transformation. Notes Here, we follow Ken Plummer (2019: 4f) in distinguishing ‘story’ and ‘narrative’. While the former term refers us to the subject matter of what we tell each other, the latter concerns the formal organisation of storytelling: ‘So stories, the what we tell, put character into plots, with beginnings, middles and ends: they set

1

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scenes, create tensions and find resolutions. … Narratives, the how we do this, examine the acts, apparatus, mechanics and structures that make it all work: just how we tell tales, present news reports, make films, sends tweets, tell our stories’ (2019: 5; original emphasis). 2 See www.ref.ac.uk

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Giroux, H.A. (2014) ‘The swindle of democracy in the neoliberal university and the responsibility of intellectuals’, Democratic Theory, 1(1). Giroux, H.A. and Giroux, S.S. (2012) ‘Universities gone wild’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 12(4): 267–​73. Göktepe-​Hultén, D. (2010) ‘A balancing act: factors behind the formation of academic entrepreneurship’, Critical Sociology, 36(4): 521–​35. Gustavs, J. and Clegg, S. (2016) ‘Working the knowledge game?’, Management Learning, 36(1): 9–​30. Hackett, E.J. (2014) ‘Academic capitalism’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 39(5): 635–​8. Hao, Z. and Zabielskis, P. (2020) Academic Freedom Under Siege: Higher Education in East Asia, the US and Australia, Cham: Springer. Herrmann, A.F. (2017) ‘The beatings will continue until morale improves’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 17(4): 347–​56. Holmwood, J. (2014) ‘From social rights to the market: neoliberalism and the knowledge economy’, International Journal of Lifelong Education, 33(1): 62–​76. Holmwood, J. (2016) ‘The university, democracy and the public sphere’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(7): 927–​42. Holmwood, J. (2017) ‘ “The turn of the screw”: marketization and higher education in England’, Prometheus, 34(1): 63–​72. Hu, M.-​C. and Krishna, V.V. (2009) ‘Developing entrepreneurial universities in Taiwan’, Science, Technology and Society, 14(1): 35–​57. Jemielniak, D. and Greenwood, D.J. (2013) ‘Wake up or perish’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 15(1): 72–​82. Jessop, B. (2017a) ‘On academic capitalism’, Critical Policy Studies, 12(1): 104–​9. Jessop, B. (2017b) ‘Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities’, Higher Education, 73(6): 853–​70. Kallio, K.-​M., Kallio, T.J., Tienari, J. and Hyvönen, T. (2015) ‘Ethos at stake: performance management and academic work in universities’, Human Relations, 69(3): 685–​709. Kauppinen, I. (2013) ‘Towards a theory of transnational academic capitalism’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(2): 336–​53. Kavanagh, D. (2009) ‘Institutional heterogeneity and change: the university as fool’, Organization, 16(4): 575–​95. Kim, T. (2005) ‘Internationalisation of higher education in South Korea: reality, rhetoric, and disparity in academic culture and identities’, Australian Journal of Education, 49(1): 89–​103. Letizia, A.J. (2016) ‘The hollow university: disaster capitalism befalls American higher education’, Policy Futures in Education, 14(3): 360–​76.

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Levin, J.S. and Shaker, G.G. (2011) ‘The hybrid and dualistic identity of full-​time non-​tenure-​track faculty’, American Behavioral Scientist, 55(11): 1461–​84. Menzies, H. and Newson, J. (2016) ‘No time to think’, Time & Society, 16(1): 83–​98. O’Hagan, C., O’Connor, P., Myers, E.S. and Baisner, L. (2019) ‘Perpetuating academic capitalism and maintaining gender orders through career practices in STEM in universities’, Critical Studies in Education, 60(2): 205–​25. Paasi, A. (2016) ‘Globalisation, academic capitalism, and the uneven geographies of international journal publishing spaces’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 37(5): 769–​89. Plummer, K. (1995) Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds, London: Routledge. Plummer, K. (2019) Narrative Power, Cambridge: Polity. Queer Diaspora Collective, The (2019) ‘Fungibility in the academia’, Higher Education for the Future, 6(2): 158–​70. Research Excellence Framework (2020) ‘Index of revisions to the “Panel criteria and working methods” (2019/​02)’. www.ref.ac.uk/​media/​1450/​ ref-​2019​_​02-​panel-​crite​r ia-​and-​work​ing-​meth​ods.pdf Schaefer, D.O. (2019) The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seigworth, G.J. and Gregg, M. (2010) ‘An inventory of shimmers’, in G.J. Seigworth and M. Gregg (eds) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp 1–​25. Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L.L. (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Triple Helix Association (2017) ‘Prof. Henry Etzkowitz’. www.tri​pleh​elix​ asso​ciat​ion.org/​memb​ers-​gall​ery-​2?mm=​60 Ullrich, P. (2019) ‘In itself but not yet for itself –​organising the new academic precariat’, in W. Baier, E. Canepa and H. Golemis (eds) The Radical Left in Europe: Rediscovering Hope, London: Merlin Press, pp 155–​68. Weber, M. (2007 [1922]) ‘Science as a vocation’, in H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (eds) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Abingdon: Routledge, pp 129–​56. Weber, M. (2019 [1922]) Economy and Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Index A abnormality  71, 72, 75 Åbo Akademi University  183 academic affects, capitalising on  39–​42 academic capitalism  1–​5, 14, 47 and the Caribbean  60–​1 and China  218 in crisis  21–​2, 42 and disciplinary biases  56 and ethical subjectivation  96–​7 and labour  5–​6 and meaning  239–​44 and relationships  130 and storytelling  100–​3 writing about  237–​8 Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University  5 academic life and labour  3, 4, 10, 162–​4, 239 academic life, an  148–​51, 156–​61 careers  180, 182, 220, 243 contracts  30–​1, 66 and politics  245 and self-​control  99 and subjectivation  7 tenure  49, 68, 73, 79, 119, 198 thinking of  48, 49–​51 see also friendship in academia; work; workloads academic patriarchy  65, 67, 69, 72, 74, 79–​81 access to higher education  65, 73, 240 activism  53, 54, 82, 245 admission systems  65, 79 affective athleticism  179–​85, 192, 217 and COVID-​19  187–​9 and self-​management  175–​9 affective capitalism  4, 6–​8, 42, 50, 83 and the Cartesian vision  9 as a public secret  160 and relationships  130 affective dissonance  22, 29, 33–​6, 41 affective economy  176–​7 affect theory  6–​7, 11, 14, 176, 238–​9 agency  51, 223 academic agency  36–​9 and storytelling  95 Ahmed, Sara  50, 163, 176 Altomonte, Guillermina  49 anarchism  66, 80 Anderson, Barbara  165 Andersson Cederholm, Erika  135 ‘anomie’ discourse  66, 69

anxiety  110, 119–​21, 135, 149, 157, 160, 163 Appiah, Kwame Anthony  151 Arendt, Hannah  95, 99, 102, 105, 106 art, works of  103, 230 atavistic characteristics  70 athletics in US schools  228 athletic training  see affective athleticism Australia  11, 41, 219 Association for Research in Education (AARE)  30–​3, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40 neoliberalism in university sector  21, 22, 29–​33, 155 authenticity  110, 218, 223, 224 autoethnography  115, 151, 154, 164, 197–​8 autonomy  27, 73, 207, 232 individual  122, 140, 217, 221, 223, 225, 230 in research  143 university  12, 29–​30, 65, 68

B Becker, Gary  100 Beckford, George  51, 53 behaviour  153, 155, 161, 162, 175, 224 behaviour management  112 and binaries  67 and intelligence  71, 81 and leadership  113 Benjamin, Walter  95, 98, 101 Berlant, Lauren  111, 150 Best, Lloyd  51 binary norms  67, 84, 161 biomedical regime of truth  69 Bjerg, Helle  50, 177 Blackmore, Jill  148–​9 Black Power Movement  52 Blixen, Karen  189–​91 Boardman, Craig  47 bodily control  8, 177 boundaries  129, 130 friendship boundaries  136–​40 ‘relational work’  134–​5 between work and life  132 Bourdieu, Pierre  21, 25–​9, 34, 39, 66 Bozeman, Barry  47 Braidotti, Rosi  9 Braithwaite, Kamau  52 Brennan, Marie  11 Bristol, Laurette  56 Brown, Wendy  99, 114 249

Affective Capitalism in Academia Brunila, Kristiina  12, 13, 50, 51, 67, 135, 177 budget restrictions  4, 30, 37, 77, 79, 80 Bunda, Tracey  43 Burawoy, Michael  245 bureaucracy  242, 244 Burrows, Roger  196 Butler, Judith  84

C Canada  82, 219 capitalism  47 capital accumulation fields  26 capitalist academies  69 crisis of  22, 42 emotional capitalism  130 and knowledge  84 logics of  21–​5 (post)liberal capitalism  65, 80 Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell  37 careers  career path  180, 182 keeping  243 and self-​presentation  220 Caribbean  12, 51, 55, 56 economies of  48, 51, 52 and global power  60 intellectual dependency  53 radical thinkers in the  53–​4, 57 society and culture  59–​60 Carr, Zola  69 Cartesian vision  9 casualising the workforce  30–​1, 41 Cederholm, Erika Andersson  12 celebrations/​commemorations at work  141 Chaput, Catherine  48 Cheal, David  134 children  abnormal children  71, 72, 75 American and Chinese  225–​9 early life  26, 28, 40 China  13 and access to Western universities  216–​21 children and confidence  225–​9 educational consultants in  219, 229–​32 entrepreneurs in  217 and performance training  221–​5 chromosomes  70–​1 citations  134, 243 citizenship  44, 220, 227, 228 after WWII  69 and self-​presentation  232 civil liberties  76 class  28, 40, 44, 52, 70, 83, 218, 227 and extracurricular activities  228–​9 factor in education  82–​3

lower classes  67, 68, 70, 81 climate change  44 closet, the  160–​1 Cobb-​Roberts, Deidre  56 collars  183–​4, 187 coloniality, systems of  44, 47, 48, 51–​4 in the Caribbean context  52 coloniality of knowledge  53 deepened coloniality  54–​6 ‘coming out’  161 commercialisation  2, 30, 42, 49 of ideas  47 commodification  7, 22–​3, 182 labour  10, 39 students as  218–​21 communism  69, 73 in Greek education system  73–​6 community  56 competitiveness  51, 77, 80, 135 between universities  27, 29, 54 and work environment  34 compliance  38, 50, 153, 190 conferences  95, 105, 129, 133, 140, 216, 220 confidence  216, 218, 220, 230, 232 confident students  225–​9 Considine, Mark  29, 37 contracts  30–​1, 66 council-​management governance (CMG)  36, 37, 38 and diversity group members  41 COVID-​19  2, 106, 164, 187–​9, 218 retrenchment after  155 writing during  189–​91 Cozza, Michela  13 Crazy English  229 criminality  67, 69 ‘born criminals’  70 crises  44 crises of abjection  42 crisis in academia  21 crisis of capitalism  22, 42 critical pedagogy  57–​60, 61 ‘cruel optimism’  9, 67, 111, 112, 150 cultural capital  21, 66 cultural-​symbolic logic  29–​33

D Darwinian thinking  71 De Angelis, Massimo  199 decolonising  43, 44 exchange-​value habits  22 degeneration theory  67, 70, 71 Deleuze, Gilles  50, 96, 104, 176, 177, 192 democracy  2, 4, 58, 70, 232, 233 and education  58, 227 Denmark  activism in universities  82

250

Index University Reform  99 depoliticising social problems  112, 231 depression  69, 149 De Sousa Santos, Boaventura  43 developing countries  54, 55 differences, respecting  84, 113, 124 digital communication  204, 205–​6 Dirlik, Arif  59 disability  83 disciplining academics  37 dispositions  21, 25, 28 diversity  41, 43, 58 divorce  77 Dredge, Dianne  12 dress, university  183–​4 drugs  157 Durkheim, E.  68

E early life  26, 28, 40 economic crisis  79 education  of American children  225–​9 consultants in China  222 education effectiveness  82–​3 as a public good  58, 68, 83 as a state obligation  76 Edwards, Marc  112 ELIDEK  66 elites  67, 216, 219, 230 elite researchers  34 elite students  229 elite universities  27 email  204 embodied dispositions  28, 35 emotions  6, 8, 39, 51, 153 abject emotions  22, 40, 41 emotional capitalism  130 passionate intensities  38 English in China  English schools  216 importance of English language  219, 229 entrepreneurial characteristics  216, 231 entrepreneurial practices  4–​6, 29–​30, 49, 83, 99 entrepreneurial students  29 entrepreneurial university  240–​2 equality  114 Esnard, Talia  12, 56 ethics  44, 54 and academic capitalism  96–​7 ethnicity  124, 131, 182, 225, 227, 240, 243 Etzkowitz, Henry  240–​2 eugenics  67, 68 psychic eugenics  69 European Central Bank (ECB)  77

European Union (EU)  65, 77 examinations  73 exchange-​value  21, 24 expendable people  49 extracurricular activities  228–​9

F Facebook  201 family and access  27 Fanon, Frantz  53, 59 femininity  70, 72 feminisation  9, 39 feminism  111 and leadership  113 Figueroa, Mark  55 Finland  183, 198, 200, 202 flesh  179, 185 food, relationship with  149 Foucault, Michel  100, 112, 114, 149 Fournillier, Janice  55 France  68, 82 French universities  81 freedom  59, 84, 99, 100, 105, 123 academic  58, 104, 129, 143, 199, 208 of intellectual thought  52, 54, 60 Freud, Sigmund  159–​60 Friedman, Milton  96 friendship in academia  129–​31, 143–​5 and conflict  143 and gift exchanges  134–​5, 144 interview methodology  135–​6 making friends  136–​43 networking  131–​4 types of friendship  132, 137 funding  2, 30, 79, 80, 112, 198 Finnish model  200–​1 private funding  78 see also budget restrictions

G Galton, Sir Francis  67 Gates, Bill & Melinda  230 gender  112, 114, 227 defining gender  84 gender-​binary structure  67 gender equality  6, 44, 56 and leadership  119–​21 segregation  72 genetics  70–​1 Gherardi, Silvia  13 gift exchanges in friendship  131–​4, 134–​5, 145 invisible gifts  140–​3 Giroux, Henry  57–​8 globalisation  54, 55, 133 and Caribbean culture  59 Global South, radical thinkers in the  51 251

Affective Capitalism in Academia Goddard, Henry H.  71 Goffman, E.  219 Google Scholar  99, 155, 201 Great Reset, The  81–​3 Greece  12, 68, 69 communism in education system  73–​5 economic crisis  66, 77 education reforms (2020–​21)  65 military junta and after  76–​7 and the Simon-​Binet test  72 Greenwood, Davydd J.  243 Guattari, Félix  50 guilt  40, 41, 135, 165, 208 gym, the, as a political space  192

H habitus concept  21 habitus in hysteresis  34–​6 primary habitus  28 Hampel, Amir  13 Hardt, Michael  50 Harvey, David  199 hastiness in reading  197 Helsinki University  184 heredity  67, 70, 71 hierarchies  49, 118, 125, 240 capitalist hierarchies  76, 83 Chinese hierarchies  229 and international education  219 Higher Education as a Global Commodity  49 h-​index  97, 155, 197, 200, 242, 243 historic crisis context  21 Hoppe, Magnus  13 human capital, theory of  100, 110 Human resources (HR)  22, 37 human subjectivity  9 hysteresis  21, 34–​6

I identity  50, 220, 223 and academic lives  4, 6, 111 in the Caribbean  52, 56 and performance  216 sexual identity  149 work identity  132 Illouz, Eva  130 images  1, 100, 220, 222 imaginary realism  102–​4 immigrants  41, 43, 227 imprisonment  76 inclusivity  228 Indigenous people  41, 43 individuals  blaming individuals  10, 66, 78, 83 creating individuality  226 and effeminate libidos  75 individualising responsibility  105, 163–​4, 177, 231

individual performance  49, 56 and leadership  114, 118–​19, 121–​2 marginalised individuals  151 industry, and university collaborations  30, 47 inequalities  72, 79, 80, 83, 175, 229, 243 and labour value  21 and production  51 structural inequality  24 information channels  201, 202 innovation  223 Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development  68 institutions  7, 50 institutional policies  37 shaping behaviours  161 insufficiency in reading  197, 201–​3 intellectual rights  84–​5 capitalisation of  96 intellectual traditions, Caribbean  51–​4 intelligence  inheritance of  67–​8 intelligence quotient (IQ) tests  71–​2, 76, 81 international campuses  218–​19 International Monetary Fund (IMF)  77 international students  219 interview skills  223 Iris.ai  202 Islamist extremists  81 Ivy League  27

J Jago, Brenda  165 James, C.L.R.  53 Jameson, Fredric  23, 39, 40 Janning, Finn  97, 101 Jemielniak, Dariusz  243 Jessop, Bob  4, 47 Jorgensen, Kenneth Molbjerg  12, 50 journals  24, 97, 98, 100, 155, 182, 203, 205 Jules, Didacus  55 jumpiness in reading  197, 203–​5

K Kallikak Family  71 Karppi, Tero  6, 7, 176 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)  31, 37 Kim, Terri  240 knowledge  capitalisation of  240–​2 coloniality of  53 as a common good  84, 85 knowledge-​based economy  4, 49, 65 and power  59 Korea  240 Kristeva, Julia  40 252

Index

L labour  21 exploitation  24 relations  39 value of  24, 25 Lamming, George  53 language  67, 117–​18 late-​capitalism  39, 40, 42, 44 and ‘affect’  176 and injustices  111 and performance management  49 Latour, Bruno  102, 186, 209 Lavia, Jennifer  59, 59–​60 leadership  110–​14 data and analysis  114–​16 and gender  119–​21 and men  113 training  116–​19 learning difficulties  82 Lefebvre, Henri  206–​9 self-​help and self-​blame  207 left-​wing  66, 77, 81 Leslie, Larry  3, 5, 130, 175 Levitt, Keri  51 Lingard, Bob  59 lived experiences  101, 102 Lombroso, Cesare  70 Louisy, Pearlette  55 Lund University  184

M Macron, Emmanuel  81 resetting  82 Maldonado-​Torres, Walter  53, 54 manageable subjects  50, 66 management  22 new public sector management  49 vocabulary of  117 marginalised people  41, 43–​4, 225 Marginson, Simon  22, 29, 33, 37, 38 marketing  1, 2, 37, 43 and storytelling  96 marketisation of universities  2–​7, 10–​11, 12, 14, 65 and relationships  143 markets  29, 49, 54 marriage  77 Marx, Karl  21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 35, 42, 54 masculinity  72, 113, 165 measurement  70, 199–​200, 241 market metrics  4, 47 and performance  181, 196, 242 see also performance media environment  205 men  69, 70, 182 and leadership  113–​14 male students  73

Metaxas, Ioannis  75 middle level workers  25 Mignolo, Walter D.  53, 54 Miles, Catharine Cox  72 Mohidin, Fathia  192 morality  49, 219 and communism  74–​5 moral abnormality  67, 69 moral decline  70 moral economy of friends  130 moral panic  69 Morel, B.A.  70 Myrsiades, Kostas  58

N Naidoo, Rajani  49, 54–​5 narrative power  239, 243 National University of Singapore  240 National Youth Organisation  75 Nehring, Daniel  13 neoliberalism  3, 6, 9, 54, 61 and academic workers  158, 164 affective impacts of  135 definition of  99 and higher education  4, 29, 47, 49, 112, 162–​4 networking  26, 27, 50, 145 international networks  129, 133, 140 social networking  131–​4 New Democracy party  65, 81 New Oriental  216, 229 non-​academic labour  36, 37 Nordic education systems  84, 112 normality, understandings of  67, 71, 151, 182

O objective theory  186 online searching  203 Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD)  77 other, the  9, 40, 68, 69, 72, 111 outputs  99, 179, 196, 199, 200, 204, 207, 243 see also publishing

P Pan-​Africanist  54 pandemics  44, 82 see also COVID-​19 parenting  226 PASOK  77 passion  220, 221, 224, 232 learning  216 passionate work  132, 133, 143, 177 patriarchy  69, 74 and Greece  77

253

Affective Capitalism in Academia and (post)liberal capitalism  65, 67, 72, 79–​81 peer-​review system  134 performance  4, 37, 220, 224 in academia  217 data  175, 242 of leadership  121–​4 management  49, 112, 200, 216–​18, 241 performative writing  175, 192 politics of performativity  51 see also measurement Perry, James  161 personal interests  223 Petersen, Eva Bendix  9 Pignarre, Philippe  37 plantation society  48, 51–​4, 55 and Caribbean scholarship  59 ‘inner plantation’  60 Plummer, Ken  239 police forces within universities  65, 66, 79 political imaginary  51 politics  7, 9 and academic capitalism  237–​8 of academic labour  10, 11, 245 depoliticising social problems  112, 231 positionality  48, 56 post-​colonial studies  51, 53, 57–​60, 59, 81 post-​structuralism  49–​51 poverty  67, 69, 78 power relations  3, 7, 9, 37–​8, 40, 54, 106 ‘breaking the power’ of academics  22 in the Caribbean context  60–​1 coloniality of power  51 and freedom  105 narrative power  239 and plantation systems  48 and relationships  130 precarisation of labour  50, 51, 68, 241 presentation skills  121, 177, 231 see also self, the prestige  29, 33 primitive tribes  70 privatisation  2, 6, 7, 47, 241 privilege  208, 220, 225, 229 production  49 and capitalism  21–​4 and commodification  10, 11 fields of  25–​7 knowledge  47, 50, 53, 58, 68, 84, 187 of texts  201, 205 unproductive systems  65 profit  23, 24, 96 profit-​based journal publications  47 proletariat  25, 36, 42 psychic norm  67 psychic reality of academia  175 psychometrics  68

publications  see publishing public intellectuals  57–​60 public library, and storytelling  100–​1 public policy  53 public presentation  1, 2 public secret  8–​11, 160, 163, 198 public speaking  220, 221 public spending cuts  see budget restrictions publishing  47, 78, 155, 206 growth of academic publishing  243–​4 importance of  177, 179–​80, 181 short publications  98 and visibility  100

Q quality  23 images of  37 of research  243 queer materialistic theory  85 Quijano, Anibal  52, 53, 54

R race  28, 40, 56, 81, 83 and racial identities  52 radical thinkers  51, 53–​4, 57, 61 rationality, crisis of  9 reading, academic  196–​7, 199–​200 hastiness  205–​6 insufficiency  201–​3 jumpiness  203–​5 and time  205–​9 refugees  41, 43 relational distance  37 relationships  10 see also friendship in academia reproduction  69, 71, 72 research  early-​career researchers  34–​5 meaningless  244 reducing  31–​3 research grants  2 research-​only positions  29, 32 ten commandments of  97–​8 Research Excellence Framework (REF) 243 resistance  51, 59, 60, 101, 102, 103 acts of  56 to cultural imperialism  52 strategies  105 retirement  41 retrenchment  162, 241 Rhoades, Gary  5 rhythms of reading  see reading right-​wing party  65 Rizvi, Fazal  59 Rothenberg, Catherine  114 Roy, Siddhartha  112 254

Index

S Sandstones  27 ‘savage’ tribes  68 Scandinavia  180 Schaefer, Donovan  238 scholarship  1, 27, 243 and high -​capital value  28 meaning of  4 self, the  28, 50, 52, 59, 100, 153 as ‘hero’  219 professional self  177 self-​determination  232 self-​esteem  227 self-​expression  226 self-​justification  242, 243 self management  175–​9 self-​presentation  121, 216, 221, 222 senior level managers  22, 25, 29, 36–​9 sexuality  40, 112, 149 shame  113, 117, 135, 227 Shannon, Patrick  57–​60 shared experiences  198 Simon-​Binet scale  71 Sjöholm, Carina  12 Slaughter, Sheila  3, 5, 130, 175 Small Island states  55 Smith, M.G.  52 social capital  27, 129 social change  53–​4, 60 Social Darwinism  67 social inequality  80 see also inequalities socialist government  77 social justice  68, 112, 114 social media  201, 204 social relationships  10 see also friendship in academia; networking social skills  223 society, threats to  71, 75, 79 soft skills  231 spaces, collective  105–​6 Sparkes, Andrew  152, 154, 163 speaking, ways of  218 spending cuts  see budget restrictions Spivak, Gayatri  59 sporting activities  2 Springtime of the Peoples  70 Staunaes, Dorthe  50 Stengers, Isabelle  37 Stern, William  71 storytelling  100–​1 and imaginary realism  102–​4 and professional identity  95–​6 and storyselling  50, 96–​7, 98–​100 and visibility  99–​100, 104–​6 stratified society  40, 44 stress  135

structuralism  47, 51, 54 structural shifts  6, 8, 10, 11, 21, 48 students  confident students  225–​9 dangerous image of  79, 80 student experience  1–​2 subcultures  66 university life  2 subjectivation  7, 8–​11, 48, 50, 67, 218 ethical subjectivation  105 and leadership  110, 125 racialised subjectivities  53 and reading  202 suicide  69 surveillance  154, 162, 241 ‘sweaty desire’  9 Sweden  180, 183, 184, 192 symbolic capital  21, 26, 27, 29, 43 Syring, David  208 Syriza  66, 78

T taming critique  25, 37, 42 tax increases  80 teaching  57, 60 teaching-​and-​research positions  29, 31, 34, 41 teaching-​only positions  32–​3, 40, 68 technological solutions for information  202 TED Talk  220 ‘temporal sovereignty’  204 ten commandments of academics  97–​8 tensions  21 around roles and boundaries  56 of Caribbean societies  61 and relationships  143 use-​exchange tensions  22–​4 tenure  49, 68, 73, 79, 119, 198 Terman, Lewis Madison  71–​2 thinking and feeling  8 time  23 aspects of  206–​9, 242 restrictions  65, 66, 78 traditions  187 Triple Helix Association  240 Tudge, Alan  30 tuition fees  2, 77, 199, 219 turmoil  21, 38 Twitter  201 Tzanaki, Demetra  12

U United Kingdom  219 United States  68, 72 access to universities in the  216–​21 American culture  226 255

Affective Capitalism in Academia children and confidence  225–​9 and degeneracy theory  71 university minions  37–​8 University of Athens  72, 73, 79 ‘The attack on the Dean’  79–​80 University of Helsinki  115, 122 University of Jyväskylä  204 University of Munich  240 University of Plymouth  240 university sectors as capitalising fields 25–​9 Uppsala University  183, 184 use-​value impulses  21, 25, 28, 35 and academic fields  42–​4 and exchange-​value tension  22–​4

V Valero, Paola  10, 12, 50, 135 value systems  238 Venäläinen, Juhana  13, 48 Vicars, Mark  13, 51 vice-​chancellors  36–​7 Vidali, Maria  80 violence  41, 51, 79, 80 forcing compliance  38 from senior level  42 towards colleagues  41 violent affects  36–​9, 38 workplace violence  39 visibility  99–​100, 105–​6 and publications  179 volunteerism  231 Vostal, Filip  206

performance training  221–​5 White, Sheldon  76 white people  white males  39–​40 ‘whiteness’  182 Willmott, Hugh  181 women  40, 43, 69, 83, 114, 165, 227 Black women  56 female leadership  110 female students  73 the ‘immoral mother’  71 invisible work  145 and leadership  119–​21 single parents  41, 81 work  5, 66, 132 casualising the workforce  30–​1, 41 celebrations/​commemorations at  141 invisible work  144–​5 voluntary hours  155 wages  25, 31, 49, 79 working conditions  164 workplace violence  39 see also friendship in academia workloads  31–​2, 68, 99, 144, 155, 177, 196 ‘always on’ digital communication  204–​5 information overload  202, 204 World Economic Forum (WEF)  82 Worsham, Lynn  22, 39, 40, 41 Wynter, Sylvia  52

Y Ylijoki, Oili-​Helena  206, 207

W

Z

Weber, Max  82, 238, 240 Western universities and Chinese students  216–​21

Zelizer, Viviana  135 Zembylas, Michalinos  28 Zipin, Lew  11, 36, 37, 38

256