1. Setting the Scene: Research and Writing Against the Neoliberal Grain
From Universitas to Neoliberal Academia
Negotiating the Audit Culture
Collaborative Autoethnographies
Writing in Dialogue
2. The Manufactured CV
Tamar’s Story
Omri’s Story
Susan’s Story
3. Challenging knowledge In/Accessibility
Susan’s Story
Omri’s Story
Tamar’s Story
4. Tackling Difference in a Neoliberal classroom
Susan’s Story
Omri’s Story
Tamar’s Story
5. Closing Thoughts: Academic Hazards and Opportunities
Emotional Labour
Disappearing Campus life
The University of the Students and the Masters
References
Index
Susan Gair is Associate Professor in the College of Arts at James Cook University, Australia. Her research interests include critical social work practice, child adoption policy and practice, challenging inequalities, and promoting culturally respectful practice with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Tamar Hager is Associate Professor in the Education Department and Gender Studies Program at Tel Hai College, Israel. She has written several autoethnographies on motherhood, activism, and teaching. Her writings address feminist methodologies, neoliberal academia, multiculturalism and critical pedagogy.
Omri Herzog is Senior Lecturer in the Cultural Studies Department at Sapir College, Israel. His research interests include corporeal politics, popular cultural critique, and the dynamics of contemporary Israeli culture.
This open access book reflects on academic life under a neoliberal regime. Through collaborative autoethnographies, the authors share stories about the everyday experiences, dilemmas and conflicts of three academics: the struggle for promotion, teaching’s challenges, the race to publish, confronting bureaucracy and institutional politics, as well as the resulting emotional stress. These stories reveal the impact of neoliberal culture on ideological, economic, social, collegial, and emotional integrity which are integral to academics’ lives today. But along with the challenges, the authors present their vision of hope, and transformation through academic solidarity - and for the silenced voices to be heard, inside academia and beyond it.