Academic Women in Neoliberal Times

Briony Lipton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030450618
• eBook ISBN: 9783030450625
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Counseling in Career Development
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates the gendered dimensions of academic life in the contemporary Australian university. It examines key discourses – most notably academic performativity and identity – through a feminist lens, and scrutinises how discourses of neoliberalism and feminism are entangled in the structure, systems, operations and cultures of the university. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with academic women in Australia, the author uses a mix of experimental methods to emphasise the performative and discursive decisions women make with regard to their academic careers. In doing so, this book reveals how women themselves generate neoliberal and feminist shifts, how they manage the contradictions they produce, and how they carve spaces of influence and authority. Moving towards a re-evaluation of existing discourses, this book offers new insights into gender inequality in the Australian university in neoliberal times.

© The Author(s) 2020

B. LiptonAcademic Women in Neoliberal TimesPalgrave Studies in Gender and Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45062-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Briony Lipton¹

(1)

School of Education, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

Briony Lipton

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

DiscoursesGenderFeminismNeoliberalismLeadershipEquityGender representationHigher education

End Abstract

It is nine thirty on a Wednesday night and I am in bed working into the glow of my computer. My thumb swipes and claws at the screen of my smartphone. With one hand, I am scanning journal articles, and with the other, transcribing ideas, and typing paragraphs into my MacBook. I am saving notes to my reminders list and emailing web links to myself to read their content at a later date. These much-celebrated technologies used to produce this research and subsequent book have not so much brought about liberation in so much as they have promoted a speed-up and disaffection in the way they have enabled us to do more with less ( Gregg, 2011) and impact significantly on the careers of female academics. This frenetic work method is one that I have used for some time. Indeed, as I write this book, not for the first time I type with only one hand and again as I write this book. One arm is numb under the weight of a gorgeously chubby infant. Even as I write this very sentence I have had to pause, moving the laptop to the side, to gently pull my newest stirring baby to my chest for a night feed (Fig. 1.1). Hoping not to wake my three-year-old son lest he too want some late-night comforting. My days are filled with making porridge and peanut butter sandwiches, nappy changing, baking refined sugar free snacks, and trips to the park. My evening activities are interspersed with catching up on emails, reading articles, note taking, drafting chapters, academic job searches, quiet freak-outs, and countless breastfeeds. Days and nights are an emotional overflow of writing and breastfeeding. I feel a creative charge:

Fig. 1.1

(Dis)Affection #1

A longing for text! Confusion! What’s come over her? A child! Paper! Intoxications! I’m brimming over! My breasts are overflowing! Milk. Ink. Nursing time. And me? I’m hungry, too. The milky taste of ink! ( Cixous, 1991, p. 31)

Such bursts of inspiration and the seductive efficiencies that facilitate this writing can be experienced as empowering and intellectually productive, as much as they can be harmful to our embodied and emotional selves. This is ‘where work “intrudes” on life’ (Bartlett, 2006, p. 21). Melissa Gregg describes this state of being as a ‘presence bleed’ that ‘familiar experience whereby the location and time of work become secondary considerations [when] faced with a “to do list” that seems forever out of control’ (2011, p. 2). The impacts of neoliberalism are keenly felt, with women academics particularly vulnerable to institutions’ emphasis on performance measures, research outputs, impact factors, and funding targets (Thwaites & Pressland, 2017; Taylor & Lahad, 2018).

Here, my babies and my mothering body become a powerful and insistent disrupter of academia. This work is very personal, ‘enacted in the gaps of everyday life’ (Barnacle & Mewburn, 2010, p. 437), as well as being important professionally. ‘Texts are written by bodies; often about bodies; they inscribe experiences themselves on our skin and through our flesh’ (Pullen & Rhodes, 2015, p. 92). I wrestled for some time, as to whether I should also disclose the private and ‘ordinary’ moments of my life in this book. I decided upon including my personal experiences, because in many ways, my own scholarly journey runs parallel with the topic of my research project: academic women’s experiences, performativities, and identities in the contemporary Australian university in neoliberal times.

In recent years, the intensification of academic work, the fracturing and restructuring of teaching, research, and academic service, and the increase in various measurements of productivity, efficiency, quality, and accountability have placed new demands on academics to perform productively and reinvent the self. These material and affective changes in Australian higher education—as is evident globally—are the effects of contemporary neoliberalisation ( Ball, 2015; Lorenz, 2012). Neoliberalism is a mode of governance as well as a political and economic rationality. It promotes above all else, economic liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation and upholds as its central mandate the primacy of a free market (Brown, 2003; Clarke, 2008; Skeggs, 2014). The corporatisation of higher education has been labelled as ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997) with new managerialism being the bureaucratic administration of neoliberalism in the university.

The research findings presented in this book capture a particularly vulnerable moment in academia as higher education faces new pressures (Taylor & Lahad, 2018). Values of the university have very much become linked to private interest, capitalising academic work, and turning knowledge into a commodity in the economic market. In a bid to become more competitive in the international knowledge economy, universities are moving away from government obligation to support tertiary education towards a privatised model of education delivery (Marginson, 2011; White, 2003). Rajani Naidoo notes:

The perception of higher education as an industry for enhancing national competitiveness and as a lucrative service that can be sold in the global marketplace has begun to eclipse the social and cultural objectives of higher education generally encompassed in the conception of higher education as a ‘public good’. (2003, p. 250)

Changes include an unprecedented increase in student enrolments and course fees, a sizeable decrease in government funding, and a heavy emphasis on the marketisation of research and institutions, products and services. These transformations are based on the neoliberalist rationality that institutional competition and consumer preferences are more efficient mechanisms for allocating resources than government interventions and regulatory frameworks (Morley, 2003, 2014; Leathwood & Read, 2009; Deem, Mok, & Lucas, 2008; Harvey & Newton, 2004; Lafferty & Fleming, 2000). Deregulation of the higher education environment in favour of corporatisation, metrification, and performance-based funding models is highly visible and has increased competition amongst universities for funding and prestige. As a result, it has increased the hierarchical stratification of institutions and encouraged new forms of social and racial exclusion (Taylor & Lahad, 2018; Tomlinson, 2003).

Neoliberalism has found fertile ground, as Rosalind Gill states, in academics ‘whose predispositions to “work hard” and “do well” meshed perfectly with its demands for autonomous self-motivating, responsibilised subjects’ (2010, p. 241). It pushes our feelings inwards, individualising our academic practices and silencing our experiences in the process. The construction of academic identities is intrinsically connected to neoliberal measures and values of production, consumption, and competition. Although the majority of academics express opposition to current developments in Australian higher education, most nevertheless remain compliant with institutional imperatives. In the neoliberal university, we are constantly managing our performance as the demands on academics’ ‘output’ intensifies. Through knowing and enacting or resisting these neoliberal discourses, individuals produce themselves. According to Gregg (2011), this is a form of affective labour in which we find ways to hold on to the feeling that we are still in control in an environment t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Inventive Methods of the Intimate Insider: Possibilities for Feminist Research
• 3. Cruel Measures: Gendered Excellence in Research
• 4. Academics Online: Reflections on Gendered Precarity and Digital (Self) Surveillance
• 5. Academic Conferences: Collegiality and Competition
• 6. Unruly Academic Women: Laughter, Affect, and Resistance
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter