Introduction
Working in universities in the early twenty-first century is a challenging endeavour. It is hard not to feel overwhelmed as managerialism crushes the lifeblood of inspiration out of academe. It is difficult not to retreat into depression when vivid testimonies abound of the toxicity,1 barbarism2 and horrific psychological cost3 wrought by this shift to bureaucratic/corporate ideas of the university. While our first volume, Resisting neoliberalism in higher education: seeing through the cracks4 sought to expose what life is like within universities, this volume seeks to trace how we might prise open the cracks in neoliberal logic and find ways to ādwell in the ruinsā.5 It is about the creative responses academics are currently using to subvert the powerful forces of neoliberalism that have a strangle-hold on the governance of universities.
In this volume, we seek to extend the metaphor of āseeing through the cracksā of neoliberal managerialism, responding to a call from the Critical University Studies field to foreground how academics are negotiating persistent and new dimensions of the managerial ethos. To expose the cracks in neoliberal logics, we must first briefly recount some of the recent examples of managerial ruthlessness that exemplify a range of tools of leverage currently wielded in many universities; tools that discipline, differentiate and punish.
This is not easy to write about. Yet somehow, we must expose the cracks within the neoliberal university that are being prised open in the process of re/creating the conditions of hope.
In this chapter, we outline how radical hope exceeds optimism because it still regards change as possible despite all evidence to the contrary.6 Barcan7 also writes hope into her picture of academic labour in ways that we will draw upon in detail in this chapter. Importantly, this form of hope is radical because it is combined with anger and rage about the ending of all we hold dear.
This chapter provides a brief sketching in of the conditions of possibility that still exist in neoliberal universities for collegiality, creativity and activism and new counter-ontologies of critical resistance and hope. The varied ways of seeing and exploiting the cracks of managerial contradiction and contingency contained in this volume show how it is still possible to resist neoliberalism. These chapters highlight the importance of relational and collective processes, drawing attention to feminist, intersectional and decolonising criticalities that are necessary to mobilise in our struggle: through unions, against rankism and for solidarities that do not paper over the cracks.
Backstory
This book and Volume I grew out of several local and national research events. As the initial work was conducted in Melbourne, Australia, we respectfully acknowledge the Ancestors, Elders and families of the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung of the Kulin who are traditional custodians of these lands and have been for many centuries. We pay respect to the deep knowledge embedded within the Aboriginal community and unique role of the Kulin Nationās living culture in the life of this region. We recognise that contemporary universities are shaped by Eurocentric hegemony through the dispossession of First Nations peoples that entailed a ālogic of eliminationā in settler-colonialism with genocidal intent in Australia, coercive xenophobia elsewhere in the Southern periphery and invasion as a fundamental social structure in all settler-colonial sites.8 In the discussion of the damage neoliberalism has wrought in higher education, we are conscious that our right to fair conditions and to teach, research and engage with communities are rooted in broader social deficits of justice formed in settler sovereignty, rights of governance and the privileges of Whiteness and academic position. We aim to shed light on the politics of privilege, hierarchy and exclusion that continue to be present within universities.9 Tuck and Yang10 argue that the āinvasion imperativeā persists in varied guises in academic work, especially in knowledge production where the āfavored reaping grounds are Native, urban, poor, and Othered communitiesā. Our search for ways to āprise open the cracksā and expand generative spaces of academic resistance needs to embrace decolonising aims.
The two volumes were inspired by work within the education Discipline Group, Curriculum and Pedagogy as Complex Conversations (CPCC) at Victoria University, Melbourne, our work with eminent critical theorist and Visiting Professor Antonia Darder, Leavey Endowed Chair of Ethics & Moral Leadership, Loyola Marymount University and Professor Emerita University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and national discussions in the Professional and Higher Education Special Interest Group (SIG) of Australian Association for Researchers in Education (AARE). Discussions during our one-day symposium for academics, academic teaching scholars and PhD students were inspired by Antoniaās keynote on The Legacy of Paulo Freire: The Continuing Struggle for Liberation. This work was further progressed in thought-provoking, creative work led by Antonia at a three-day retreat. These activities were designed to unearth issues of identity, culture, decolonising practice, critical pedagogy and liberation, while we continued to think and write about what it meant to be involved in critical resistance to dominant neoliberal discourses in the academy.
At the 2015 AARE Conference, a panel of speakers offered their insights and provocations about the troubled space of educational research. This followed from the 2014 conference where was a strong feeling of grief and survivalism in reaction to a climate of funding cuts, organisational restructuring and diminished time for research. The panel symposium discussed ways of moving beyond grief and mourning to investigate whether there were any cracks in neoliberalism that could be exploited. These research events then led to the idea of an edited collection and we invited contributions from the SIG and international networks including those connected with the Academic Identities Conference series. There was such a response from colleagues that the planned single volume became two volumes at the publisherās suggestion.
In the original proposal, we used the metaphor of āseeing through the cracksā (now the subtitle of Volume I) to capture the ideas emerging from local and national research events. The metaphor speaks to the sense of neoliberal capture of higher education and academicsā imprisonment in the neoliberal logics of competitive entrepreneurialism and the idea that we were all in some way engaged in ārattling the cagesā of the academy, as one of our Discipline Group colleagues put it. The metaphor speaks to the diminishing space for critical pedagogy and declining time ...