Affective Capitalism In Academia

Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. Moving through 11 international and comparative case studies, it explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed. Affect has emerged as a major analytical lens of social research. However, it is rarely applied to universities and their marketisation. Offering a unique exploration of the contemporary role of affect in academic labour and the organisation of scholarship, this book considers modes of subjectivation, professional and personal relationships and organisational structures and their affective charges. Chapter 9 is available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism and 11 international case studies, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed.

This book examines how teaching and learning and teacher and student identities are being reframed in higher education by neoliberal policies and practices. It shares how teachers perform teaching and learning duties in relation to prescribed institutional policies and how teachers insert dissonant pedagogies as a critical practice. The book explores narrative pedagogy as a disruptive presence and a space for critique. It interrogates personal/professional experience of educational systems that present educators juggling complexity and meeting competing demands to make learning meaningful for students. Each contribution will act as a counterpoint and provide a synoptic method for comparison. The book re-constructs meaning from the generic narrative of the public face of education, which homogenizes and diminishes collective understandings of teachers and teaching. This book provides a contemporary account of the social realities experienced within the higher education classroom across the globe.

This interdisciplinary and international book subjects key areas of inclusion in the global knowledge economy to critical scrutiny from queer perspectivism. Drawing on empirical data from diverse international contexts including Chile, Finland, Japan, Malaysia, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa, and the UK, this book examines sites of affective antagonisms, fragility, and friction, and explores whether queer theory can provide alternative readings of contemporary pathways, pedagogical and research cultures, political economies, and policy priorities with higher education. Main themes covered include: The Global Knowledge Economy and Epistemic Injustice Decolonisation Internationalisation Feminist Leadership Affirmative Action Queering the Political Economy of Neoliberalism Digitalisation of academic work Both comparative and illustrative, this key text provides a comparative analysis that recognises epistemic diversity, multiplicity of experiences, and, importantly, the effect of comparative reason in constructing stratified universities’ world fields and excluded and marginal academic experiences. It also takes into account the colonial historical entanglements in the ongoing formation and disavowal of the university and academic labour. Queering Higher Education: Troubling Norms in the Global Knowledge Economy is ideal reading for all those interested in queer theory and how it relates to higher education.

This far-reaching Research Agenda highlights the main features of entrepreneurial university research over the two decades since the concept was first introduced, and examines how technological, environmental and social changes will affect future research questions and themes. It revisits existing research that tends to adopt either an idealised or a sceptical view of the entrepreneurial university, arguing for further investigation and the development of bridges between these two strands.

There is a pervasive sense of incessant acceleration in the academic world. This book puts the temporal ordering of academic life under the microscope, and showcases the means of yielding a better understanding of how time and temporality act both as instruments of power and vulnerability within the academic space.

This book outlines the creative responses academics are using to subvert powerful market forces that restrict university work to a neoliberal, economic focus. The second volume in a diptych of critical academic work on the changing landscape of neoliberal universities, the editors and contributors examine how academics ‘prise open the cracks’ in neoliberal logic to find space for resistance, collegiality, democracy and hope. Adopting a distinctly postcolonial positioning, the volume interrogates the link between neoliberalism and the ongoing privileging of Euro-American theorising in universities. The contributors move from accounts of unmitigated managerialism and toxic workplaces, to the need to decolonise the academy to, finally, illustrating the various creative and counter-hegemonic practices academics use to resist, subvert and reinscribe dominant neoliberal discourses. This hopeful volume will appeal to students and scholars interested in the role of universities in advancing cultural democracy, as well as university staff, academics and students.