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1 – 10 of over 1000
Article
Publication date: 5 August 2020

Claire Jin Deschner, Léa Dorion and Lidia Salvatori

This paper is a reflective piece on a PhD workshop on “feminist organising” organised in November 2017 by the three authors of this paper. Calls to resist the neoliberalisation of…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper is a reflective piece on a PhD workshop on “feminist organising” organised in November 2017 by the three authors of this paper. Calls to resist the neoliberalisation of academia through academic activism are gaining momentum. The authors’ take on academic activism builds on feminist thought and practice, a tradition that remains overlooked in contributions on resisting neoliberalisation in academia. Feminism has been long committed to highlighting the epistemic inequalities endured by women and marginalised people in academia. This study aims to draw on radical feminist perspectives and on the notion of prefigurative organising to rethink the topic of academic activism. How can feminist academic activism resist the neoliberal academia?

Design/methodology/approach

This study explores this question through a multi-vocal autoethnographic account of the event-organising process.

Findings

The production of feminist space within academia was shaped through material and epistemic tensions. The study critically reflects on the extent to which the event can be read as prefigurative feminist self-organising and as neoliberal academic career-focused self-organising. The study concludes that by creating a space for sisterhood and learning, the empowering potential of feminist organising is experienced.

Originality/value

The study shows both the difficulties and potentials for feminist organising within the university. The concept of “prefiguration” provides a theoretical framework enabling us to grasp the ongoing efforts on which feminist organising relies. It escapes a dichotomy between success and failure that fosters radical pessimism or optimism potentially hindering political action.

Content available
Article
Publication date: 27 June 2022

Isabella Krysa and Marke Kivijärvi

This research attempts to make sense of the experiences of two academic women who become mothers.

Abstract

Purpose

This research attempts to make sense of the experiences of two academic women who become mothers.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is an autoethnography. Applying the autoethnographic method allows us to discuss cultural phenomena through personal reflections and experiences. Our autoethnographic reflections illustrate our struggles and attempts of resistance within discursive spaces where motherhood and our identity as academics intersect.

Findings

Our personal experiences combined with theoretical elaborations illuminate how the role of the mother continues to be dominated by such gendered discursive practices that conflict with the work role. Once women become mothers, they are othered through societal and organizational practices because they constitute a visible deviation from the masculine norm in the organizational setting, academia included.

Originality/value

This paper explores how contemporary motherhood discourse(s)within academia and the wider society present competing truth claims, embedded in neoliberal and postfeminist cultural sensibility. Our autoethnographic reflections show our struggles and attempts of resistance within such discursive spaces.

Details

Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, vol. 17 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1746-5648

Keywords

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 1 December 2022

Abstract

Details

Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-959-1

Article
Publication date: 4 March 2022

Sefika Mertkan, Gulen Onurkan Aliusta and Hatice Bayrakli

Implementation of research evaluation policies based on neoliberal orientations of performativity has transformed higher education institutions globally, reshaping academic work…

Abstract

Purpose

Implementation of research evaluation policies based on neoliberal orientations of performativity has transformed higher education institutions globally, reshaping academic work and the academic profession. Most lately, the mantra of “publish or no degree” has become the norm in many contexts. There has been little empirical research into the unintended consequences of this neoliberal academic performativity for inexperienced researchers. This article focuses on the role institutional research evaluation policies play on doctoral students and early-career doctoral graduates’ publication practices and on their decision to sometimes publish in journals with ethically “questionable” publishing standards in particular through the concept of figured worlds.

Design/methodology/approach

The study was conducted in a higher education setting employing a variety of research incentive schemes to boost research productivity where “publish or no degree” policy is the norm. It employs qualitative approach and involves in-depth interviews with nine doctoral students and seven early career academics who have been working part-time or full-time for five years following PhD completion.

Findings

Findings demonstrate publishing in journals with ethically “questionable” publishing standards is not always simply the result of naivety or inexperience. Some authors choose these journals in order to retain a sense of self-efficacy in the face of rejection by more highly ranked journals. Under institutional pressure to publish, they are socialized into this “shadow academia” through (existing) academic networks, conferences and journal special issues.

Originality/value

It is often assumed that scholars are trapped into “questionable” journals through the use of unsolicited emails. This paper challenges this assumption by demonstrating the crucial role research evaluation policies based on neoliberal orientations of performativity and contextual dynamics play on the publication practices of doctoral students and early-career doctoral graduates on their decision to submit to journals with “questionable” publication practices. It introduces the concept of unethical publication brokering, an informal network of ties promising fast and easy publication in outlets that “count”.

Details

Journal of Organizational Change Management, vol. 35 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0953-4814

Keywords

Open Access
Book part
Publication date: 1 December 2022

Agnès Vandevelde-Rougale and Patricia Guerrero Morales

This chapter looks at the discursive dimension of the working environment in research and higher education organizations; more specifically at neoliberal managerial discourse and…

Abstract

This chapter looks at the discursive dimension of the working environment in research and higher education organizations; more specifically at neoliberal managerial discourse and at how it participates in shaping the way researchers, teachers and support staff perceive themselves and their experiences. It is based on a multiple case study and combines an intersectional and a socio-clinical approach. The empirical data is constituted by in-depth interviews with women conducted in Ireland and Chile, and includes some observations made in France. A thematic analysis of individual narratives of self-ascribed experiences of being bullied enables to look behind the veil drawn by managerial discourse, thus providing insights into power vectors and power domains contributing to workplace violence. It also shows that workplace bullying may reinforce identification to undervalued social categories. This contribution argues that neoliberal managerial discourse, by encouraging social representations of “neutral” individuals at work, or else celebrating their “diversity,” conceals power relations rooting on different social categories. This process influences one’s perception of one’s experience and its verbalization. At the same time, feeling assigned to one or more of undervalued social category can raise the perception of being bullied or discriminated against. While research has shown that only a minority of incidents of bullying and discrimination are reported within organizations, this contribution suggests that acknowledging the multiplicity and superposition of categories and their influence in shaping power relations could help secure a more collective and caring approach, and thus foster a safer work culture and atmosphere in research organizations.

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 21 September 2023

Nina Winham, Kristin S. Williams, Liela A. Jamjoom, Kerry Watson, Heidi Weigand and Nicholous M. Deal

The purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper contributes to the feminist tradition of writing differently through the process of care that emerges from shared stories.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a process called heartful-communal storytelling, the authors evoke personal and embodied stories and transgressive narratives. The authors present a composite process drawing on heartful-autoethnography, dialogic writing and communal storytelling.

Findings

The paper makes two key contributions: (1) the paper illustrates a novel feminist process in action and (2) the paper contributes six discrete stories of lived experience at the intersection of parenthood and Ph.D. studies. The paper also contributes to the development of the feminist tradition of writing differently. Three themes emerged through the storytelling experience, and these include (1) creating boundaries and transgressing boundaries, (2) giving and receiving care and (3) neoliberal conformity and resistance. These themes, like the stories, also became entangled.

Originality/value

The paper demonstrates how heartful-communal storytelling can lead to individual and collective meaning making. While the Ph.D. is a solitary path, the authors' heartful-communal storytelling experience teaches that holding it separate from other relationships can impoverish what is learnt and constrain the production of good knowledge; the epistemic properties of care became self-evident.

Details

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2040-7149

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 30 May 2019

Njoki Nathani Wane, Zuhra E. Abawi and Zachary Njagi Ndwiga

The chapter addresses the questions surrounding the politics of the academe as a reflective process. The three authors’ experiences are very different – spanning from tenured…

Abstract

The chapter addresses the questions surrounding the politics of the academe as a reflective process. The three authors’ experiences are very different – spanning from tenured professor to sessional instructor to professor in an African university. The narratives from the authors inform the readers of their goals to join the academy as faculty; their job search; being members of the staff and then; their experiences as members of the teaching force at various universities. The chapter is based on their experiences of navigating the politics of the academe. This chapter provides their narratives of what it means to be a professor, mentor, colleague, and researcher. Each story is told from their particular standpoint: two females and one male teaching in North American universities and Africa, respectively, two Black and one racialized female who can pass, but cannot because of her name. The analysis will address numerous complications involved in addressing expectations, establishing common grounds as educators from an international perspective, and providing narratives of how we have managed to maintain our goals and aspirations as members of the academe. The tensions involved will be problematized and explored from within the context of the academy and the associated constraints therein (Tatum, 1999). The objective of this chapter is to theorize the significance of navigating the politics of the academe to deflate arising tensions that may delay your passion for teaching. The chapter is informed by an anticolonial theoretical framework in light of converges and divergences of varying colonial contexts embedded in colonial Canadian society. The anticolonial framework draws on the specific settler-colonial Canadian context (Tuck & Yang, 2012). The chapter is divided into six parts: (1) introduction that provides a general overview of what it means to be faculty at a university, (2) situating ourselves, (3) theoretical framework, (4) Universities in general and more specifically, Canadian system and Kenyan, (5) discussion that provides an analysis or synthesis of our experiences, and (6) conclusion.

Details

Diversity and Triumphs of Navigating the Terrain of Academe
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78973-608-3

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 9 August 2023

Ilaria Aversa

Activist criminology advocates for social change by acting beyond the role of the academic, mainly through first-hand involvement in the field (Goyes, 2016). In this chapter, the…

Abstract

Activist criminology advocates for social change by acting beyond the role of the academic, mainly through first-hand involvement in the field (Goyes, 2016). In this chapter, the author offers a longitudinal reflection on the researcher’s positionality, epistemology and methodology from the personal experience since their first research project, in 2019. During this project, the author started having cooperation with the Liberi Nantes migrants’ sports centre, now a community centre in Rome’s working-class suburb. This sparked her first reflections on activist criminology and how to embed it in her research approach and practice. The initial cooperation evolved in the ongoing and evolving collective ‘conversational integration’ project, which aims at overcoming the notion of integration as one-sided assimilation, working on addressing the diverse needs of the local community through a bottom-up governance initiative. This chapter is to be intended as a checkpoint in their growth within activist criminology and it hopefully serves to spark questions, suggestions and a push to form a solid network of activist academics that can help in fostering social change outside of the neoliberal agendas of academia.

Details

The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80262-199-0

Keywords

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 9 August 2023

Abstract

Details

The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80262-199-0

Article
Publication date: 29 December 2021

Danling Li

This paper aims to examine how Hong Kong universities have responded to a newly included assessment element of socio-economic impact in a government-implemented research…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine how Hong Kong universities have responded to a newly included assessment element of socio-economic impact in a government-implemented research evaluation system – Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2020 – within the context of tightening audits and forceful knowledge economy objectives.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper reports an institutional case study of the institutional-level response to the RAE 2020 impact requirement at a top-ranked comprehensive university in Hong Kong. A qualitative inquiry approach was adopted. The data sources mainly include university documents related to the RAE 2020 socio-economic impact policy, interview data with nine RAE-eligible academics at the case university, documents on the RAE exercises issued by the University Grants Committee (UGC) and field notes taken during the RAE information sessions.

Findings

The institutionalisation process of the RAE socio-economic impact agenda could be considered as establishing an indicator-oriented reward and recognition regime for knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange (KT/KE). Overall, two major institutional strategies were identified in operating the RAE 2020 impact agenda at the case university: (1) launching various policy initiatives: driven by the RAE-defined socio-economic impact; (2) incorporating socio-economic impact into faculty evaluation: premised upon the 16 KT performance indicators laid down by the UGC.

Originality/value

This article adds to the theoretical debate on the local reproduction of the global in studies of neoliberalism in higher education by describing a Hong Kong case study, supported by empirical data, of an actual university's responses to the newly included impact requirement in RAE 2020. More specifically, this study reveals that (1) the policy for socio-economic impact might be designed in a neutral or even benevolent manner, but has taken on a neoliberal and managerial dimension in its actual implementation; and (2) the neoliberal discourse underpinning the university's operation can be accounted for and explicated by the local factors embedded in the specific academic environment.

Details

Asian Education and Development Studies, vol. 11 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2046-3162

Keywords

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