Not Getting Over It: The Impact of Sara Ahmed’s Work within Critical University Studies

ABSTRACT

This forum-style paper presents contributions by scholars from the area of Critical University Studies (CUS). It articulates the ways that particular concepts from Sara Ahmed’s scholarship have influenced or been useful in CUS. Across her scholarship, Ahmed offers intersectional perspectives on exclusionary practices and structures that many within CUS have drawn upon. The contributors to this paper hail from and research across a diverse range of fields that include cultural studies, queer studies, education, critical race studies, and organisational studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical university studies
• conferences
• racialisation
• shame
• intersectionality
• gender studies
• queer studies
• academia
• critical race studies

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tseen Khoo

Dr Tseen Khoo is a Senior Lecturer in the Research Education and Development team, La Trobe University, Australia. Tseen has published on research funding issues, early career researcher experiences, alternative academic streams, and racial diversity issues in Australia. She co-created and co-manages the Research Whisperer blogging project (researchwhisperer.org).

James Burford

Dr James Burford lectures in research education and development at La Trobe University, Australia. His current research interests include the geopolitics of academic mobility, the spatialities of graduate education, and the use of queer concepts in higher education research. With Emily Henderson, James co-edits the academic blog Conference Inference (conferenceinference.wordpress.com).

Emily Henderson

Dr Emily F. Henderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education Studies, University of Warwick, UK. Emily’s research lies in the areas of gender and higher education, particularly the production of knowledge about gender; the academic profession, academic mobility and conferences; poststructuralist and feminist theory and research methodology.

Helena Liu

Dr Helena Liu is a senior lecturer at UTS Business School, Sydney, Australia. Her research critiques the gendered, racialised and classed nature of our enduring romance with leadership. Her research has been published in journals including Human Relations, Organization, and Journal of Business Ethics, and as a book, Redeeming Leadership: An Anti-Racist Feminist Intervention (Bristol UP, 2020).

Z Nicolazzo

Dr Z Nicolazzo is an associate professor of Trans* Studies in Education and a member of the Transgender Studies Research Cluster at the University of Arizona, US.