Continuing attachments in academic work in neoliberal times: on the academic mode of existence

ABSTRACT

Is there (still) something specific about academic practice in contemporary neoliberal times? This article reports on a sociomaterial, ethnographic study informed by Deleuze’s untimely empiricism conducted at two research centres of a research university. We unfold the specificity of ‘the academic’ by elaborating upon two central notions: relational aspirations (the attachments of these academics, and the operations that such attachments generate) and mode of existence (the way academic practice comes into being by and through these attachments). The article discerns four types of relations that are typical for academic practice and argues that the way in which academic practice exists nowadays is characterized by a continuous distancing in action, that is, by drawing things together and by slowing things down.

KEYWORDS:

• Academics
• ethnography
• mode of existence
• university
• sociomaterial approaches
• neoliberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Of course, academics are only one group of people inhabiting contemporary universities (amongst students, management, secretaries, maintenance personnel, etc.). In that sense, this article delimits what happens at universities to what academics do in these universities. This is a reductive move, yet at the same time based on the argument that the specificity of the university is largely to be situated in work that academics perform on a daily basis (rather than that of secretaries or management, for instance) (Barnett, 2011).

2. In view of safeguarding the participants’ anonymity, concrete anecdotes and/or stories are not provided as scenes in this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders;

Notes on contributors

Mathias Decuypere

Mathias Decuypere is a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Education and Society, University of Leuven, Belgium. His primary research interests are directed at higher education (policy), open education and the specificity of academic and other educational practices. He largely draws upon sociomaterial approaches and social topology as main conceptual frameworks. He has just completed a research project in which he studied how diverse academic practices are being given shape nowadays – and with a special focus on the role of digital devices herein.

Maarten Simons

Maarten Simons is professor of educational policy and theory at the Laboratory for Education and Society of the University of Leuven (Belgium). His principal interests are in educational policy, new mechanisms of power, and new global and European regimes of governing education and lifelong learning. Moreover, in his research he focuses explicitly on the challenges posed to education with a major interest in (re)thinking the public role of schools and universities, and the particular public and pedagogical role of teachers and academics.