The marketised university and the politics of motherhood

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we offer a critique of neoliberal power from the perspective of the gendered, sexualised, raced and classed politics of motherhood in English universities. By using dialogical auto-ethnographic methods to examine our own past experiences as full-time employed mother–academics, we demonstrate how feminist academic praxis can not only help make the gendered workings of neoliberal power more visible, but also enable us to nurture and sustain alternative ways of being and working in, against and outside the university. Far from desiring greater inclusion into a system which enshrines repressive logics of productivity and reproduces gendered subjectivities, inequalities, silences and exclusions, we aim to refuse and transgress it by bringing feminist critiques of knowledge, labour and neoliberalism to bear on how we understand our own experiences of motherhood in the academic world.

KEYWORDS:

• Motherhood and academia
• feminist methodologies and theories
• neoliberal subjectification
• time–space logics of neoliberalism
• resistance
• refusal and transgression

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for comments on earlier drafts of this paper made by two anonymous reviewers, Claire Polster, Paul Hodge, Lara Daley, Andrew Robinson, Jon Mansell and Siân Adiseshiah, and for opportunities to present drafts at ‘Feminism in Academia: An Age of Austerity?’ hosted by the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association and the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association at the University of Nottingham (September 2012) and a seminar at the University of Nottingham Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (October 2012).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Amsler is a mother, sociologist, critical theorist and Reader in Education at the University of Lincoln, UK. She is author of The Education of Radical Democracy (Routledge 2015) and writes on the political economy of education, the politics of knowledge, forms of radical democracy, and pedagogies of possibility.

Sara C. Motta is a mother, critical theorist and popular educator currently working as senior lecturer in Politics at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has published widely in relation to new forms of popular politics in Latin America, UK and Australia, with a focus on decolonising subjectivities, prefigurative epistemologies and emancipatory pedagogies. Her most recent books (with Mike Cole) are Education and Social Change in the Americas and 21st Century Socialism: The Role of Radical Education (both Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 and 2014).

ORCID

Sarah Amsler http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0752-8804

Notes

1. A similar discussion has emerged in Australia from a team of mother–academic geographers who asked ‘how many papers is a baby ‘worth?’ to explore the gendered implications of disciplinary norms under the neoliberal regime of calculative excellence (Klocker and Drozdzewski 2014).

2. In 2011, the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) undertook a consultation to determine how caring relationships should be accounted for in judgements about the quality of academic work in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). HEFCE had been criticised for penalising women during the 2001 research exercise by offering no allowances for maternity leave at all, and in 2008 for defining it as an ‘extenuating circumstance’ (Donald 2011; UCU 2006). In 2011, HEFCE recommended that women who took 14 months of maternity leave during the six-year study period should be permitted to submit one less piece of work. Criticism from across the sector eventually led to the removal of this time limitation.

3. This was described by one critic as ‘vastly fairer’ as it took ‘appropriate consideration of maternity leave without adding complexity’ (Jump 2011).

4. Our critique intersects with discussion in feminist epistemology about the nature of feminist critique, in particular ‘its ways of inheriting or rejecting disciplinary norms, and how that then locates it as a project in relation to academic disciplinarity’, including through misrecognition as a ‘non-academic’ activity (Jenkins 2014; Pereira 2012).