Discomforts in the academy: from ‘academic burnout’ to collective mobilisation

Abstract

As part of a set of interventions on discomfort feminism, this article addresses how the politics of discomfort informs boundary work in the neoliberalized academic workplace in Switzerland. Departing from the authors’ engagements in a series of workshops on new forms of stress and pressure in academia and the effects of the deteriorating conditions of labor at their department, this article explores multiple and unevenly distributed emotions of discomfort generated by and through the workshops. We discuss discomfort as an affective orienting device that betrays the normative social space and the crossing of the personal-professional boundary in the academic workplace. This article explores the potentials and pitfalls of ‘staying with’ discomfort, rather than attempting to return within a comfort zone. We argue such affective politics can inform change in the neoliberalized workplace by reworking normative boundaries and helping mobilize different academic collectivities, ones based on care and shared vulnerability.

Keywords:

• Academia
• affect
• discomfort
• mental health
• neoliberal workplace
• psychological distress

Academia is a place of unease and distress for many scholars, researchers, teachers and students that traverse its spaces. According to the Times Higher Education, ‘academics face higher mental health risk than other professions’ (Else 2017). Extreme exhaustion, loss of self-confidence, impaired mental and physical health comprise the symptoms now commonly referred to as ‘academic burnout’. In order to tackle the problems of stress, anxiety and other symptoms of dis-ease, universities are now beginning to offer solutions such as increased counselling services, workshops on meditation, stress-relief and time-management techniques. ‘Academic burnout’ becomes a personal problem, or more accurately a personal failure, that needs to be adequately managed to improve the personal and psychological ‘resilience’ to academic stress.

With this paper we seek to contest this individualization of health problems in academia and re-politicize the question of our mental health. We see the ‘academic burnout’ as a deeply political problem structurally embedded in the social and economic conditions of the academic workplace, rather than being an individual pathology. Against, what Fisher (2009) calls, the ‘privatization of stress’, it is necessary to reframe this individualization of health problems, by tackling the sources of impaired mental health in academia. Many scholars are starting to shed light on the structural issues of increasingly neoliberalized universities that underpin the questions of mental health (Berg, Huijbens, and Larsen 2016; Mountz 2016; Peake and Mullings 2016; Taylor and Lahad 2018). The new and old sources of pressure include, among others, lower staff to student ratio, the structural effects of standardizing measures for academic assessments, budgetary cutbacks, and increasing and unevenly distributed administrative workloads. In view of the changing university, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and other critical scholars are calling for collective action against the ills of academia, ranging from quitting (Coin 2017), embracing failure (Kern 2020), decolonizing time (Shahjahan 2015), practicing politics of care and collaboration (Kuschinski, Hilbrandt, and Fraeser 2018), exercising self-care (Ahmed 2014) and slow scholarship (Schwiter and Vorbrugg 2021).

Furthering these efforts, we focus on the transformative role that a feminist approach to discomfort may play in addressing challenges in the current academic workplace, beyond an individualization of problems and solutions. To that end, the article departs from the authors’ engagements in a series of workshops on new forms of stress and pressure in academia and the effects of the deteriorating conditions of labor at their department. Here, we engage with the discomfort generated while discussing sources and effects of pressure, stress and inequality in the academic workplace and outline three different aspects of the workshops that help us articulate the politics of discomfort. It is important to note that discomfort was not the main conceptual tool in crafting the workshops, but we rather reflect on the role it played in putting in the proposal for the workshops, and on its pedagogical potential in hindsight. In the introduction to this special issue its conveners point out the tensions that prompted this topic: a tension between the comfort created through an emphasis on care, and the distance that this comfort creates to less comfortable others, what they call ‘comfort feminism’. As an antidote, they offer the project of discomfort feminism. The transformative potential of the project of discomfort feminism ‘lies in its ability to throw into sharp relief these differences, and how difference comes to matter in the unequal and unjust distribution of comfort across spaces and bodies’; it asks: ‘what political work can discomfort do’ (Eves et al. this issue). In this piece, we focus on how discomfort is involved in the process of drawing boundaries between the personal and the professional in the academic workplace. We discuss discomfort that emerges in the liminal space between certain established norms. In this case, the feelings of discomfort betray the normative social space and the crossing of the personal-professional boundary in the academic workplace. We further highlight the transformative potential of ‘staying with’ discomfort as a process of inhabiting this liminal space, and on the challenges and pitfalls of the politics of discomfort in building collectivities.

Following the tradition of feminist writing on trouble as an emancipatory endeavor (Ahmed 2015; Butler 1990; Haraway 2016), we consider discomfort as an affective orienting device that designates the boundaries of normative social space (Laketa 2018), in ways that can help address the politics of mental health as dis-ease in the neoliberalising academy. Our piece follows up on, and hopes to contribute to, a recent ongoing discussion about an ethics of care in the academy (see Hawkins 2019; Mountz et al. 2015; Parizeau et al. 2016; Puawai Collective 2019; Taylor 2019; Skop et al. 2021). Our overall point is that it is tempting to remove, shake off, or contain discomfort related to institutionalized pressures in the academy, but we argue that embracing it, can have constructive potential. We develop this point by considering how discomfort is involved in (re)constructing the shifting personal/professional boundary in understanding, and dealing with, mental health at the academic workplace. We also address some of the challenges and ambivalences of discomfort as an affective politics of forging new collectives in spaces of academic work. Below, we draw on our joint experience and present three snapshots on uncomfortable moments at work, to help us articulate what it is about discomfort that can contribute to collective mobilization.

Academic workplace in Switzerland: is it really that bad?

Our point of departure is the authors’ experience of being part of a departmental experiment, at a Swiss institution for higher education, where we have both worked. The experiment involved a series of workshops, intended to make space to reflect on, and discuss, the deteriorating conditions of labor in the academy, and the effects of these changes on our own embodied selves. We elaborate on the details of this experiment in a later section, and here we would first like to situate it within the context of Swiss academy, generally considered relatively privileged compared to other national contexts. Indeed, one question that often came up as a response to our proposal for the workshops, and during the workshops themselves, was: Is it really that bad here? The question was posed predominantly by people in senior positions in the department. The implied answer is that Switzerland is quite a comfortable place to be an academic worker, sheltered from the pressures of yearly reviews in other countries and with quite decent wages across academic positions. The implied response is also that it is much worse elsewhere and that we, as academic workers in Switzerland, should be grateful for what we have. This section addresses the myth of the comfortable Switzerland by reviewing some of the ways the academic workplace is structured here.

Currently around staggering 80% of academic workers (research and teaching staff) in Switzerland is employed on short-term contracts (SAGW 2018). The majority of these workers are doctoral students and postdoctoral teaching and research staff. They pertain to the mid-level staff, so called corps intérmediaire or Mittelbau. Given that this academic system is predominantly based on the system of chairs, the professorial staff occupies less than 10% of academic workers in Switzerland (Federal Statistical Office 2020). The professorial staff is predominantly male, with only 24% of female professors (Federal Statistical Office 2020). While the exact numbers are not known, there is a clear lack of racial and ethnic minorities among the professorial staff. Moreover, racial and ethnic minorities are severely underrepresented among the mid-level staff as well. This culture of (white) masculinity affected both authors as female, white and passing as white, members of the mid-level staff.

These disparities show that Switzerland might be a comfortable place to be an academic worker for the select few who reap the benefits of stable employment, wage and social benefits offered by the government. For the majority of workers, the working environment is fraught with tension, increased competition for jobs and grants, and uncertain prospects for future (SAGW 2018). It is for these, and many other reasons, that a group of mid-level workers recently organized a petition to the Swiss Federal Assembly to improve these working conditions – see info.petition-academia.ch. The group has compiled extensive argumentation and resources to support their claims towards the Federal Assembly, marking an important step towards these voices to be heard. It is worth noting that the organizers of this petition have decided to stay anonymous, since as they say, ‘we have good reasons to fear that we will not be able to get a job in academia anymore once we are known by name’ (info.petition-academia.ch). Their fear testifies to the hierarchical, closed, and non-democratic structure of academia in Switzerland, a country that prides itself on its direct democracy. In sum, the academic workplace in Switzerland is shaped by multiple exclusions, silences and precarious working conditions that are quite unevenly distributed. The workshops presented below need to be understood as both a response to, and a part of, those institutional silencings.

Challenging the comforting distance

After one and two years of working at a Swiss academic institution as postdoctoral researcher and junior lecturer respectively, the authors started discussing, together and with other colleagues, certain troubling departmental patterns: several women, most of them doctoral students, were going on stress-related sick leave. To help us make sense of the situation, a small group of ten mid-level female academics initiated an exchange through a recently created departmental email list aiming to share resources and support for junior female academics, and we decided to read together Alison Mountz (2016) article ‘Women on the Edge’, which deals with female workplace stress in academia. Through our discussion, we agreed to take our conversation further, to claim a legitimate space in its own right for such discussions, specifically at our institution. To achieve this, we decided to apply for, and were eventually granted, a small department-wide seed fund, aiming to generate cross-disciplinary work at our geography department.

The proposal, entitled ‘Science down to earth: Diverse and caring academic work environments’, offered to organize a series of six lunchtime workshops once a month, around key themes of concerns gleaned from the literature and our own experiences. The themes of the workshops were specifically: ‘gender stereotypes and career development’, ‘slow science’, ‘when metrics matter’, ‘workplace stress and academia’, ‘supervision and leadership’, ‘landscapes of tranquility and inspiration’. These were open to all at the department, and they ended being reasonably well-attended with around 15–25 participants each time. The workshops were based on different activities and/or reading discussions mediated either by the organizers’ themselves, or by hired external facilitators with professional experience in training on particular topics, which included engaging us around gender bias in hiring procedures, and role play exercises for the theme of supervision.

Putting in this application was, however, met with some resistance and indeed discomfort. The process of applying for the grant is, therefore, the first aspect of the workshop related to the politics of discomfort that we discuss here. The small departmental grant that we applied for was initially designed to bring together different strands of geographical work across social and natural science research, in an interdisciplinary department. We interpreted the grant call a bit differently: seeing that natural and social science research are subjected to different, sometimes competing, and gendered, norms, we proposed to take the advantage of proximity between scientists dealing with these different norms in our workplace to reflect on them. While we had feared that it was our somewhat elastic reframing of ‘interdisciplinary work’ that would bring us into trouble, resistance to our proposal came from the content of the workshop proposed. ‘Why is this relevant for our department?’, ‘there are already university-wide graduate campus events and a counselling office for these kinds of issues’, were the main problems that reviewers raised about our proposal. They pointed us towards other institutional settings that might be more appropriate for the content of our proposed workshops.

These reactions, and the discussions we were proposing, generated some discomfort among the reviewers, but also between us, the applicants. Indeed, the activities we proposed straddled both our specific workplace (the department), and wider academia: we were bringing our department, the ‘here’, into discussion, thus somewhat personalizing these discussions. By proposing to host these workshops at our department, we specifically intended to avoid having abstract conversations about academia ‘out there’, at a comfortable distance. This is not to say that conversations ‘out there’ are not useful – they can help highlight similarities in the struggles of apparently distant workers. However, these can also create a sense that the issues discussed are too wide and too big to tackle. Bringing these discussions at our department level aimed to generate some reflections about the ‘here’, as opposed to the comfortably distant ‘there’.

We understand that this generated discomfort partly because we aimed to be facing our own practices and representations, but also to a greater extent because this opened the door to discussing our emotional experiences. The discomfort of troubling the established boundaries between emotions and work, itself, seems to us, as Lee (this issue) puts it, ‘associated with appraisals, judgements, certain attitudes and/or certain ways of reacting to male-centered structures’ – or rather masculinist structures in our view. These masculinist structures relegate the question of vulnerability, care, and emotional distress as something to be addressed over there, rather than here, seeking to disavow uncomfortable intimacies through spatial displacement.

The initial discomfort, including our own, to our funding application therefore reveals to us a politics of containment or bracketing the issues of vulnerability, precarity and mental health, as an attempt to control their unsettling effects. As Sara Ahmed puts it ‘if you bracket what causes trouble you put trouble out of action. When you bring up what is bracketed, trouble leaks out of its container. Trouble is put into action. And what a mess: things spill all over the place’ (2015, 182, emphasis in text). The aim of the workshops, as we see it, was precisely to put trouble into action, to render it productive rather than stifling, and to engage in the process of staying with the discomfort by bringing the ‘here’ into question. The process of putting trouble into action also helped mobilize a different academic community, as it catalyzed connections among otherwise distant scholars, across different academic fields, professional and political backgrounds, and trajectories. By staying with the discomfort, this initially loose and generally precariously positioned group of academic workers, was able to strengthen these ties in order to destabilize the individualization of work concerns at our workplace.

(Re)drawing boundaries: the personal and the professional

The second aspect of the workshops, that illustrates for us the political work that discomfort can do, addresses challenging some normative order in the academic workplace. The topics that we tackled during our workshops were situated in-between, and across, individual personal and professional experiences. We wanted to discuss ways to disentangle the professional and structural factors from personal and academic biographies as they interplay in affecting mental health of academics (not only female ones, but very often caring ones). The subject of mental health, however, remains a taboo at our and most other academic institutions, a topic relegated to confidential conversations within university corridors or campus psychological counselling offices. This is not to say that boundaries between personal and professional do not or should not exist. Rather here, we want to draw attention to the way discomfort signals us the crossing of boundaries and the processes through which these liminal spaces between established norms are constructed. We address how these lines are drawn and the consequences they have.

This boundary work is evident in how mental health issues in academia are often interpreted: ‘he/she’s having a meltdown because he/she is not made for this job’, ‘he/she’s good at something else probably, but he/she can’t put up with the pressure’, and ‘he/she should either decide not to be a professor or seek a different career path altogether’. Sound familiar? This complex boundary work between the personal and the professional gets further entangled when we consider their potential consequences. Consider the experiences of Monique (name is a pseudonym), our colleague who upon reading an earlier version of this article shared with us her story:

Personally, I went on burnout twice, both times primarily due to personal problems. It is important for me to stress to people at my department that these were personal problems. Precisely because I went through difficult times in my private environment, which can easily lead to depression and burnout, no matter what your work environment is, but where a stressful work environment surely does not help. However, my burnouts continue to be read as job-related, as a professional problem, that is that I am not made for this job and the ‘normally high’ pressure that is related to it. So precisely because it is read as job-related, I am then presented as disqualified from academia by some at my department.

Monique sought to emphasize the personal nature of her ‘burnouts’ precisely to avoid the stigmatizing effects of mental health concerns as a sign of weakness in our professional workplaces. Unfortunately, she eventually lost her job at the university, as she was deemed ‘not good enough for academia’ (Monique, personal communication). Here we see how emotional distress is viewed as a sign of failure, a personal shortcoming with spillover effects on the work environment. The conflicting expectations are caught in a vicious double-bind: emotional distress is relegated to the domain of the individual, yet at the same time it is unable to remain as a private affair. This uncomfortable liminality of being on the edge sticks to Monique as she is deemed out of place in the corporate academia. In the unequal distribution of merit that withholds contemporary academia, her experiences trouble the normative assumptions and expectations of the masculinist neoliberal university. The unequal distribution of merit corresponds with the unequal distribution of comfort and discomfort at the university with some bodies (and some voices, as Michel [2019] reminds us) feeling accepted, appropriate and fitting-in while others are excluded as intruders that disturb the normative order.

Her testimony brings into light the norms according to which mental health issues are sometimes appraised. What is more, her experiences put into question the option of staying in academia as a desired outcome and the object of ultimate value. There is an appeal and a disenchantment connected to academic work, with a dynamic of conflicting desire that often binds us into reproducing the normative ideal of the academic subject. Coin (2017) writes about the act of quitting in academia as a politics of refusal to participate in the increasingly managerial and competition-driven workplace. For Coin, the cause of quitting is clear: ‘the growing discomfort of cognitive laborers whose ethical values, material needs, and social ideals are increasingly at odds with the isolated entrepreneur of the neo-liberal university’ (2017, 707). Quitting can be seen then as a form of disobedience that aims to craft a space for different ideals and values. Similarly, we propose that ‘staying with discomfort’ allows alternatives to accepted norms to find a space for expression – it allows to put a finger on the contours of such norms, in this case the arbitrary way in which mental health issues are flung across the boundary between the personal and the professional. It also provides an opportunity to claim the liminal space and to mobilize around ways to scrutinize, if not, to unsettle the normative boundary work. The workshops helped re-politicize the question of our mental health and strengthen the collective responses and solidarities needed to address and challenge the normative order of our workplace. To that end, the workshops’ participants also formulated several concrete measures and strategies for dealing with academic stress on a collective level, that were shared with the entire department. These strategies aimed at creating a caring working environment by addressing both everyday interactions and interpersonal relations, as well as seeking changes on a more institutional level.

The politics of ‘staying with’ discomfort

The third aspect of the workshops that we seek to highlight is the unequal distribution of comfort and privilege in the process of mobilizing collectivities based on shared vulnerabilities. Indeed, engaging with discomfort is an ambivalent process that must continually be reflected upon. As Zembylas (2018, 94) notes while reflecting on pedagogies of discomfort about Whiteness in schooling, ‘there seems to be always some sort of violence done in the name of some ethical idea/principle against those who do not conform to certain ideas/principles’. In this sense discomfort cannot be taken out of context, and its progressive potential comes from a spirit of challenging uneven relations of privilege and questioning for whom discomfort is engaged and how. As the editors of this special issue note, engaging with discomfort in feminist activism can also be the product of a ‘comfort feminism’ and dynamics of othering that hide certain forms of oppression and privilege. While reflecting on this along with reviewers in writing this short piece, the authors indeed wondered if our ability to ‘challenge the comforting distance’ was not partially facilitated by such othering dynamics.

Indeed, while not all of us within the group of applicants for these workshops self-identify as White, we could trace through our personal archive that the issue of racial discrimination in our problem framing was deliberately deleted from our proposal. It was crossed-out through subsequent rounds of proposal writing among our group of applicants on the grounds, we remember, that it would be potentially ‘too sensitive’ to bring up for this application. In other words, we feared that bringing up the sensitive issue of race would lose us support from the reviewers. By removing this issue, and indeed by ‘bracketing it off’, we effectively made ourselves more comfortable when putting in the proposal.

It is impossible to say whether bringing issues of racial discrimination to the fore would have prevented us from obtaining the grant that made it possible to hold the workshops, but in effect the issue was erased from view, and it did not enter the conversations and discussion subsequently during the workshops themselves. By silencing this conversation, we have also (inadvertently) reproduced the dominant ideology of racelessness (Michel 2015) and coloniality (Purtschert, Lüthi, and Falk 2012) in Switzerland. Bringing in this nuancing anecdotal aspect helps us sharpen the idea we propose here on the potentials of staying with discomfort and pitfalls of trying to contain it. While we engaged with our discomfort to tackle emotional personal issues in our professional setting, thus challenging a certain ‘comforting distance’ the authors feel that we did brush off our discomfort related to race, and thereby missed the opportunity for a progressive discussion. But as Rachelle Chadwick’s (2021, 14) notes in analyzing the emotional politics of research, ‘staying with feelings of discomfort are strategies that aim to counter and resist the flattening and erasure of differings, specificities, embodied and affective intensities and ambivalent feelings’.

The workshops that prompted our reflection here can be seen as an attempt to ‘convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized conditions into effective antagonisms’ (Fisher 2009, 86). However, we do not, of course, claim that the workshops here redrew oppressive neoliberal masculinist norms in the academy or our department – there is a long way to go. In fact, in some ways they have redrawn hierarchies and reproduced some silencings while unsettling others. The potential lies in seeking to transform psychological dis-ease into politics of discomfort that enacts new orientations and disorientations in the academic workplace. It involves asking troubling questions about our own complicity in reproducing gendered, raced, and classed normativities. Using discomfort as a resource has thus potential for collective mobilization. It is a form of affective politics for building communities and collectives that enables different ways of being together. The transindividual character of this affective politics challenges the separatism and increasing individuation in academia and as such it provides an (affective) platform necessary for mobilizing an enduring collective transformation of the neoliberal workplace.

Concluding thoughts

It can be argued that this series of workshops was a small event, without the same effect of, say, the institutionalization of new rules and regulations, but does it make it un-productive, or useless? As far as we can see, the effects of the workshops were diffuse and difficult to measure, but inhabiting the discomfort that came out of troubling the personal-professional boundary, in the end, created tangible openings: the workshops included a number of participants that probably exceeded any other attendance rates for this seed-grant, they led to new collaborations between the organizers, including this piece, and the cementing of a peer community that continues to exchange ideas and mobilize around issues of care in the academic workplace.

The three above-mentioned snapshots on discomfort, but also the other uncomfortable intimacies that punctuated the workshops, uncovered the complex emotional work involved in addressing personal stories and experiences in a professional setting imbued with different power dynamics based on institutional hierarchies, age, gender, ethnicity and so on. The workshops highlighted emotions as everyday embodiments of comfort and discomfort in the workplace. The authors experienced discomfort as a feeling of intense affectivity, one that can be visceral and personal yet often unspeakably shared. The feeling designates, for us, the unacceptable crossing of social boundaries and as such has the potential to engulf space rendering the affective atmosphere awkward and stifling.

Seen this way, we can talk about discomfort as an affective orienting device as it informs us where those boundaries are situated, and often guides us to remain within our comfort zone. However, as the workshops opened up a space to share our feelings of unease, we were able to trace what comfort and discomfort do in academia. We gained a clearer understanding of the normative spaces being forged when seeking to avoid discomfort, and inversely, of the opening created when staying with discomfort. This emotional work thus became a site of knowledge production, and inquiry, into the neoliberalized workplace. The complex feelings performed further political work as they became a way to propel us into action, and mobilize different collectivities based on care and shared vulnerability.

So, from this snapshot, there are two points about discomfort that we want to make here: firstly, feelings of discomfort emerge in situations marked by liminality, in the ‘no-(wo)man’s land’ between certain established norms and categories. Discomfort is an affective orienting device that informs us that norms have been trespassed, for whom, and that, consequently, informs us where exactly boundaries are in social space. At our workplace, discomfort arises for example as an effect of the friction between gendered, racialized and ageist norms that structure academic debating spaces, and the experiences of injustices that traverse these norms (Hawthorne and Heitz 2018). Secondly, being uncomfortable can be politically productive. In other words, inhabiting discomfort has the potential of disrupting, and challenging, alienating norms. We tend to want to shake away the feeling, to get back into a ‘normal’ social space, but in this case ‘staying with’ the discomfort (Haraway 2016), enabled us to claim the liminal space between the personal and the professional.

We find discomfort feminism is an emancipatory project for it holds the potential to challenge habitual stigmatizing norms and practices within academia. In this case, we provide a glimpse onto how taking discomfort seriously, and ‘staying with’ it, contributed to questioning, politicizing, and eventually reworking some norms around the private – professional boundary. Against psychological resilience, discomfort feminism offers vulnerability as the grounds for creating collective, caring, and ethical spaces of academic work. As we move in and out of the discomfort, rather than simply discarding or shaking it off, as we decide to leave our comfort zone around a normative boundary between professional and personal, it feels like change, however seemingly small, is in the making.

Acknowledgements

This paper benefitted from a multitude of conversations, exchanges of experiences and pathways towards working collectively to change the conditions of our workplaces. We would like to thank all the co-organizers and the participants of the ‘Science down to earth’ workshops, where we draw most of our inspiration for this paper. We are also grateful for thoughtful feedback to Catia Gregoratti, Johanna Herrigel, and participants at the 2018 AAG session on Political geographies of discomfort feminism and uncomfortable intimacy and their convenors who are also organising this special issue. Finally, thanks to the anonymous reviewers for helping us sharpen our thoughts too.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sunčana Laketa

Sunčana Laketa is a feminist political and urban geographer, working as an SNF Ambizione Fellow at the University of Neuchâtel. She completed her PhD at the University of Arizona in 2015, moving afterwards to Switzerland to continue her postdoctoral work. In her work she attends to affective and emotional geographies of (post)conflict cities. Her recent publications examine the geopolitical dimensions of affect and emotions, performative subjectivities and landscapes in the ‘divided’ city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her current research investigates the urban affective atmospheres of security and terror threat in Paris and Brussels.

Muriel Côte

Muriel Côte is Associate Senior Lecturer at Lund University. After completing a PhD in geography at the University of Edinburgh in 2014 and spending 5 years as a Lecturer at the Political Geography unity at the University of Zürich, she started working at the Lund University in 2020, where she teaches development studies. Her research focuses on the politics of resource extraction and conservation that she understands to be at the core of uneven development dynamics. She situates her work within political ecology and takes an ethnographic approach to her research. She is particularly interested in contexts where the state is considered weak or absent.