Beyond the academic precariat: a collective biography of poetic subjectivities in the neoliberal university

Abstract

The ‘neoliberal turn’ in the higher education sector has received significant intellectual scrutiny in recent times. This scrutiny, led by many established academics working within the sector, has highlighted the negative repercussions for teaching and research staff, often referred to as the ‘academic precariat’ due to their tenuous employment prospects within an increasingly market-driven system. This critique of the modern university can also inadvertently position academics as either resisting or complying with neoliberal governance. This does not adequately account for the nuanced and poetic ways in which professional, personal and gendered subjectivities are formulated, intertwined and negotiated. In this paper we draw on the six overlapping yet distinct narratives of the six female authors, all early-career academics from Australia. We capture and analyse these narratives through collective biography, a qualitative methodology underpinned by the work of Davies and Gannon and others, that helps us to move beyond the ‘good vs. bad’, ‘resistance vs. compliance’ debates about academic life. We identify aspects of our lived subjectivities that offer rupture through poetic and hopeful ways of understanding how academics construct and negotiate their lives.

Keywords:

• Higher education
• Neoliberalism
• Collective biography
• Subjectivity
• Early-career academics

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their insightful, generous and encouraging feedback. Such scholarship is a prime example of the sort of collegiality and intellectual curiosity that we hope to foster in our professional lives and relationships. The authors also wish to thank Jan Wright for her invaluable feedback on an earlier iteration of this paper and her ongoing mentoring as the backbone of the WHFSL.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term ‘para-academic’ refers to ‘a person but, also, potential collectivities of people and practices existing simultaneously inside, outside, and alongside the conventional academy’ (Withers & Wardrop, 2014, p. 8).