Widening Scripts

ephemera journal, 2019

How to live feminism within academia? What are the tools required to enable this process? With these questions in mind, and with our experiences as researchers, activists and friends, we participated in the two-day workshop ‘Feminism, Activism and Writing!’ (FAW!). Whilst conferences are often dialogic spaces replicating patriarchal dynamics of power, we experienced the FAW! workshop as a space that challenged patriarchal regimes, encouraged, and enabled scholarly encounters through feminist practices. In this collaborative piece, composed as a collective rather than as individuals, we offer an overview of our reflections developed during and after the workshop. In particular, we focus on three areas informed by the themes explored in the workshop: the concepts of affect, solidarity and the politics of care in academia, the positioning of scholars as feminists, and the issue of precarity in academia. In our reflections, we argue that these three areas ought not to be explored nor dealt with separately, as intertwined and informed by the neoliberal, patriarchal practices. We therefore suggest these areas as starting points for a radical transformation of academia, through the lenses and practices of feminism. Through the learning(s) of the FAW! workshop, we call for a radical reconsideration of all forms of collective solidarity, based on the acceptance and celebration of affective-relational practices developed to cope with the challenges of precarity, and requiring the acknowledgement of the value of both positions, as scholars and activists.

This article reviews current debates on epistemic habits of critique and affirmation, specifically focusing on approaches which combine criticality with ways to encourage unfoldings of alternative futurities, figurations and worlding practices. Embedded in a process of critical self-reflection regarding epistemic habits, the article discusses disidentification (Butler 1993, Muñoz 1999), cruel optimism (Berlant 2011), and everyday utopianism (Cooper 2014) understood as examples of such habits. The article explores how feminisms, unfolding within academia, and thus institutionally embedded in the logics of global capitalism, neoliberalism and particular nation-state politics, on the one the hand, are bound to a performance of cruel optimism, glossing over dilemmas and contradictions, and, on the other hand, perhaps enabled to enact messy kinds of everyday utopianism. Finally, the article reflects upon possibilities for changing one's epistemic habits, suggesting a couple of changes: to systematically integrate reflections on changing conditions of academic knowledge production, as well as on geopolitical grammars. These issues are addressed as being interwoven with and mixed up in the epistemic practices that are produced by messy links with both feminist activist resistance and institutionalized and professionalized academic feminisms.

Lived experiences of women in academia: Metaphors, manifesto and memoir , 2018

Cautious about the dangers of ‘authentic experience’ and confessional narrative, this chapter uncreatively assembles accounts of the complexities of women’s lives in academia. Online sources of information about navigating academia as a woman become elements for artistic experimentation. Purposely juxtaposing official university web accounts of valuing equity, diversity and flexible working arrangements with online newspaper, blog and social media accounts of the lives of women in universities, the tensions, contradictions, perplexities (and potential liberties) of women’s lives in academia are foregrounded. These words, images and screenshots are re-arranged into a form akin to a poem with footnoted weblinks. Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) has described this form of writing as “uncreative”, “patchwriting”: “a way of weaving together various shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole” (p. 3). This chapter appropriates Goldsmith’s methodology of writing into feminist methodologies of “collective memory” (Haug et al., 1999) and “collective biography” (Davies & Gannon, 2006). Working with digitised fragmentation (and/ or proliferations) of subjectivities, uncreative writing forms a “postidentitarian literature” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 85). To deliberately sort, manipulate, move and manage words, images and screenshots from webtexts performs and parodies the sorting, manipulations, movements and management strategies of the corporate university, even as there are concurrent, latent modes of agency at work. Creative combinations of information become “moving information” – language is “push[ed]” around while, simultaneously, the author/ reader is “emotionally moved by that process” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 1). These new assemblages may not always “make recognisable sense”, but “express intensities” “capture forces” and “act” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 195), to make a “different sense” (St. Pierre, 2008, p. 330). In these re-arrangements, the reader (and writer) become disoriented, amused, and impelled to re-think habitual modes of reading, writing and living our shared lives.

Aphra Behn online, 2021

I teach writing and literature at a community college, and I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate. Because I balance full-time teaching and graduate research, I am accustomed to the intensity of a heavy workload. Still, during this past year, my home and work responsibilities have multiplied and with that so has my anxiety. Stress and lack of time have made it challenging to write and research. However, two feminist organizations have helped me cope and remain hopeful about my scholarship.

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2017

This article reviews current debates on epistemic habits of critique and affirmation, specifically focusing on approaches which combine criticality with ways to encourage unfoldings of alternative futurities, figurations and worlding practices. Embedded in a process of critical self-reflection regarding epistemic habits, the article discusses disidentification (Butler 1993, Muñoz 1999), cruel optimism (Berlant 2011), and everyday utopianism (Cooper 2014) understood as examples of such habits. The article explores how feminisms, unfolding within academia, and thus institutionally embedded in the logics of global capitalism, neoliberalism and particular nation-state politics, on the one the hand, are bound to a performance of cruel optimism, glossing over dilemmas and contradictions, and, on the other hand, perhaps enabled to enact messy kinds of everyday utopianism. Finally, the article reflects upon possibilities for changing one's epistemic habits, suggesting a couple of changes: to systematically integrate reflections on changing conditions of academic knowledge production, as well as on geopolitical grammars. These issues are addressed as being interwoven with and mixed up in the epistemic practices that are produced by messy links with both feminist activist resistance and institutionalized and professionalized academic feminisms.

Comparative Education Studies, 2025

The academic profession requires a consistent immersion into the realm of ideas, scholarship, and an extended engagement beyond the classroom. In such a context, the distinction between the spaces of home and work is already blurred. Feminist scholarship shows that the responsibility of care in academia is already deeply gendered. The transformation of home into the workspace during the pandemic not only brought attention to the asymmetrically gendered division of labour but also intensified it. This paper explores how academic roles and identities are gendered and how they were experienced during the pandemic through the narrative accounts of six women academics in Delhi. This narrative inquiry focuses on how-in the context of the pandemic- identities and responsibilities for women in academia came to be gendered and engaged with the notion of care in pedagogy and scholarship. Our findings highlight that while some participants were facilitated by the greater flexibility that came with working from home in terms of being able to focus on their health, childcare, and avoiding a career break during pregnancy and postnatal care, they also pointed towards the lack of institutional flexibility in responding to a gendered experience of the workplace and the achievement of their academic goals. This paper underlines the significance of (a) having a physical workspace for a dialogic interpersonal pedagogy, (b) having a distinct professional identity as an "escape" from essentialised care demands at home, and (c) being part of a community of practice which is integral to women's sense of being in academia.

This paper is about three working class women academics in their 40s, who are at different phases in their career. I take a reflexive, feminist, (Reay 2000, 2004, Ribbens and Edwards 1998) life story approach (Plummer, 2001) in order to understand their particular narratives about identity, complicity, relationships and discomfort within the academy, and then how they inhabit careless spaces. However unique their narratives, I am able to explore an aspect of higher education – women and their working relationships – through a lens of careless spaces, and argue that careless -ness in the academy, can create and reproduce animosity and collusion. Notably, this is damaging for intellectual pursuits, knowledge production and markedly, the identity of woman academics. In introducing this work, I first contextualise women in the academy and define the term careless spaces, then move onto discuss feminist methods. I then explore and critique in some detail, the substantive findings under the headings of 'complicity and 'faking' it' and 'publishing and collaboration'. The final section concludes the paper by drawing on Herring's (2013) legal premise, in the context of care ethics, as a way to interrogate particular careless spaces within higher education.

ADVANCE Journal, 2021

We are a community of academic women who parent children with disabilities. In this essay, we draw on our experiences as mother-scholars and our collective experiences as an affinity community to demonstrate how the university system often ignores us as whole people, fragmented between our worlds as academics and as carers. We offer this integrated systems-ofcare model as a counternarrative to the dominant emphasis on hyperindividualism in the neoliberal U.S. university system.

European Journal of Women's Studies

Our main goal in this article is to discuss the structural and persistent problems experienced by women academics, especially with respect to the gendered divisions of academic tasks and unequal divisions of care obligations in the domestic sphere. The analysis is based on reflexive thematic analysis of the open-ended questions of an online questionnaire on the academic work environment, work satisfaction, stress, academic duties and allocation of tasks, and thoughts on gender equality. Academics from different countries voice their lived experiences, frustrations as well as worries about their future. We aim to highlight how these issues are embedded in the structures of academic capitalism and argue against the tendency to individualise these issues in a bid to inspire an informed collective resistance.

Tourism Management Perspectives, 2019

While a wider context of crisis and neoliberal practices engulfing academia has triggered a variety of debilitating impacts on both education and academic working lives, tourism academia remains an insulated workplace, slowly responding to efforts corresponding to a politics of care, diversity and inclusivity. In highlighting attention to the issue of gender equity in tourism academia, this paper draws on netnographic analysis from one global electronic mailing list and analyses empirical data on the issues of "gender", "women" and "diversity". The case study brings to the fore the urgency of addressing these issues as regards tourism academia. The latter is a space that we argue would benefit from enactments that nurture affectivities of solidarity. These are exemplified in the form of caring, compassionate and feeling fuelled inclusive workplaces. This paper aims to stimulate further debate in underscoring the need to introduce what we term "unbounded feminisms of solidarity and compassion".