In her book, ‘Bad Feminist’, Roxane Gay claims this label shamelessly, embracing the contradictory aspects of enacting feminist practice while fundamentally being ‘flawed human[s]’. This article tells a story inspired by and enacting Roxane Gay’s approach in academia, written by five cis-gendered women geographers. It is the story of a proactive, everyday feminist initiative to survive as women in an academic precariat fuelled by globalised, neoliberalised higher education. We reflect on what it means to be (bad) feminists in that context, and how we respond as academics. We share experiences of an online space used to support one another through post-doctoral life, a simple message thread, which has established an important role in our development as academics and feminists. This article, written through online collaboration, mirrors and enacts processes fundamental to our online network, demonstrating the significance and potential of safe digital spaces for peer support. Excerpts from the chat reflect critically on struggles and solutions we have co-developed. Through this, we celebrate and validate a strategy we know that we and others like us find invaluable for our wellbeing and survival. Finally, we reflect on the inherent limitations of exclusive online networks as tools for feminist resistance.

Digital technology is seen as a panacea to meeting the financial and operational challenges faced by voluntary and community sector organisations (VCSOs), through delivering efficiencies and cost-saving, alongside improving quality of service. However, according to recent assessments in the UK, the rate of digital adoption is slow compared with other sectors. This article identifies how a VCSO in a period of austerity prioritises its social mission over functionality and efficiency gains from digital technology. Employing the heuristic of phronesis, we argue that VCSOs seeking to implement digital innovations need to strike a balance between instrumental rationality (that is, what is possible to achieve with technology) and value rationality (that is, what is desirable to pursue by VCSOs). Our key argument is that theories of value rationality provide a new explanation for the slow adoption of digital technology among VCSOs.

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The version presented here may differ from the published version. If citing, you are advised to consult the published version for pagination, volume/issue and date of publication 1 'We're on the edge': cultures of care and Universal Credit.

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