Anxious academics: talking back to the audit culture through collegial, critical and creative autoethnography

Ruth, Damian; Wilson, Suze; Alakavuklar, Ozan Nadir; Dickson, Andrew

doi:10.1080/14759551.2017.1380644

Cited by 22 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…When assessing research performance, for example, evidently what counts is only that which can be quantified and displayed. A recent example is Ruth et al, (2018) who talk about their anxiety when asked for a research portfolio from their University. Their accounts demonstrate outputs as part of an evaluation process, showing their feelings of worry, nervousness and unease about demands with an uncertain outcome, unrelated to their ability, skills, knowledge or work quality (Ruth et al, 2018).…”

Section: Struggling With Health Within the Neoliberal Academymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A recent example is Ruth et al, (2018) who talk about their anxiety when asked for a research portfolio from their University. Their accounts demonstrate outputs as part of an evaluation process, showing their feelings of worry, nervousness and unease about demands with an uncertain outcome, unrelated to their ability, skills, knowledge or work quality (Ruth et al, 2018). Kiriakos and Tienari (2018: 9) talk about the prevalence of anxiety specifically when writing, as 'we know our academic lives depend on it'.…”

Section: Struggling With Health Within the Neoliberal Academymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Who cares for academics? We need to talk about emotional well-being including what we avoid and intellectualise through macro-discourses

Smith

Ulus

2019

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This article explores academics’ well-being through analysing published sensitive disclosures, bringing to journal space the pain, rawness and emotional suffering of individuals’ experiences. We confront the taboos of speaking openly about mental health and emotional well-being in academic institutions, with masculine structures and encroaching neoliberal discourses that create hostile atmospheres unsupportive of vulnerability and uncertainty. We also challenge existing discourses about academics’ well-being, implicitly burdening individuals as responsible for their pain and creating walls of shame, rather than building new healthy structures. By spotlighting the voices of academics’ emotional disclosures, intensified by embodied social inequalities, we plead for openness in formal academic outlets for sharing pre-existing emotional struggles and new wounds created by cruelly competitive, winner-takes-all structures, fortified by neoliberal ideals. Led by individuals’ voices and experiences, we make recommendations for supporting academics as an attempt to extract academia from its current perverse state and commit to repair and transformation.

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Section: Struggling With Health Within the Neoliberal Academymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Struggling With Health Within the Neoliberal Academymentioning

confidence: 99%

Who cares for academics? We need to talk about emotional well-being including what we avoid and intellectualise through macro-discourses

Smith

Ulus

2019

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“…This manifests itself in the academic debate (see e.g. Jones et al, 2020;McCann et al, 2020;Mumby et al, 2017;Ruth et al, 2018) but also in discussions on the work floor, in the media and in the wider public realm. See the above mentioned recent massive demonstrations and strikes, see the manifesto "Reclaiming our University" by staff and students of the University of Aberdeen (Reclaiming our University, 2016), see the so-called San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) signed by universities around the world, in which they made a plea to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, in funding, appointment, and promotion considerations and to value research on its own merits and, see the recent report of the Dutch university organizations (VSNU, 2019) in which they make a plea for the accounting of one's talent, intellectual drive and development rather than the counting of one's performance numbers, and see the already applied University of Ghent model (Cardol and de Knecht, 2019) in which the rector declared to "renew the trust in the staff rather than to overly measure and control them."…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

The autoimmunity of the modern university: How its managerialism is self-harming what it claims to protect

Houtum

Uden

2020

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What we critically ascertain in this essay is how the modern university is increasingly drifting away from the key ambitions of its own mission statement, and largely by its own doing. Although the typical university in its mission statement claims to aspire outstanding quality, academic freedom, and to contribute to society, in its daily organization, the modern university has normalized and internalized a neoliberal metrical governmentality, in which quality, freedom, and societal benefit risk being exchanged for quantity, managerial control, and status benefit. In this essay, we stand up against this worrying self-harming protection strategy, what we term—following Jacques Derrida—the autoimmunity of the university. To structure our argument, we will discern the main worrying autoimmune paradoxes of this university policy in the hope to further the debate and potentially remedy the university of this self-inflicted harm.

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“…These experiences often carry a negative value and contain subjects such as sexual harassment (Moreira, 2007), emotional emptiness (Miller, 2002) and bullying (Sobre-Denton, 2012). Universities have increasingly become targets of autoethnographic accounts (Alvesson, 2003; Learmonth and Humphreys, 2011; Petersen, 2009; Ruth et al., 2018; Tienari, 2019), and scholars write stories about academic bullying that focus on struggles and resistance against unethical actions rather than about bystanding (Pheko, 2018a, 2018b; Vickers, 2007).…”

Section: Methods and Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bullying and the neoliberal university: A co-authored autoethnography

Zawadzki

Jensen

2020

Management Learning

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The purpose of this article is to deepen the understanding of academic bullying as a consequence of neoliberal reforms in a university. Academics in contemporary universities have been put under pressure by the dominance of neoliberal processes, such as profit maximization, aggressive competitiveness, individualism or self-interest, generating undignifying social behaviours, including bullying practices. The presented story takes us – a junior academic and his conceptual encounterer – through our remembered experiences and field notes around a set of workday events in one European university reformed through managerial solutions as the object of the study. To do that, we employ co-authored analytic autoethnography to learn how neoliberal solutions reinforce paternalistic relationships as significant in career development, how such solutions enable the bullying of young academics and how neoliberalism in academia prevents young academics from contesting bullying. We are particularly interested in the bystander phenomenon: a person who shies away from taking action against bullying and thus strengthens bullying practices.

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Anxious academics: talking back to the audit culture through collegial, critical and creative autoethnography

Cited by 22 publications

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Who cares for academics? We need to talk about emotional well-being including what we avoid and intellectualise through macro-discourses

Who cares for academics? We need to talk about emotional well-being including what we avoid and intellectualise through macro-discourses

The autoimmunity of the modern university: How its managerialism is self-harming what it claims to protect

Bullying and the neoliberal university: A co-authored autoethnography

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