Failure failure failure failure failure failure: Six types of failure within the neoliberal academy

Abstract

I am not a failure…but I feel like one 1 . As a Geographer working within the contemporary academy I am proud of my achievements 2,3,4 …but I feel like a failure, and expect to fail, every day of my working life 5 . And when you feel like a failure, and expect to fail, it is hard to escape the conclusion that you are a failure. Even if your CV, profile and performance indicators make a powerful case to the contrary.Recent theorisations of failure, gentleness, modesty and (un)wellness within contemporary academia have provided important openings to acknowledge the prevalence of failure and fear-of-failure in academic workplaces, disciplines and careers in four senses. First, through these lines of work, there is increased recognition of failure as collateral damage of neoliberalisation within contemporary academia. It is 1 This was not an easy sentence to write. It is not easy to disclose feelings of failure, and I suppose it has taken years (and a certain accumulation of confidence, experience, social capital and ontological security) to feel able to put this into words. More practically, it took many iterative drafts to write 'I am not a failure…but I feel like one'. I spent days wondering how to articulate the co-presence of, and oscillation between, 'not-failure' and 'failure' (as caricatured in the preface). At various stages, too, the wording changed from 'I feel like a failure' to 'I sometimes feel like a failure', 'I often feel like a failure' , 'I always feel like a failure', 'I usually feel like a failure', or 'I know I am a failure' (maybe depending on my mood, circumstances, or how much melodrama I was enjoying playing with in my writing). 2 I find it interesting that I feel an obligation to begin by asserting my success. (I suppose I want to get across a sense that I am not writing from a bitter place devoid of success: rather, I know I have been fortunate enough to have some significant successes in my field, but feel like a failure nonetheless). It is also notable that I feel uneasy speaking of myself as a success (e.g. I find myself undercutting my narrative with footnotes, parentheses and excessive, self-effacing detail). So while I could write an uncomplicated, triumphant account of myself as a success (exceptional academic achievements; first in my family and street to go to university; from PhD to Professor in a decade; from profound shyness to international keynote speaker; £100,000s of research income; leadership and editorship roles; 100s of citations; and all that), I find I just cannot do it. Perhaps I am just inherently bashful; perhaps I am working toward a more self-effacing mode of autoethnographic practice (Horton, forthcoming); perhaps the dramatic social mobility of my career has created such dissonance and dislocation that I feel embarrassed -even ashamed -about how things have ended up; perhaps I am reacting to the overweening ambition and self-promotion I perceive in some colleagues; perhaps I just find it fun and productive to write complex, footnoted sentences. I don't know.3...

Ways to write an academic life: Queering the academic curriculum vitae

“…Institutions’ competitive orientation legitimises the efficiencies of benchmarking strategies. Failure is often thought of as collateral damage of neoliberalisation within contemporary academia (Horton, 2020).…”

“…[shift] [key] [typing…]I am aI am an‘I am not a failure … but I feel like one’ (Horton, 2020: 1).[enter] […] [delete] [delete] [delete][ your changes have been automatically saved ]…”

“…As Horton observes, ‘when you feel like a failure, and expect to fail, it is hard to escape the conclusion that you are a failure. Even if your CV, profile and performance indicators make a powerful case to the contrary’ (Horton, 2020: 2). Far from being an individual issue, the academic CV illuminates’ conceptions of prestige within the academic economy (Macfarlane, 2020: 10) and the ways that class, race and gender structure access to, our success and progression within academic careers (Breeze and Taylor, 2020; Sinclair, 2004).…”

Academic Emotions

“…In this sense, the academic self produced through quantification, like the discipline it suggests, is not always a self that is desirable in the eyes of the subjectthe tension between the professional/ vocational manifested in the gap between the scholar as a person and their quantified persona. For those whose numbers are viewed as less than excellent, or below expectations, such an accounting can be doubly dislocating, requiring individuals to narrate and identify as a failed academic self, with all the pain, frustration, anger and shame that entails (Horton, 2020;Wolfe and Mayes, 2019).…”

“Writing's intimate spatialities: Drawing ourselves to our writing in self-caring practices of love”

“…In overtaxed, neoliberalized, highly metricized, competitive, and increasingly precarious academic careers, it often feels this way (Askins and Blazek 2017;Dufty-Jones and Gibson, 2021;Hawkins, 2019;Mountz et al, 2015;Peake and Mullings, 2016). And that can lead to the prevalent emotions of fear and anxiety related specifically to writing (particularly among emerging and earlier-career scholars) (Askins and Blazek 2017;Cameron et al, 2009;Hawkins, 2019)-a pervasive problem, one that may make us feel isolated as individuals and even mired in failure (Horton, 2020). We try harder?…”