“…Notably, while the pain of working in universities has been expressed by people of all genders, races, employment statuses and levels of seniority, a key feature of much writing on the problems with the contemporary academy has been produced by those whose bodies, desires, social background or beliefs mark them as 'different' from the white, middle-class norm. This has been an incredibly rich scholarship with significant transformational power, now held up by many academics as examples of critical injustices that institutions must address, as well as a cause of considerable friction, simplified and dismissed as 'identity politics' (see, for example, Ahmed, 2012;Attewell, 2016;Black and Garvis, 2018;Brown and Leigh, 2018;Garrod et al, 2017;Matthew, 2016;Pereira, 2017). This section attends to this conversation because of the way it conforms to a model whereby ethics arises from the pleasures and pains of the academic body, and yet is one of the few places where questions have been raised about the usefulness of this form of selfhood.…”