The New Vocabulary of Resilience and the Governance of University Student Life

Aubrecht, Katie

doi:10.26522/ssj.v6i1.1069

Cited by 29 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Alongside this shaming history, there is a growing sense within University cultures that mental illness is 'normal', even an expectation (Aubrecht, 2012). Sensitive media disclosures of academics' struggles with their mental health remain ever-present, yet these are clouded by a culture of silence at institutional levels, as Guthrie et al, (2017) In a recent report, around half of UK higher education academics suggest that their wellbeing and mental health are undermined (Gorczynski, 2018).…”

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

Organization

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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%

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

Smith

Ulus

2019

Organization

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“…Bessel van der Kolk's research on adaptations after experiences of trauma has shown that those who do best after suffering traumatic experiences are those who had, as children, learned that they could consistently draw on positive external support, and that it was in and through this security that they were able also to mobilize their own self‐help skills (van der Kolk, ,185). As appealed to alongside wellness or wellbeing, resilience may gloss too quickly over students’ differences and the real difficulties some face as a result (Aubrecht, ), thereby promoting quietism rather than concerted structural change to the social, political, and economic norms that leave so many people feeling unable to cope with everyday life. Unproblematic appeals to resilience may also lead to victim‐blaming: if a student's circumstances affect their work or health more detrimentally than those of another student in similar circumstances, this may be blamed on their being insufficiently robust – or inadequate, oversensitive, or just plain wrong for wanting to acknowledge that they feel damaged and broken by what has happened to them, and to name it as unjust.…”

Section: Building Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

Failing safely: Increasing theology and religious studies students’ resilience and academic confidence via risk‐taking in formative assessment

Cornwall

2018

Teaching Theology & Religion

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Students increasingly appear anxious, risk-averse, and worried about getting things "wrong." They may appear to lack intellectual curiosity, and be unwilling to engage in independent study. This essay explores how teaching and assessment in theology and religious studies might help students learn to take intellectual risks, and increase their resilience. One approach is to encourage students to experiment and "fail safely," to increase their confidence that they understand what is expected of them, and to help them begin to understand learning as more broadly formational, not always directed toward a grade. I suggest three strategies: more formative assessment; a stronger narrative about the purpose of formative assessment; and an appeal to values, virtue, and the cultivation of character. Via these approaches, students might be encouraged to understand assessment in less utilitarian terms and increase their resilience for a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, prepared both critically and dispositionally to thrive and contribute positively to society.

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“…I have claimed a disability identity within disability studies communities, spaces in which the referral is less obviously part of the cultural pattern. And yet, even in disability studies communities where you can be disabled because you say you are (Linton, 1998), the expectation is that you have come to such communities with bodies and selves that bear the labour of any number of bio-bureaucratic systems (Aubrecht, 2012). Nancy, as much as I recognize the need to support students and as much as I desire recognition that affirms impairment as (Dis)Embodying Disclosure in Higher Education / K. Aubrecht & N. La Monica a source of individuality and distinction as well as a site of suffering, I wonder how we can acknowledge distress, confusion, intensity, elation, and/or anguish in a way that does not involve a "referral" to offices through channels and processes that are highly medicalized-as your student expressed "like giving blood"-and that either result in or require acknowledgement of a "record"?…”

Section: It's Complicated Katiementioning

confidence: 99%

(Dis)Embodied Disclosure in Higher Education: A Co-Constructed Narrative

Aubrecht

Monica

2017

cjhe

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In this paper we use co-constructed autoethnographic methods to explore the tensions that animate the meaning of “disclosure” in university and college environments. Drawing insight from our embodied experiences as graduate students and university/college course instructors, our collaborative counter-narratives examine the ordinary ways that disclosure is made meaningful and material as a relationship and a form of embodied labour. Our dialogue illustrates the layered nature of disclosure—for example, self-disclosing as a disabled student in order to access academic spaces but not self-disclosing to teach as an instructor. Katie uses phenomenological disability studies to analyze disclosure at the intersection of disability and pregnancy as body-mediated moments (Draper, 2002). Nancy uses Hochschild’s (1983) notion of “emotional labour” to explore how socio-spatial processes of disclosure can be an embodied form of “extra work” (e.g., managing perceptions of stigmatized identities).

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The New Vocabulary of Resilience and the Governance of University Student Life

Cited by 29 publications

References 28 publications

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

Failing safely: Increasing theology and religious studies students’ resilience and academic confidence via risk‐taking in formative assessment

(Dis)Embodied Disclosure in Higher Education: A Co-Constructed Narrative

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