THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EVERYDAY ACADEMIC LIFE Instructor: H. Simten Coşar Mondays 2:30-5:30 Office: Room 1503 Dunton Tower Room: TBA (original) (raw)

LABOUR IN THE ACADEMIC BORDERLANDS: UNVEILING THE TYRANNY OF NEOLIBERAL POLICIES

The article examines the current conditions of labour within the neoliberal university, particularly with respect to the labour of borderland academics. Borderland is used in this instance to refer to the political space embodied by radical intellectuals across disciplines engaged in examining questions of class, race, gender and other social formations of inequality, through materialist perspectives. This work sets out an appeal for an emancipatory pedagogy and praxis by politically engaged academics, based on well-established foundations of revolutionary pedagogy, including Paulo Freire's notion of social consciousness as an imperative of educational practice in higher education. Toward this end, a concrete use value of academic labour is discussed, promoting such commitments in our practice with students and colleagues to support possibilities for the emancipatory reshaping of academic work, institutions, and society. In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it. —Karl Marx (1972) The specific kind of production that historically has shaped academic labour has always functioned in the interest of capitalism, despite contradictory ideals that have informed past discourses of academic freedom and liberal sensibilities. Today, however, the overriding imperatives of neoliberalism within universities have not only more fully disfigured academic labour, but have in its wake eroded any semblance of liberal ideals, conveniently relegating social welfare concerns to the cultural wasteland of university life. Hence this phenomenon is not only an ideological one but one that has also transpired in clear and well-documented ways: intensified workloads, casualization (or adjunct labour), competition for internal and external resources, and the privileging of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), in sync with metrics based Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), tenure requirements, and performance management. Despite some recent (e.g. Venezuela, Bolivia) and brief (e.g. Greece) breaks with the neoliberal project, these and associated trends within universities continue as part of a " particular ether " or broad consensus amongst educational pundits, policy makers, and university administrators on how the 21 st century university ought to function, produce knowledge, and participate in the formation of future intellectuals. In this paper we focus on the intensified alienation of academic work under these conditions, as