Reading, Writing and Resistance: Feminist and Neoliberal Subjects in the Canadian Academy (original) (raw)
Related papers
There are now bookshelves filled with critical analyses of the fallout of free-market neoliberal corporate culture as it is being played out in universities. As (former) public institutions of education and knowledge production plunge into branding competitions, tables of top 100s, quantitative measuring of impact and funding income and student numbers, our understanding of the university is thrown into turmoil as are the working lives of those who struggle with these new meanings of the tertiary education sector. The texts collected here to review are part of a genre that critique the politics of a neoliberal education, reflect on life in the university, and strategise ways of maintaining ethical and professional values in university work. It's not coincidental that many of them are informed by feminist politics.
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow-moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects. We then consider strategies for slowing scholarship with the objective of contributing to the slow scholarship movement. This slowing down ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015, x (x), x -xx 3 represents both a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service and a collective feminist ethics of care that challenges the accelerated time and elitism of the neoliberal university. Above all, we argue in favor of the slow scholarship movement and contribute some resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.
Patriarchy and Higher Education: Organizing around masculinities and misogyny on Canadian campuses
Culture, Society & Masculinities 5(2), 2013
The spread of “men’s rights” organizations on Canadian university campuses raises several important questions. What can be learnt about the relationship between men’s rights organizations, institutions of higher education, and the broader conceptualization of feminisms, masculinities, and patriarchies? I argue that just as the academy has provided a space for the emergence of broader and innovative understandings of masculinities, so too has it provided a uniquely fertile terrain for the emergence of reactionary and patriarchal responses to those innovations, which appropriate the conceptual frameworks and language of feminism and intersectionality. An initial consideration of this process situates the academy as an important and formative space in the shaping of those conceptual frameworks which underpin broader social struggles over gendered roles and practices.
Past Imperfect, 2008
This paper examines the formation of the Women’s Studies Department at Simon Fraser University. While the struggle to establish this, the first credit Women’s Studies program in Canada, was a significant part of the second wave women’s movement and a crucial step towards achieving the broader goal of reinserting women back into academic discourse, in many disciplines the study of women continues to remain peripheral to “traditional” areas of inquiry. This paper will argue that although the establishment of the Women’s Studies department was a monumental achievement for women at the time and has undoubtedly greatly improved the status of women’s voices within academic research, it is not enough. What is required now is the incorporation of these voices into the mainstream disciplines; the ideal being an academic world that fully reflects the pluralistic society in which we live.
2015
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow-moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects....
Book Review: University Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in Canada
Canadian Journal of Education, 2022
Sara MacDonald discusses the gradual inclusion of women into Canada's undergraduate student body at 19 universities and colleges (see Appendix 1) between 1870-1930. Through historical analysis, MacDonald aims to answer the book's central question: "Did the rapid adoption of coeducation work for or against the interests of women?" (p. 6). The book is framed around the argument that university education for women in Canada was radical because of its focus on coeducation, rather than through separate women's colleges. The differences between these two modes are highlighted as significant because "from the beginning, coeducation was tied not only to the much larger issue of women's work, but also more explicitly to competition with men for employment" (p. 2). While pointing to the use of gender theory as an analytical framework, MacDonald also addresses racial and class inequities, noting that "during the period covered by this book, the experience of schooling at all levels was determined by social class, and, for some, curtailed completely by their race or indigeneity" (p. 5-6). Although the bulk of the text focuses on white, middle-class Anglo-Canadian women who were among Canada's first female university students and graduates, MacDonald is clear in acknowledging that this group was both small and highly privileged.
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time: to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow-moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects. We then consider strategies for slowing scholarship with the objective of contributing to the slow scholarship movement. This slowing down represents both a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service and a collective feminist ethics of care that challenges the accelerated time and elitism of the neoliberal university. Above all, we argue in favor of the slow scholarship movement and contribute some resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.