For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University

TLDR

The neoliberal university demands high productivity in compressed time frames, yet its isolating effects and embodied work conditions are rarely examined. The article develops a feminist ethics of care to challenge these demanding working conditions. It foregrounds collective action and argues that good scholarship requires time, examining temporal regimes and proposing strategies to slow scholarship within a feminist politics. The authors find that slowing down constitutes a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service, offering resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal approaches to counter the accelerated, elitist neoliberal university.

Abstract

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.