Process-model feminism in the Corporate University

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In a period characterised by worries over the rise of the corporate university, it is important to ask what role feminism plays in the academy, and whether that role is commensurate with feminist values and ethics. Commercial and political pressures brought to bear on the encounter between instructor and student can rob teaching of its efficacy, and the effects of institutional limitations on research may be equally troublesome. This essay argues that through a process-model approach, feminists can understand and intervene in ongoing shifts in institutional governance and mitigate their effects on teaching and research, and that process-model pedagogy is a form of microactivism existing independent of pedagogical content, making process-model feminism fundamentally materialist, radically strategic, and highly portable. Through a discussion of pedagogical and administrative practices in which process-model feminism can intervene, this essay suggests a way of understanding and inhabiting feminism’s current place in the ‘corporate’ academy.