Precarious Responsibility: Teaching with Feminist Politics in the Marketized University

Abstract

One of the most pressing characteristics of the neoliberal restructuring of academia, together with increased managerialism, performativity measures, and a " customer service " approach, is the casualization or precarization of academic work. Casualization entails a fragmentation of academic work, where academics are forced to move between workplaces on hourly-paid and fixed-term contracts, often doing their job without access to resources such as an office, training, or paid research time. While a number of feminist scholars have investigated the ways in which feminist academics negotiate the ever-increasing mechanisms of individualization, ranking, and auditing of their work, this article focuses on the precarious pedagogies of casualized feminist scholars. Recounting experiences of challenging the hierarchical hegemony of the university, and its white male Euro-and US-centric focus, the article maps attempts to affect the teaching and learning process, while highlighting the precarious but still privileged position of casualized feminist scholars in higher education. Delineating some of the difficulties of teaching with a feminist politics of responsibility in the marketized university, this article suggests possibilities for resistance. While the marketization of higher education in the UK has been ongoing since the 1980s, or even the decade before, involving increased reliance on performativity measures for staff and the introduction of tuition fees, this process has recently been intensified using an ideological " austerity " narrative. 1 As Stefan Collini asserts, with these recent changes, higher education has come to be described not as " a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds " but rather as " a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers " (2010). Scholars such as Rosalind Gill have highlighted the strain on academic staff (termed " faculty " in the US), related to constant monitoring and increased workloads, connected with changes including " the importing of corporate models of management into university life; the reformulation of the very nature of education in instrumental terms connected to business and the economy; the transformation of students into 'consumers'; and the degradation of pay and working conditions for academics, as well as the increasing casualization of employment " (2010, 230–1). 2 The marketized university's increased reliance on performativity measures and its " customer service " approach to education change what it means to work and study in higher education institutions, strengthening and increasing their already existing hierarchies and inequalities. Additionally, with the contemporary university's focus on profitability and employability, feminist scholarship and teaching—which often offer uncomfortable or troublesome questions and knowledges—might be overlooked in favor of less complex viewpoints that are more easily accountable in terms of economic value.