Technologies of Self-Care in Precarious Neoliberal Academia: Women Academics’ Craftwork as Strategies of Coping and Complicity

Abstract

This article explores the use of craftwork as a technology of self-care by women academics to cope with work demands and commodified narratives in academia. It combines discussions about work pressures in academia and technologies of the self to theorise self-care strategies used to navigate academic demands and identify new research avenues. Through the memory work of the four women academic authors, the article shows craftwork as a strategy of self-care to achieve self-control, self-preservation and self-(re)positioning. The article extends the theorisation of self-care, showing its simultaneous function as a coping and complicity mechanism that responds to and engages with individualised well-being narratives in academia. It also advances and complicates understanding of how technologies of self-care sustain the power structures of the academic labour process, showing the visceral and emotional dimensions of these technologies. The article outlines the contours of a research agenda to interrogate ethical self-care in academia.