Civic engagement as empowerment: sharing our names and remembering our her-stories—resisting ofuniversity: The women who write

Abstract

In this chapter, The Women Who Write speak from their experiences as female academics to expose and collectively resist the competitive, masculinised, individualising culture of academia. Drawing upon the dystopic narratives of surrogacy, surveillance, and survival in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, this chapter creates a fertile space for sharing entangled stories and complex truths: women walking with/in the university, but not Ofuniversity. Against global representations of a corporatised academe, this chapter speaks-back to the academic machine, asserting that women are more-than productive surrogates, even as they are overlooked/unnamed. By speaking their names and human stories, the authors revision academia and reposition themselves not as the public possession of academia but as beings Ofearth, Ofourselves, and Ofeachother.