When All Hope Is Gone: Truth, Lies and Make Believe

Abstract

The chapter presents a reflexive and biographically positioned ‘truth’ that speaks about, to and from the changing nature of academic labour in higher education institutions. The chapter articulates a particular set of positioned beliefs and feelings about how neoliberal discourse in higher education makes strange the familiar and the familiar strange. These are represented in a reconstructed narrative account that references the ways in which academic work(ers) become subject to a performative functionality. The chapter draws on the function of parrhesia: a form of speech that emerges out of pre-established experience, theoretical and practical understanding to contextualise a ‘speaking back’ to the wider social and political contexts reshaping academic work in universities.