“You can feel the exhaustion in the air around you”: The Mood of Contemporary Universities and its Impact on Feminist Scholarship

• Autores: Maria do Mar Pereira
• Localización: Ex aequo, ISSN-e 2184-0385, ISSN 0874-5560, Nº. 39, 2019, págs. 171-186
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Science and higher education have undergone profound changes in recent decades, leading in many countries to the institutionalisation of academic cultures of performativity. In this article, I examine how that institutionalisation shapes women’s, gender, feminist studies (WGFS) in paradoxical ways. Drawing on an ethnography of Portuguese academia, I show that the growing emphasis on productivity has created opportunities for WGFS but also produced a mood of exhaustion and depression that has extremely detrimental impacts on WGFS academics’ bodies, relationships and knowledge production. I use this paradox to call for more debate in WGFS about contemporary academic working cultures, and our ambivalent personal investments in work.