Critical friendship: an alternative, ‘care-full’ way to play the academic game
The severe impact of the neoliberal university has been commonly acknowledged, particularly for women academics. Feminist conceptualisations of academic work highlight that meaningful relationships in the workspace and care ethics in academia are practices of resistance against the neoliberal academy, including those of friendship and mentorship. In this paper, we add critical academic friendship to this repertoire of practices aligning with feminist care ethics and propose it as a way of working within the neoliberal academy slowly and meaningfully. Critical friendship is a practice often used by teacher educators to assist engagement in self-reflection and constructive critical dialogue among colleagues as a means to aid both personal and professional development. Inspired by our personal experience as critical academic friends and using an autoethnographic approach, the paper outlines how our critical friendship developed and was practiced. We highlight how time, space and neoliberal academic practices all influence how this relationship unfolded. Through showcasing how engaging in critical friendship helped us (re)produce robust feminist personal and professional identities, we hope to inspire more academics to share similar experiences, to intensify the message that engaging in ‘care-full’ relationships is paramount for resisting the pressures of neoliberal academic work and for ‘doing’ academia differently and more meaningfully.
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
Gender, Place and CultureVolume
30Issue
8Pages
1104-1125Publisher
Taylor & Francis (Routledge)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Rights holder
© Taylor & FrancisPublisher statement
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Gender, Place and Culture on 03 May 2022, available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0966369X.2022.2069684.Acceptance date
2022-04-18Publication date
2022-05-03Copyright date
2022ISSN
0966-369XeISSN
1360-0524Publisher version
Language
- en