Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. Moving through 11 international and comparative case studies, it explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed. Affect has emerged as a major analytical lens of social research. However, it is rarely applied to universities and their marketisation. Offering a unique exploration of the contemporary role of affect in academic labour and the organisation of scholarship, this book considers modes of subjectivation, professional and personal relationships and organisational structures and their affective charges. Chapter 9 is available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism and 11 international case studies, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed.

Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. Moving through 11 international and comparative case studies, it explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed. Affect has emerged as a major analytical lens of social research. However, it is rarely applied to universities and their marketisation. Offering a unique exploration of the contemporary role of affect in academic labour and the organisation of scholarship, this book considers modes of subjectivation, professional and personal relationships and organisational structures and their affective charges. Chapter 9 is available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Drawing on Tarde's and Deleuze’s monadology, this book investigates the affective turn of contemporary capitalism. The concept of affect provides critical insight to overcome the limitations of social constructivism and cognitive capitalism. Affective capitalism transforms the population’s everyday bodily experiences into quantitative metrics that can be observed, measured, and processed on a non-conscious register, turning them into dividuals prepared to react and be affected by specific information at a given moment. In an era where social wealth increasingly relies on the 'social factory,' algorithms and big data constitute the living labor beyond employment. This book argues that affect also holds a potential for dismantling today’s real subsumption of life by capital. The network effect, mostly actualized as a company's market capitalization, is constantly traversed by the molecular becoming of affect, leading to new assemblages, such as free software movement, decentralized platforms, peer-to-peer networking, blockchain, and universal basic income.

This handbook provides a frame of reference for the global challenges facing higher education leadership today. Focusing on recommendations and directions for the future rather than simply a recap of measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic, the contributors also delve into contexts such as the climate crisis, issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, digitalisation, funding and marketisation, the war in Ukraine and China-Taiwan and Hong Kong tensions. They collate a systematic, global view of higher education systems during the pandemic and beyond, and explore possibilities for the future, providing recommendations for "the new normal". With contributions from across six continents, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of higher education and governance, university leaders, government and accreditation bodies, and anyone else interested in reflecting on the past few years in higher education and the road ahead. Jürgen Rudolph is Director of Research and Learning Innovation at Kaplan Singapore. Joseph Crawford is Senior Lecturer in Management, Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Education), University of Tasmania, Australia. Sam Choon Yin is Dean (Academic Partnerships), Kaplan Singapore. Shannon Tan is Research Executive at Kaplan Singapore.

This book examines how teaching and learning and teacher and student identities are being reframed in higher education by neoliberal policies and practices. It shares how teachers perform teaching and learning duties in relation to prescribed institutional policies and how teachers insert dissonant pedagogies as a critical practice. The book explores narrative pedagogy as a disruptive presence and a space for critique. It interrogates personal/professional experience of educational systems that present educators juggling complexity and meeting competing demands to make learning meaningful for students. Each contribution will act as a counterpoint and provide a synoptic method for comparison. The book re-constructs meaning from the generic narrative of the public face of education, which homogenizes and diminishes collective understandings of teachers and teaching. This book provides a contemporary account of the social realities experienced within the higher education classroom across the globe.

In her groundbreaking work The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild described “emotional labor management” as follows: “to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.” Think of a retail worker in customer relations who must keep calm and be pleasant even when dealing with someone who is irate. While scholars have explored the affective realm when it comes to teaching and being a professor, there is less written about the experience of those working in nonteaching areas of academia—“alt-ac.” Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers critically examines aspects of affective and emotional labor involved in alt-ac careers in higher education. This is the first and only book of its kind that focuses on affective labor and alt-ac/staff careers in higher education. Cross-profession and cross-disciplinary, the book takes seriously the invisible labor performed at our institutions by academic staff, work that is essential for the success of our students. Research in this volume allows an opportunity for those in alt-ac careers to examine and share their affective experiences in their roles in technology, administration, research, and academic support services and as librarians, academic advisors, and writing center instructors—among others. Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers is the third book in Kansas’s Rethinking Careers, Rethinking Academia series, which seeks projects that lead to meaningful professional development and create lasting value for graduate students, recent and experienced PhDs, university faculty and administrators, and the growing alt-ac and post-ac community.

This interdisciplinary and international book subjects key areas of inclusion in the global knowledge economy to critical scrutiny from queer perspectivism. Drawing on empirical data from diverse international contexts including Chile, Finland, Japan, Malaysia, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa, and the UK, this book examines sites of affective antagonisms, fragility, and friction, and explores whether queer theory can provide alternative readings of contemporary pathways, pedagogical and research cultures, political economies, and policy priorities with higher education. Main themes covered include: The Global Knowledge Economy and Epistemic Injustice Decolonisation Internationalisation Feminist Leadership Affirmative Action Queering the Political Economy of Neoliberalism Digitalisation of academic work Both comparative and illustrative, this key text provides a comparative analysis that recognises epistemic diversity, multiplicity of experiences, and, importantly, the effect of comparative reason in constructing stratified universities’ world fields and excluded and marginal academic experiences. It also takes into account the colonial historical entanglements in the ongoing formation and disavowal of the university and academic labour. Queering Higher Education: Troubling Norms in the Global Knowledge Economy is ideal reading for all those interested in queer theory and how it relates to higher education.

This book considers the detrimental changes that have occurred to the institution of the university, as a result of the withdrawal of state funding and the imposition of neoliberal market reforms on higher education. It argues that universities have lost their way, and are currently drowning in an impenetrable mush of economic babble, spurious spin-offs of zombie economics, management-speak and militaristic-corporate jargon. John Smyth provides a trenchant and excoriating analysis of how universities have enveloped themselves in synthetic and meaningless marketing hype, and explains what this has done to academic work and the culture of universities – specifically, how it has degraded higher education and exacerbated social inequalities among both staff and students. Finally, the book explores how we might commence a reclamation. It should be essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of education and sociology, and anyone interested in the current state of university management.

Why do people work for other people? This seemingly naïve question is at the heart of Lordon's argument. To complement Marx's partial answers, especially in the face of the disconcerting spectacle of the engaged, enthusiastic employee, Lordon brings to bear a "Spinozist anthropology" that reveals the fundamental role of affects and passions in the employment relationship, reconceptualizing capitalist exploitation as the capture and remolding of desire. A thoroughly materialist reading of Spinoza's Ethics allows Lordon to debunk all notions of individual autonomy and self-determination while simultaneously saving the ideas of political freedom and liberation from capitalist exploitation. Willing Slaves of Capital is a bold proposal to rethink capitalism and its transcendence on the basis of the contemporary experience of work.