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Closed Doors: Academic Collegiality, Isolation, Competition and Resistance in the Contemporary Australian University

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Time and Space in the Neoliberal University

Abstract

This chapter is an exploration of how academic collegiality is constructed in and shaped by the spaces of the neoliberal university. Based on a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with women academics at several Australian universities as well as critical autoethnographic reflections. It is possible to see how collegiality is a set of gendered practices and performances rather than a quality or virtue. In this chapter academic women articulate the complexity and contradiction of collegiality discourse, and how as a consequence, women are rendered invisible in various academic spaces. This chapter thus also reveals how academic women have created alternative abstract and lived spaces for feminist collectivity in the changing internationalised higher education environment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Briony Lipton

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  1. Briony Lipton
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Correspondence to Briony Lipton .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

    Maddie Breeze

  2. School of Education, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

    Yvette Taylor

  3. Department of Education and Childhood, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Cristina Costa

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Lipton, B. (2019). Closed Doors: Academic Collegiality, Isolation, Competition and Resistance in the Contemporary Australian University. In: Breeze, M., Taylor, Y., Costa, C. (eds) Time and Space in the Neoliberal University. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15246-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15246-8_2

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15245-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15246-8

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