Abstract
This chapter addresses debilitating impacts of neoliberal academia and ways to resist it; and it does so through critical analysis of disability studies. With insights of disability studies, it pushes the conversations not to stop at how oppressed academics are under the neoliberal regime, but to ask what it means to participate in higher education which is traditionally contested for its ablism and saneism. As neoliberalism came to corporatize education, academics’ are evaluated based on financial value of their work and their capacities to fulfill its expectation. Through a concept of hyper-productivity—one of the key characteristics of neoliberal academia—this chapter describes how expectation of neoliberal academia comes to be internalized as desire or a standard to measure one’s value as academics. Using the social model of disability, this chapter untangles how the expectation for hyper-productivity is constructed as well as how such neoliberalization amplifies ableism and sanism in academia. Finally, examples of disability-centered activism organizing are shared to provide ways to improve mainstream education justice movements to be more accessible and inclusive. Significance of collective care is reviewed as a way to sustain academics as they fight for education justice and to actualize democratic ways of living.
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Notes
- 1.
I do not mean to say that neoliberal academia and its impact are unique to these nations. It is definitely affecting academia of different nations; while degree and nature of such impact varies depending on the nation (please see Naidoo 2008, for example).
- 2.
A concept of “bodymind” is used throughout the chapter, instead of separating body from mind, in order to emphasize the deeply intertwined nature of body and mind. Please refer to Price (2011), for example, for a further conceptualization of “bodymind”.
- 3.
Recently, in the realms of disability studies and activism, many people are working to extend the analysis outlined above by improving the social model through critique (please see Kafer 2013, for example).
- 4.
Or if one uses dictation software to write paper vocally, one is required to be able to clearly speak what s/he intends to write down.
- 5.
Please see Kafer (2013) for more reference to the concept of ‘crip time.’
- 6.
Mingus’ article on INCITE Women of Color Against Violence Blog (2010, August 23) also provides an example of how disability communities move together to attend a conference as a collective.
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Editors’ Postscript
If you liked reading Chap. 10 by Nishida and are interesting more on how neoliberal social structure plays out in disabled people’s everyday lives, we recommend Chap. 14 “Occupying Seats, Occupying Space, Occupying Time: Deaf Young Adults in Vocational Training Centers in Bangalore, India” by Michele Friedner. Or Chap. 21 “Black & Blue: Policing Disability & Poverty Beyond Occupy” by Leroy Franklin Moore Jr., Lisa ‘Tiny’ Garcia, and Emmitt Thrower and Chap. 2 “Krips, Cops and Occupy: Reflections from Oscar Grant Plaza” by Sunaura Taylor with Marg Hall, Jessica Lehman, Rachel Liebert, Akemi Nishida, and Jean Stewart address accounts on larger Occupy Wall Street Movement and responses from disability communities.
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Nishida, A. (2016). Neoliberal Academia and a Critique from Disability Studies. In: Block, P., Kasnitz, D., Nishida, A., Pollard, N. (eds) Occupying Disability: Critical Approaches to Community, Justice, and Decolonizing Disability. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9984-3_10
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