Hi Anita and all
This looks like a BRILLIANT event, and I'm gutted not to be able to make it.
But I'm writing about this at the moment and thought people might be
interested in my piece called 'The hidden injuries of the neo-liberal
University'. The intro to it is below- do contact me if you'd like a copy,
or you can read it in Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist
Reflections (eds Flood & Gill), Routledge, 2009.
Best wishes, Ros

Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of the neoliberal university

Introduction

How are you?

I am  totally stressed at the moment, to be honest.  Work is piling up and
I'm just drowning.  I don't know when I'm going to have time to start on
that secrecy and silence book chapter - I'm so, so late with it now, and I
feel really bad that I'm letting Roisin down, but I literally never have a
second.

I know, I know exactly what you mean.

I mean, I had 115 e-mails yesterday and they all needed answering.   I'm
doing 16  hour days just trying to keep on top of it. I feel like I'm always
late with everything, and my 'to do' list grows faster than I can cross
things off it. It's like one of those fungi in a horror movie that doubles
in size every few hours! (Laughter)And I never ever have chance to do any of
my own work. I'm sleeping really badly and  it all just feels completely out
of control.

It's the same for me. Reading? What that? Thinking? No chance!  And you feel
awful, don't you. With me I feel like I'm constantly stealing time from the
kids too- I'll go off to check messages in the middle of a game of Monopoly
or something.  Sometimes I just feel like quitting.

Yeah I know. It just gets worse. Still hoping  to win the lottery,
then?(laughter) But how are you?

Do you really want to know?! (laughter) (Yeh) well, awful actually. I'm
really fed up. I  heard yesterday that my article for x journal was turned
down. (Oh no!) You know, the one I worked on for ages and ages.I poured so
much of myself into that piece (I know).  And one of the referee's comments
was vile - it  said something like "my first year undergraduates have a
better understanding of the field than this author does -- why are they
wasting all of our time".  When I read it it was like a slap in the face,
Ros.  It was all I could do not to burst out crying in the postroom, but I
had a lecture right afterwards so I somehow managed to pull myself together
and go and do that.  But last night, I just didn't sleep (poor you) I just
kept on going over and over with all these negative comments ringing round
my head.  And you know the worst thing is, they are right: I am useless (no
you're not), I'm a complete fraud, and I should have realised that I was
going to be found out if I sent my work to a top journal like that.

This is a transcript of a conversation I had with a female friend in the few
days before (finally) beginning work on this chapter. Both speakers are
white, both work in 'old'  (pre-1992) British Universities, and both are
employed on 'continuing' contracts - thus are already marked as 'privileged'
in multiple ways in the contemporary academy.  Mine is easily recognizable
as the voice which worries about how late this article is!  Some readers may
find this fragment of conversation rather odd, but I suspect for many more
it will appear familiar and may strike deep chords of recognition.  It
speaks of many things: exhaustion, stress, overload, insomnia, anxiety,
shame, aggression, hurt, guilt and feelings of out-of-placeness, fraudulence
and fear of exposure within the contemporary academy.  These feelings, these
affective embodied experiences, occupy a strange position in relation to
questions of secrecy and silence.  They are at once ordinary and everyday,
yet at the same time remain largely secret and silenced in the public spaces
of the academy.  They are spoken in a different, less privileged register;
they are the stuff of the chat in the corridor, coffee break conversations
and intimate exchanges between friends, but not, it would seem, the keynote
speech or the journal publication or even the departmental meeting.  For all
the interest in reflexivity in recent decades, the experiences of academics
have somehow largely escaped critical attention. It is as if the parameters
for reflexivity are bounded by the individual study, leaving the
institutional context in which academic knowledge is produced  simply as a
taken for granted backdrop.

What would it mean to turn our lens upon our own labour processes,
organisational governance and conditions of production? What would we find
if, instead of studying others, we focussed our gaze upon our own community,
and took as our data not the polished publication or the beautifully crafted
talk, but the unending flow of communications and practices in which we are
all embedded and enmeshed, often reluctantly: the proliferating e-mails, the
minutes of meetings, the job applications, the peer reviews, the promotion
assessments, the drafts of the RAE narrative, the committee papers,  the
student feedback forms, even the after-seminar chats? How might we make
links between macro-organisation and institutional practices on the one
hand, and experiences and affective states on the other, and open up an
exploration of the ways in which these may be gendered, racialised and
classed?  How might we engage critically with the multiple moments in which
individuals report being at breaking point, say 'my work is crap' or 'I'm
going to be found out'-as well as those moments of gratuitous attack and
cruelty, so often seen- for example - in anonymised referee processes (yet
rarely challenged) -- and connect these feelings with neoliberal practices
of power in the Western University? In short, how might we begin to
understand the secrets and silences within our own workplaces, and the
different ways in which they matter?



-----Original Message-----
From: Women's Media Studies Network list [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Anita Biressi
Sent: 28 September 2009 17:05
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: My Brilliant Career? Reminder and further details

My Brilliant Career? Women in the Academy: A Symposium and Networking 
Event
 
 
Friday 30th October 2009, 10am-5.15pm at The Women's Library, London E1 
7NT
 
 
There are a limited number of places left for The Women's Media Studies 
Network one day event addressing the experiences, aspirations and concerns 
of women working in higher education in media, cultural studies and the 
humanities.

To reserve your place now (lunch included) download the registration form
via 
this link: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/images/events/wmsn/my_brilliant_career-
301009-registration_form.doc

Enquiries to organisers Anita Biressi ([log in to unmask]) or
Heather 
Nunn ([log in to unmask])
 

Speakers:

Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media Studies, University of Brighton
TOUGHEN UP PRINCESS:  academic men and women and changing the default 
position

Mary Evans, Professor and Visiting Fellow, Institute of Gender Studies LSE
A Brilliant Career : But is this Feminism? Reflections on Professional
'Success'

June Purvis, Professor of Women's and Gender History, Portsmouth University
Where do I belong? Some reflections on feminism and my academic career.

Dr Nirmal Puwar, Senior Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Intersecting Space Invaders


Round table speakers:

Helen Baehr, MeCCSA Executive Committee member, research consultant and 
member of the Board of Women in Film and Television

Rosalind Brunt, Visiting Research Fellow in Media Studies, Sheffield Hallam 
University , founder member of WMSN

Becky Francis, Professor of Education, Roehampton University

Dr Kaity Mendes, Lecturer, De Montfort University
 

Summary:

This event invites scholars who situate their research within a feminist 
framework to consider the organisational and personal/social impediments to 
institutional and intellectual recognition into the 21st century. It will
also 
consider the broader implications of these barriers to female success in the

academy in terms of their impact on students' own aspirations and their own
understanding of gender roles in intellectual and public life. Speakers
include 
younger, mid-career and senior academics and the event will allow space for 
participants to discuss challenges and strategies for collaboration with
women 
who have extended experience of negotiating academic roles. Participants
will 
be encouraged to initiate further events on associated topics which might 
include the opportunities and constraints for postgraduate female academics;

opportunities for scholars from different ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic
backgrounds and those on part-time and short-term contracts; the media 
image of female intellectuals; the emotional labour of women working in HE; 
the impact of recession on women academics.

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