When Thriving for More Collapses the System: The Academic Reproduction of Uncaring Structures

This essay argues that the widening gap between aspirational aims and visionary orientations and the prevailing practices in neoliberal academia stems from deeper, historically rooted, market-based logics shaping our institutions, increasingly governed by economic values and academic subjectivities therein. As a result, the crisis in higher education is both structural and reproduced through the performative reiteration of values and norms. The performance of neoliberal capitalism, a seed of our current polycrisis, specifically in UK business schools can be seen in the prioritization of output-orientated and performance-centred metrics. Such focus devalues aspects of academic work that sustain our higher education institutions, namely social reproduction in the form of non-commodified emotional and care work. In this essay, we question both the structural conditions in which we, as academics, operate and the performative acts that make productive labour “unproductive”. Building on Butler's conceptualization of performativity and Fraser's social reproduction, we illustrate the tensions arising from the division, dependence and disavowal of social reproduction from economic production in academia and how this may lead to a collapse of the system. Through an act of disciplined imagination, we use cosmological metaphors to illustrate how tensions in the UK neoliberal capitalist academe can be resisted and what regenerative practices can be enacted.