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Assembling disruptive practice in the neoliberal university: an ethics of care

ABSTRACT We document and interrogate our collective experimentation with disruptive academic practices as early- and mid-career women researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand. We grapple with our disruptions and attempted interventions to do academic work differently. We find that, in our efforts to resist, and attempts to promote different norms within a neoliberal university setting, we exercise a commitment to care: for colleagues, students, our friends, families and selves. This ethic of care emerged as we interrogated our gendered experiences in a set of experimental interventions designed to disrupt gendered neoliberal practices. These interventions – the formation of a national Women and Gender Geographies Research Network (2013), an interactive seminar (2015), and a panel session at the New Zealand Geographical Society Conference (2016) – generated different experiences of living, working, and relating in academic spaces. In productively disrupting, we learned the value of collectives to generate momentum and build solidarity, and the importance of creating safe spaces for sharing experiences. Our experiments emphasize that mutual trust, especially within our collective, is critical to progress. The interventions’ generative work privileged other forms of labour and fostered an active and equitable (knowledge) community in which practices of care for diverse academic communities and ourselves were paramount.