Introduction: Queer sharing in the marketized university

Abstract

The global pandemic has brought questions of our shared states, including the state of The University, into sharp relief. In and around the academy, we share states of exhaustion and inequality but also states of care and politicization. To say "we share" is to evoke, simultaneously, these contradictory states of passive and active connection, of ambient and intentional being in community. In this volume, the University is the site of that double sense of sharing, a paradox made more confounding because our different "shares" overlap and are not always easy to distinguish, as the phrase "work fatigue" suggests. The University has navigated COVID-19 restriction by exploiting and marketizing this blur, promoting online learning "communities" and "flexible" work practices while locking down campuses and imposing more stringent visas regulations. At the same time, forms of refusal and resistance, such as strikes and other unionized actions, social media call outs over the normalization of over-work, and resignations due to changing working conditions continue as a shared and frustratingly repeated pattern across our educational institutions. In this collection we ask, In what ways and for whom do we share in the University, and how might we share otherwise?

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https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/81837/