ICS Seminar Series - Associate Professor Rae Dufty-Jones, Professor Jamie Peck and Ms Tegan Bergan
Date: Thursday, 1 April 2021
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: The seminar will be held online via zoom. Please RSVP to email yan.wang@westernsydney.edu.au by 5:00pm Wednesday, 31 March, to receive the zoom link.
Making space to write in the ‘Covid-normal’ neoliberal university
Presenters: Associate Professor Re Dufty-Jones, Professor Jamie Peck and Ms Tegan Bergan
Abstract
Writing is integral to our performance as scholars. The quality of our writing forms a yard-stick by which our colleagues, institutions and profession evaluate us. Yet our research writing is more than our individual ‘cultural capital’. Rather, scholarly writing is a technology that can have significant epistemological (how do we know) and ontological (what exists) impacts on people and places. That is, writing not only allows us to develop knowledges about communities and environments; it also diffractively creates, materially and socially, those same entities.
Cycling back to the individual, writing can generate deep pleasure, feelings of fulfilment and accomplishment be an outlet for creativity and even allow us to craft (however fleeting) moments of order out of chaos. At the same time, our writing practices are also titrated by the multiple institutional pressures brought to bear on the production and value of research writing. In the contemporary university, research writing has become increasingly metricized and part of complex calculations that are used to measure individual, disciplinary and institutional ‘worth’. Meanwhile, ceaseless, hyperbolic pressures to publish, to publish in the ‘right’ journals, and to be ‘impactful’, contribute to the wider crisis of mental health in the academy affecting both students and staff alike.
The above matters regarding the politics of research writing have culminated amidst the present Coronavirus pandemic: a time in which we grapple with research ambitions while shifting to online teaching delivery; juggle working-from-home alongside diverse caring responsibilities. With the well-being of ourselves, colleagues, students and our institutions at stake, this panel-based seminar considers the critical juncture at which we find ourselves.
Reflecting on these circumstances, four panellists in this ICS-Seminar will present their perspectives around the following questions: three panellists in this ICS-Seminar will present their perspectives around following questions:
- What are the current challenges in making ‘space’ (metaphorically and materially) for our research writing in the ‘Covid-normal’ neoliberal university? What strategies have you employed or observed in response to these challenges?
- How do we challenge (indeed should we challenge) current institutional politics that position individualized, competitive and metricized technologies as the best means of achieving excellence in research writing? And, what should they be replaced with?
- How might we harness the epistemological and ontological possibilities of our scholarly writing going forward?
Biography
Associate Professor Rae Dufty-Jones is an economic and social geographer in the School of Social Sciences at WSU. She is currently the Co-Lead of the 'Sustainable and Prosperous' Theme in the NSW Public Policy Institute and President of the Geographical Society of NSW.
Professor Jamie Peck is an economic geographer with interests in labour studies, state restructuring and the political economy of neoliberalization. He is Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and a Global Professorial Fellow at WSU’s Institute for Culture and Society.
Ms Tegan Bergan is a PhD candidate in the School of Social Sciences at WSU. Tegan is completing a PhD that explores co-living housing – a new form of shared housing. Tegan is interested in how housing acts as an infrastructural mooring that iteratively shapes markets, materialities and governance.
