This study investigates the erosion of academic freedom in neoliberal universities, focusing on the concept of “voluntary servitude” as a mechanism through which academics actively, albeit unconsciously, contribute to their own subjugation. Moving beyond an individual perspective, the work examines how shared affective dynamics, such as collusion, perpetuate this condition. Drawing on a qualitative study with Italian academics in the WOP field, the findings reveal that freedom is often perceived as the absence of constraints: a personal privilege attained through career progression. Three pathways to so-called “emancipation” emerge: the gift, betrayal, and merit. These patterns take the form of pathological collusion that reinforces servitude by satisfying needs for recognition and protection, while obscuring structural inequalities and the erosion of the common good. The study argues that one way forward lies in collective reflexivity, a practice that enables the recognition and transformation of such dysfunctional patterns. The aim is to reimagine academic freedom not as an individual achievement but as a “freedom with,” grounded in shared responsibility, interdependence, and plurality, thereby transcending neoliberal paradigms.
This article reflects on unresolved affective tensions in the field, not as failures or impasses but as analytical tools for (un)doing research. Shifting from a distant and detached analysis of my interlocutors’ narratives towards a decentred account of myself, I trace my disorientations, discomforts and troubles in encounters with queer refugees and asylum seekers. Through this ephemeral self-accounting, I approach the self as an aporetic, political and theoretical space of (un)becoming, examining how (non-)normativities emerged in my PhD research and how I navigated them while oscillating between affirmation and resistance. From this autotheoretical standpoint, and in confronting the inescapability of discursivity, I write through uncertainties, ambivalences and affective conflicts, approaching writing not as closure or as a constraint to ‘write what we already know’ but as an invitation to relate and (un)learn through the performative act of writing itself.
In this response paper, I begin by carefully engaging with the concerns raised during the symposium “Reclaiming the Publicness of Education” at the Nordic Education Research Association (NERA) conference held in Helsinki, Finland, in March 2025. I do so by highlighting key issues addressed by each of the contributing authors in relation to these concerns. Drawing inspiration from psychoanalytical theory (Lacan, 1997; McGowan, 2024) and political philosophy (Sloterdijk, 2016), I then reflect on how publicness—as a vital realm in education—can be conceptualized and embraced as central to what makes education educational. In this regard, I draw on notions of alienation, emancipation, and displacement. Importantly, I do not approach publicness as a shared realm in a positive, socio-symbolic sense within education. Rather, I argue for a conception of publicness as a space where subjects—understood as whatever-beings (singular subjects) without fixed determinations and beyond identities—can share their negativities (experiences of non-belonging, lack, and absence) in common. This, I contend, opens up possibilities for restructuring—and even a disruption—of the unequal socio-symbolic order that is typically foreclosed. This foreclosure, I posit, stems from, for example, the fixation of this order around dominant symbolic positions and identities, which tend to contaminate public realms with private interests in education.
Dion Rüsselbaek Hansen· Philosophical Inquiry in Edu...· 0 citations
One ongoing theme in management theory focuses on mitigating the dehumanizing effects of organizational systems and related forms power over employees. Perhaps paradoxically, the alienating tendencies of neoliberalism resulted in various humanist and emancipatory theories intended to mitigate that alienation, which operate in a way that almost exclusively benefits the organization and subtly yet profoundly subjugates the worker. Critiques of contemporary management theory and practice, most notably by critical management studies and psychoanalytic theory, made important contributions in revealing many of the pernicious mechanisms and resulting effects of human relations approaches. However, in our assessment these critiques still struggle to respond to the emergent socioeconomic and political structures of neoliberalism. As an alternative, this article considers Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) work on faciality in order to re-examine the form and function of those structures in a way that explains their perniciousness and suggests that there is a space within those structures for a more liberated form of subjectivity.
Eric K. Austin, Ryan Rouse· Tamara: Journal for Critical...· 1 citation
This article conceptualises research as an act of hope, framing inquiry as a creative and liminal space where meaning is continually negotiated. Drawing on Ernst Bloch's philosophy, I understand this liminality as a refusal of closure, a generative site where the unfinished and the possible are allowed to take form. Within this space, non-identities emerge, destabilising normative categories and expanding the imagination toward what has not yet been realised. By situating this liminal space through autobiographical memory, I interrogate the complexities of selfhood and the inner-discursive processes that shape and complicate immigrant subjectivity. Through the interplay of inner and outer worlds, autoethnographic writing becomes a mode of inquiry that allows me to interpret the ordinary body as a site of memory, rupture, and potential. This process of re-remembering – of stitching together fragments of past and present – constitutes new forms of knowledge. In this context, hopefulness becomes an ontological force, an affective orientation that resists the finality of singular meaning and opens a transformative space for reimagining the self. It is an imaginative response to the contradictions of the present, carrying anticipatory elements that challenge dominant narratives and invite collective reflection. In embracing autoethnography as a method of critique, this article offers a politically charged vision of research as both resistance and possibility. It foregrounds the transformative power of imagination, narrative, and symbolic form to reconfigure how we understand ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. Research as hope – demanding reflexive ethics – affirms the necessity of the indefinable, the spaciousness required for becoming, and the radical openness of living with uncertainty. Research, in this sense, is not merely a reflection of the world as it is but a utopian impulse that gestures toward alternative futures. It is an enduring act of writing against erasure and the invisible forms of rejection that shape our everyday lives.
“Traffic anxiety” has become a collective psychic condition among digital content producers. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis as its theoretical framework, this article conceptualizes “traffic” (viewership metrics) as objet petit a, arguing that it is constructed under the gaze of the algorithmic “big Other” as an ever-escaping object-cause of desire. After clarifying the functional division of labor between objet petit a and surplus jouissance, it further introduces the distinction between phallic jouissance and the jouissance of the Other, providing theoretical resources for understanding different subtypes of traffic anxiety. The article then theoretically articulates five mechanisms at work in traffic anxiety: frustration anxiety arising from blocked libidinal investment, castration panic under the threat to symbolic identification, the somatization and social displacement of anxiety, repetition compulsion within a temporal structure, and the failure of defense mechanisms and deepening of self-exploitation. Rather than offering empirical validation, the study deploys a theoretical-interpretive design in which autoethnographic diaries serve as an exemplary case that renders a psychic structure legible, while findings from existing qualitative and quantitative literature are drawn upon as corroborating context. The theoretical contribution of this article lies in demonstrating that traffic anxiety reflects a deeper reorganization of the economy of desire by digital platforms—a restructuring that shapes laborers’ subjectivity at the unconscious level, extending platform exploitation beyond the appropriation of labor products to the depletion of laborers’ very libidinal production.
Israel’s war on Gaza has prompted a wave of protests against human rights violations that has spread across most European countries. As universities have become arenas of contestation, there has been an increase in forms of repression of academic freedom and of political rights within academia. Our systematic, case-oriented analysis of an original database enables us to identify specific repertoires of repression employed by different institutions, as well as the characteristics of the targeted academics. By comparing Germany and the United States as case studies of high and increasing levels of repression—albeit characterized by differing systems of higher education and conceptions of academic freedom—we analyze the strategies used by these actors and how they interact. In this article, we focus on the mechanisms through which repression has been promoted, anchored in a resignification of antisemitism that treats it as distinct from racism and accords it a special status in the defense of Western civilization. We use the concept of moral panic to analyze the construction of a narrative that portrays a specific challenge to society’s fundamental values, which has resulted in the scapegoating of the Left and migrants. We also identify the main moral panic entrepreneurs responsible for the creation of this environment both within and outside universities.
S. Doğan, Donatella della Porta, F. Alagna· Perspectives on Politics· 0 citations
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