This article discusses the experience of being an academic in the UK in the contemporary climate of neoliberal capitalism and 'metric power' (Beer 2016). Drawing on existing literature and our own practice, the first portion of the paper explores the relationship between neoliberalism, metrics and knowledge. We then examine how neoliberal mantras and instruments impact the university's structures and processes, and reflect on consequences for the academic self. We take as a starting point the context of increasing workloads and the pressure on academics to excel in multiple roles, from 'world-leading' researchers to 'excellent' teachers and 'service providers' to professional administrators performing recruitment and (self)marketing tasks. Neoliberal academia, we suggest, promotes a meritocratic ideology of individual achievement that frames success and failure as purely personal 'achievements', which encourages a competitive ethos and chronic self-criticism. This article insists that these problems need to be understood in the context of neoliberal policy-making and the corporatisation of knowledge, including funding cuts and grant imperatives, the low status of teaching, the cynical instrumentation of university league tables, and increased institutional reliance on precarious academic labour. The article goes on to focus on responses that resist, challenge or, in some cases, compound, the problems identified in part one. Responses by dissatisfied academics range in style and approach -some decide against an academic career; others adopt a strategy of individual withdrawal within the system by trying to create and protect spaces of independence -for example, by refusing to engage beyond officially required minimums. This article argues that opportunities for positive systemic change can be found in collective efforts to oppose the status quo and to create alternatives for how academic labour is organised. Therein, solidarity can act as an instrument of opposition to the individualisation of the neoliberal academic self.
This article discusses the experience of being an academic in the UK in the contemporary climate of neoliberal capitalism and 'metric power' (Beer 2016). Drawing on existing literature and our own practice, the first portion of the paper explores the relationship between neoliberalism, metrics and knowledge. We then examine how neoliberal mantras and instruments impact the university's structures and processes, and reflect on consequences for the academic self. We take as a starting point the context of increasing workloads and the pressure on academics to excel in multiple roles, from 'world-leading' researchers to 'excellent' teachers and 'service providers' to professional administrators performing recruitment and (self)marketing tasks. Neoliberal academia, we suggest, promotes a meritocratic ideology of individual achievement that frames success and failure as purely personal 'achievements', which encourages a competitive ethos and chronic self-criticism. This article insists that these problems need to be understood in the context of neoliberal policy-making and the corporatisation of knowledge, including funding cuts and grant imperatives, the low status of teaching, the cynical instrumentation of university league tables, and increased institutional reliance on precarious academic labour. The article goes on to focus on responses that resist, challenge or, in some cases, compound, the problems identified in part one. Responses by dissatisfied academics range in style and approach -some decide against an academic career; others adopt a strategy of individual withdrawal within the system by trying to create and protect spaces of independence -for example, by refusing to engage beyond officially required minimums. This article argues that opportunities for positive systemic change can be found in collective efforts to oppose the status quo and to create alternatives for how academic labour is organised. Therein, solidarity can act as an instrument of opposition to the individualisation of the neoliberal academic self.
This article examines the celebrification of drag culture in the USA, and reflects on social media's role therein. This transformation is contextualised historically by charting the evolution of drag media representation from the subversive drag collectives immortalised in arthouse documentaries like The Cockettes (2002) to the emergence of highly-polished, brand-conscious celebrity drag entrepreneurs propelled to fame by the reality television programme RuPaul's Drag Race (2009-).The success of RuPaul's Drag Race (RPDR) has lent drag unprecedented levels of mainstream visibility. In so doing, we argue that RPDR has facilitated drag culture's move from the fringes to the mainstream, and contributed to drag's celebrification. In the second half of the article, we draw on celebrity studies and self-branding literatures to outline the central role that social media have played in the celebrification of drag culture. We also critique the politics this celebrification props up. Through analysis of queen-generated content on social media platforms, and of RPDR transcripts, we home in on the ethics of drag's celebrificationspecifically the ways it supports homonormative narratives of the 'good queer' (Duggan 2003), and delimits the sorts of queer bodies and politics that are acceptable in the mainstream.
Food and digital culture are mutually implicated in contemporary processes of knowledge production and power contestation around the world. Our introduction and the papers in this special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies seek to draw out the distinctions, parallels and overlaps across food and the digital to offer critical insights into digital food culture’s capacities, paradoxes and impacts on everyday life. We ask a series of questions fundamentally focused on issues of power that signal a critical concern for the (re)production and circulation of inequality within the food and digital nexus. For us and the authors here, Cultural Studies is particularly fertile ground from which to analyse digital food culture precisely because of the discipline’s commitment to critiquing power and inequality and its subsequent capacity to illuminate everyday digital food politics and their social, cultural and ethical impacts. This article presents and highlights key questions—and introduces related concepts and theoretical debates—that drive this research agenda. In addition, we address the ways the issue’s papers connect to digital food culture and power after COVID-19. We conclude with a summary of the articles in the issue and their contributions to digital food culture research and cultural studies more broadly.
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