Reclaiming failure in geography: Academic honesty in a neoliberal world

Davies, Thom; Disney, Tom; Harrowell, Elly

doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100769

Cited by 30 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…In this paper, we tell the story of this failed attempt at transdisciplinary community economy action-research, helping us reflect on the value of professional, methodological and institutional failure (Davies et al, 2021;Lorne, 2021). We seek to fill a gap in current research on urban commoning by providing new insights into how specific qualities of urban ecosystems may variously help or hinder their endogenous development, and we argue that the "city as commons" approach (Foster and Iaione, 2016) potentially works best within an ecosystemic climate of trust, solidarity, and hope that is shared by all stakeholders.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Commoning Under Adverse Conditions: Lessons From a Failed Transdisciplinary Project

Zielke

Hepburn

Thompson

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Cities

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While the commons and commoning are generally associated with community-based ecosystems at the localised scale of the neighbourhood, ambitious reinterpretations explore possibilities for scaling up commoning as a collaborative and sustainable form of urban governance engaging multiple stakeholders through the quintuple helix. Inspired by the City as Commons approach first imagined and formulated in Bologna, Italy, this paper presents original findings from a transdisciplinary action research project for studying and cultivating commoning-as-governance in a politically disaffected and economically marginalised inner-city neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. It examines the social relations (re)constituting an urban ecosystem for commoning and asks how such initiatives for designing collaborative programmes for transforming urban environments through public-common partnerships might work in contexts in which the material and affective resources for commoning have been exhausted by post-democratic privatisation and neoliberal austerity. Drawing on theories of radical democracy and post-politics, the City as Commons approach is critically evaluated and argued to be insufficient to the challenging task of engendering commoning in the disintegrating urban neighbourhoods that would arguably benefit most from such activities. The paper tells the story of how this transdisciplinary project ultimately failed in its aims and, through engagement with recent interventions on the politics of failure in the neoliberal university, reflects on the implications for future action research on commoning.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Commoning Under Adverse Conditions: Lessons From a Failed Transdisciplinary Project

Zielke

Hepburn

Thompson

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Cities

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“…Blogs and social media have been similarly adopted to innovate collaborative writing practices and dialogues. 6 Ligamented by an 'ethic of care', the above approaches challenge the institutional politics of research writing by shining a critical light on the 'win-at-all-costs' academic cultures that valorize and reward academic practices of individualization and competition (Davies et al, 2021;McDowell, 2004). As Lawson (2007: 1) notes, care ethics also allow such interventions to move 'beyond critique and towards the construction of new forms of relationships, institutions and action that enhance mutuality and well-being'.…”

Section: Responding To the Institutional Politics Of Research Writing...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our research writing has become structured as a value-generating labor task undertaken as workers within a (proto-capitalist) labor process (Berg et al, 2016). Furthermore, long-held practices and values of scholarly writing – such as rigour, excellence and peer review – have become colonized and are reflexively used as a means of generating a ‘maximum return’ to universities via a system of elevated expectations, growing surveillance and eroding rights (Davies et al, 2021). Our relationship to research writing has become both more calculative and confounding.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making space to write ‘care-fully’: Engaged responses to the institutional politics of research writing

Dufty‐Jones

Gibson

2021

Progress in Human Geography

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As pressures around academic writing mount, human geographers have developed critical strategies to resist and rework the institutional politics of research writing. Overlooked, until now, is the role of pedagogy. We advance an engaged pedagogy of research writing and use this concept to propose three practical strategies: (1) understanding writing as social practice; (2) reimagining the temporalities of writing; and, (3) reimagining the spatialities of writing. We argue that an engaged pedagogical approach expands the possibilities of how human geographers can critically and practically respond to the institutional politics of research writing.

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“…The problem starts from the profoundly diverse (and often not explicitly stated) epistemic assumptions and what counts as impact (ibid ). However, under pressure to avoid failure (Davies et al, 2021), and achieve the maximum impact of measurable output, academics may be led to blindly chase any kind of creativity that sets them apart, without asking important questions such as "who benefits and loses […] and how this can be justified" (Turnhout, 2018, p. 368). In other words, as the individual researcher strives to survive in an increasingly demanding and competitive "industry", the risk is that their mobilization of creative methods exacerbates the problems they intend to address, rather than providing a solution.…”

Section: The Values Of Managerial Knowledge Production Don't Bite the Hand That Funds Youmentioning

confidence: 99%

Painting Outside the Lines: Transgressing the Managerial University, Avoiding Forced Creativity

Leitheiser

Vezzoni

Hakkarainen

2021

Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship

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This chapter aims to put creative methods into the context of wider trends in university institutions. As managerialism—here understood as the application of corporate values and practices into all sectors of society—continues to play a large role in the production and creation of knowledge, we argue that creative methods have the potential to either subvert or reinforce these trends. We see the entrenchment of managerialism as contradictory to the stated aims of the application of creative methods in knowledge production. In an attempt to avoid this, we provide a picture and discuss the institutional framework in which creative methods are deployed to understand and critique the values and practices of managerialism in academia. We point towards the constraints it places on those who wish to take a creative approach. First, we provide an historical accounting of how managerial values have contributed to de-politicization in the wider public sphere, with a particular focus on academia. Second, we outline the fundamental properties of the managerial university, summarized as: (i) accountability, (ii) competition, and (iii) obedience. Third, we sketch out a definition of forced creativity and illustrate two applied cases of how it might look in practice: “artwashing” and “funding tricks”. This section is meant to contribute to defining “truly” creative methods by spelling out what they are not. Finally, we summarize our main points and provide future directions of discussion.

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Reclaiming failure in geography: Academic honesty in a neoliberal world

Cited by 30 publications

References 43 publications

Urban Commoning Under Adverse Conditions: Lessons From a Failed Transdisciplinary Project

Urban Commoning Under Adverse Conditions: Lessons From a Failed Transdisciplinary Project

Making space to write ‘care-fully’: Engaged responses to the institutional politics of research writing

Painting Outside the Lines: Transgressing the Managerial University, Avoiding Forced Creativity

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