Academic Women in Neoliberal Times


Book Description

This book investigates the gendered dimensions of academic life in the contemporary Australian university. It examines key discourses – most notably academic performativity and identity – through a feminist lens, and scrutinises how discourses of neoliberalism and feminism are entangled in the structure, systems, operations and cultures of the university. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with academic women in Australia, the author uses a mix of experimental methods to emphasise the performative and discursive decisions women make with regard to their academic careers. In doing so, this book reveals how women themselves generate neoliberal and feminist shifts, how they manage the contradictions they produce, and how they carve spaces of influence and authority. Moving towards a re-evaluation of existing discourses, this book offers new insights into gender inequality in the Australian university in neoliberal times.




Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times


Book Description

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka’s War argues that the bloody war fought between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist Tamil Tigers from 1983 to 2009 should be understood as structured and animated by the forces of global capitalism. Using Aihwa Ong’s theorization of neoliberalism as a mobile technology and assemblage, this book explores how contemporary globalization has exacerbated forces of nationalism and racism. Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham finds that ethnographic fictions have both internalized certain colonial Orientalist impulses and critically engaged with categories of objective gazing, empiricism, and temporal distancing. She demonstrates that such fictions take seriously the task of bearing witness and documenting the complex productions of ethnic identities and the devastations wrought by warfare. To this end, Assembling Ethnicities explores colonial-era travel writing by Robert Knox (1681) and Leonard Woolf (1913); contemporary works by Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Shobasakthi, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, and Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan; and cultural festivals and theater, including vernacular performances of Euripides’s The Trojan Women and women workers’ theater. The book interprets contemporary fictions to unpack neoliberalism’s entanglements with nationalism and racism, engaging current issues such as human rights, the pastoral, Tamil militancy, immigrant lives, feminism and nationalism, and postwar developmentalism.




Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times


Book Description

This book is a provocative new study of global feminist activism that opposes neoliberal regimes across several sites including Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States. The feminist performative acts featured in the book contest the aggressive unravelling of collectively won gains in gender, sexual and racial equality, the appearance of new planes of discrimination, and the social consequences of political economies based on free market ideology. The investigations of affect theory follow the circulation of intensities – of political impingements on bodies, subjective and symbolic violence, and the shock of dispossession – within and beyond individuals to the social and political sphere. Affect is a helpful matrix for discussing the volatile interactivity between performer and spectator, whether live or technologically mediated. Contending that there is no activism without affect, the collection brings back to the table the activist and hopeful potential of feminism.




Criminalizing Women


Book Description

Criminalizing Women introduces readers to the key issues addressed by feminists engaged in criminology research over the past four decades. Chapters explore how narratives that construct women as errant females, prostitutes, street gang associates and symbols of moral corruption mask the connections between women s restricted choices and the conditions of their lives."




Sexual Harassment, Psychology and Feminism


Book Description

This book provides a feminist psychological analysis of contemporary resistance to sexual harassment in and around #MeToo. It explores how women’s assumed empowerment in postfeminist and neoliberal feminist discourses has shaped understandings of sexual harassment and social responses to it. This exploration is grounded in the trajectories of feminist activism and psychological theory about sexual harassment. Lazard addresses the gendered binary of female victims and male perpetrators in contemporary victim politics and the treatment of perpetrators within postfeminist and neoliberal frames. In doing so, the author unpacks the cultural conditions which support or deny who gets to speak and be heard in #MeToo politics. This book will be a valuable resource not only for scholars and students from within the psychological sciences and gender studies, but for the wider social sciences and anyone interested in the psychological grounding of the #MeToo movement.




Slow Scholarship


Book Description

A powerful claim for the virtues of a more thoughtful and collegiate approach to the academy today.




Gendered Paradoxes


Book Description

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.




Knowing Victims


Book Description

Knowing Victims explores the theme of victimhood in contemporary feminism and politics. It focuses on popular and scholarly constructions of feminism as ‘victim feminism’ – an ideology of passive victimhood that denies women’s agency – and provides the first comprehensive analysis of the debate about this ideology which has unfolded among feminists since the 1980s. The book critically examines a movement away from the language of victimhood across a wide array of discourses, and the neoliberal replacement of the concept of structural oppression with the concept of personal responsibility. In derogating the notion of ‘victim,’ neoliberalism promotes a conception of victimization as subjective rather than social, a state of mind, rather than a worldly situation. Drawing upon Nietzsche, Lyotard, rape crisis feminism and feminist philosophy, Stringer situates feminist politicizations of rape, interpersonal violence, economic inequality and welfare reform as key sites of resistance to the victim-blaming logic of neoliberalism. She suggests that although recent feminist critiques of ‘victim feminism’ have critically diagnosed the anti-victim movement, they have not positively defended victim politics. Stringer argues that a conception of the victim as an agentic bearer of knowledge, and an understanding of resentment as a generative force for social change, provides a potent counter to the negative construction of victimhood characteristic of the neoliberal era. This accessible and insightful analysis of feminism, neoliberalism and the social construction of victimhood will be of great interest to researchers and students in the disciplines of gender and women’s studies, psychology, sociology, politics and philosophy.




Women Who Work


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Ivanka is donating the unpaid portion of her advance and all future royalties received from Women Who Work to the Ivanka M. Trump Charitable Fund, a donor advised fund that will make grants to organizations that empower and educate women and girls.* "This is a chatty step-by-step guide to living a happy life and getting ahead in a career." —USA Today "The advice is spot-on for everyone, not just women." —Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com and author of Delivering Happiness I believe that when it comes to women and work, there isn’t one right answer. The only person who can create a life you’ll love is you. Our grandmothers fought for the right to work. Our mothers fought for the choice to be in an office or to stay at home. Our generation is the first to fully embrace and celebrate the fact that our lives are multidimensional. Thanks to the women who came before us and paved the way, we can create the lives we want to lead—which look different for each of us. I’ve been fortunate to be able to build my career around my passions, from real estate to fashion. But my professional titles only begin to describe who I am and what I value. I have been an executive and an entrepreneur, but also—and just as importantly—a wife, mother, daughter, and friend. To me, “work” encompasses my efforts to succeed in all of these areas. After appearing on The Apprentice years ago and receiving a flood of letters from young women asking for guidance, I realized the need for more female leaders to speak out publicly in order to change the way society thinks and talks about “women who work.” So I created a forum to do just that. This book evolves the conversation that started on IvankaTrump.com, where so many incredible women (and men!) have shared their experiences, advice, ambitions, and passions. Women who work lead meetings and train for marathons. We learn how to cook and how to code. We inspire our employees and our children. We innovate at our current jobs and start new businesses. Women Who Work will equip you with the best skills I’ve learned from some of the amazing people I’ve met, on subjects such as identifying opportunities, shifting careers smoothly, negotiating, leading teams, starting companies, managing work and family, and helping change the system to make it better for women—now and in the future. I hope it will inspire you to redefine success and architect a life that honors your individual passions and priorities, in a way only you can. * The Ivanka M. Trump Charitable Fund (the “Fund”) is a donor advised fund that supports the economic empowerment of women and girls. Ivanka Trump is the grant advisor to the Fund and sole member of IT WWW Pub, LLC (the “LLC”), which receives royalties from the publication of Women Who Work. The LLC will contribute a minimum $425,000 to the Fund, which is the unpaid portion of the advance, net of expenses. In addition, the LLC will contribute all future royalties it receives that are in excess of the advance to the Fund during the period from May 1, 2017 to May 1, 2022.




Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University


Book Description

This book offers a contemporary account of what it means to inhabit academia as a privilege, risk, entitlement or a failure. Drawing on international perspectives from a range of academic disciplines, it asks whether feminist spaces can offer freedom or flight from the corporatized and commercialized neoliberal university. How are feminist voices felt, heard, received, silenced, and masked? What is it to be a feminist academic in the neoliberal university? How are expectations, entitlements and burdens felt in inhabiting feminist positions and what of 'bad feeling' or 'unhappiness' amongst feminists? The volume consider these issues from across the career course, including from 'early career' and senior established scholars, as these diverse categories are themselves entangled in academic structures, sentiments and subjectivities; they are solidified in, for example, entry and promotion schemes as well as funding calls, and they ask us to identify in particular stages of 'being' or 'becoming' academic, while arguably denying the possibility of ever arriving. It will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of Education, Sociology, and Gender Studies.




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