On stepping away from the academic treadmill
This post is written at the start of the academic year 24/5, another year that everyone in academia is approaching with a sense of dread. This is the year in which we are facing institutions’ inability or unwillingness to condemn the genocide that we’ve spent the past year witnessing; their lack of capacity to divest from companies and systems that enable and perpetrate it; their, conversely, willingness and readiness (kudos to exceptions!) to crack down on students and staff who dare to stand up and at least call out the violent collapse of all political norms. Speaking of collapses, we are also witnessing the acceleration of climate collapse, which institutions sometimes pay lip service to, but do little to stop or challenge.
In the UK, what has been described as financial but should in fact be dubbed higher education’s crisis of legitimacy becomes apparent, as institutions introduce redundancies, including cutting the same staff whose publications, careers, or successes they proudly displayed on their home pages; burnout and what has (in another British penchant for euphemism) been dubbed the mental health crisis but in fact should be called necropolitics of academic labour continues to take those ‘lucky’ to escape the cuts; and there is no, absolutely none, conversation about what is it exactly we are doing, how and why, nor where we hope to be in 5, 10, 25 years.
It is also the academic year I will begin working part-time. The reasons for this decision (as for any decision) are complex, but they mostly have to do with coming to terms with what I believe to be the moral, political and, if you wish, ontological implications of the above. The assumption that you should always want more – money, status, publications, prestige – goes by so unquestioned even in parts of the academia that like to think of themselves as critical that willingly and visibly choosing less of any or all of these things tends, at best, to elicit incomprehension; at worst, fantastical hypotheses. In lieu of this, I thought I could share some useful or adaptable1 ideas how to create space between yourself and this context, to enable you to survive it – and, hopefully, generate alternatives that are healing, constructive, and revolutionary, rather than harmful, destructive, and reproductive of the exact same systems of oppression. This means I hope these ideas can be repurposed for whatever circumstances you find yourself in. They are, however, generated from my specific positionality, values, and experience; this means they are unlikely to apply to your situation verbatim, even if we occupy structurally similar positions.
- Refuse forms of recognition and validation that tie you to or make you dependent on exploitative2 institutions.
There are reams and reams of paper written on the neoliberal techniques of measuring, (e)valuating, and fostering competition between people. Somewhat less on the degree to which academics internalize them. We are all guilty of this. I as well, despite investing a lot of effort to counter this tendency, as well as literally having written a PhD on why it happens, and why we cannot see it (yes, academia makes you stupider). The first step in moving away from the grind, then, is refusing to be judged solely or primarily by these optics and metrics, and developing alternative forms of valorisation, justification or, simply, reasons to exist (and I mean, especially for women, forms of valorisation other than care labour).
For my part, refusing institutional (de)valuation was not exactly a choice: my own institution made it perfectly clear where in their hierarchy of human beings I belonged (about 4 spine points or roughly £4,000/annum below men), and then persisted with differential (de)valuation over the next few years. In this kind of situation, you basically have two options. One, you can accept/internalize norms of the institution even when they are arbitrary and discriminatory (as my research demonstrates, intersectional bias will persist even in ‘soft’ evaluations), and either doubt your own competence, or work yourself to death by trying to overperform to reach the standard that differently-bodied, -accented, and/or -skinned (select combo) colleagues satisfy just by existing. Or you can choose to develop an internal (moral, intellectual, whatever you wish to call it) compass and decide what kinds of work, output, and engagement you truly value and find compelling; what kind of topics, causes, and individuals merit your time, and you really have something to contribute to; and, perhaps, what kind of work will make the world a better place. Of course, no-one (or close to no-one) is lucky enough to be able to do only this sort of work; but you can certainly make the decision to limit your dedication to the mechanisms of your own exploitation and channel that energy into something else. Which brings me to (2):
- Restrict the access of exploitative institutions (and individuals) to your time and energy.
This, for the purposes of this post, can primarily be coded as time and energy invested in intellectual labour, but the logic is transposable to emotional labour (hint: that one friend who always expects you to help them navigate life’s dramas) or cognitive labour (hint: the amount of time you spend scrolling on social media, both generating income for digital platforms and training their or third-party algorithms – hence labour – and literally expanding energy, both by directing attention and actually consuming resources, from electricity to food and water).
As Marxist political economy teaches us, the nature of capitalism is such that it must generate profit (something it is increasingly failing at). In order to do this, it must extract more and more of your work for at least the same if not lower wage. This means that, even if nominally your working hours remain the same, you are – quite likely – working more. Furthermore, due to the nature of academic labour, it is relatively easy for this work to colonize other aspects of your life. As I’ve written before, your interest in, say, disability justice may be objectively independent of your relationship to your employer. But if a) your increasing awareness of disability justice can be converted into ‘EDI’; b) you will be using it to teach, publish, or cite in any way that reproduces academic capital (for instance, by publishing in peer-reviewed journals, or citing academic publications); c) you will be reading in your own spare time (does your workload feature an allowance for reading or ‘scholarship’?); in other words, if any or all of these apply – congratulations, your employer is benefitting from free labour. Yours.
As the example(s) above demonstrates, it is almost impossible to remain in a paid relationship and not be subject to this form of exploitation. This is why this is about restricting, not refusing entirely; of course, if you are entirely independent of paid (or waged) labour, that’s great, but is not the reality for most people. Restricting can take a variety of forms (needless to say, they are not mutually exclusive). One pretty standard form is so-called ‘working to contract’, where employees refuse to perform work or tasks outside of those specified in their contract. Members of UCU in the UK have practised working to contract as part of Action Short of A Strike in a series of recent industrial actions pertaining to pay and pensions (viciousness with which some universities have responded to ASOS is a sad reflection of how much working above contractual obligations has become normalized). Another is ‘quiet quitting’, which had become a buzzword reflecting the growing realization that, to borrow the title of Sarah Jaffe’s brilliant book, work won’t love you back (on why not to quit quietly on some other occasion).
But even just (‘just’) saying no assiduously to demands that overstep that boundary works. This isn’t about being ‘selfish’, or prioritizing own gain (academia gives you plenty of opportunities for that). Very simply, when faced with a demand, ask: who does this serve? What purpose does it serve? Is this a purpose I can get behind? What is the best way in which I can contribute to this purpose? My guess is that, in some contexts at least, you will begin to see that the purpose you believe you are contributing to – for instance, making the world a better place – is better served through other forms of engagement (if it’s not, great, you’re lucky). Which brings me to (3):
- Redirect the labour time, resources, and energy into something else – ideally something that does not serve the reproduction of capitalism.
Now, of course, many people do work two jobs – including two full- (or close to full-) time jobs – either because this is the only way they can make ends meet or because what they are actually passionate or care about does not really pay (or not yet, or not enough). Equally revered and reviled – depending which side of neoliberalism you fall on – this approach is often contrasted with the security of a full-time job. Under traditional conditions of industrial capitalism, this, of course, makes some sense: a full-time permanent job equalled protections for pay through collective bargaining, benefits, pension and sick leave (and even health insurance, in some cases); in socialism, it even meant collective holidays or access to specific holiday sites (known as ‘corporate perks’ in capitalism); and, of course, it also meant – at least for those working in organizations that are not authoritarian or top-down – the possibility to work together for a future, in other words, to collectively decide what the organization was meant to be about (the meaning of co-op).
I certainly do not need to rehash all the reasons why this is no longer the case. But in addition to oft-repeated diagnoses like ‘neoliberalism’, “Thatcher” or “Toreeeys”, another element appears: the fact that even absent some of these conditions (neoliberalism is visibly dying, though it is hell-bent on taking you with it) few people have the energy, willingness or vision to build a world that’s more than just a dusted-off version of the old one with, you know, slightly better tech (NHS with in-app prescriptions or good pensions with access to online banking).
This has been the slowest and possibly most painful realization for me since moving permanently to the UK, some ten years ago. Most people’s imagination of alternatives is so depleted that the best it can come up with is a slightly less terrible version of the existing order, if not a return to its earlier form (something proponents of geoengineering and other technosolutions realize). Mark Fisher, who had the quirk for being a canary in the mine, encapsulated it well in the sentence “capitalist realism”. But it’s not (even) that the steady colonization of the lifeworld by forms of economic exchange has proceeded to the degree that few people are able to imagine alternatives; it’s that I strongly suspect they would not know what to do with them.
The problem with alternatives, as you learn if you grow up in (real) socialism and/or live in communities that share labour equitably, is that they are not perfect, and they also require hard work. Visions of a post-capitalist utopia where all work is performed by machines are both ludicrous and unsustainable (if nothing else, in terms of climate-wrecking resource extraction). This work, at times, can feel as uninspiring and as gruelling as in capitalism (let’s be honest, no-one likes cleaning toilets); if it is just and equitable, there are no unseen ‘others’ – migrants, women, underpaid research assistants, good citizens – to offload it to. For a lot of people, the preferred option then begins to be selectively shutting your eyes and pretending not to see your own implication in reproducing these systems, whilst making meek pronouncements about commitments to social justice or equality or even the good of non-human others, providing it can be safely done from the safety of your own home, Netflix and Amazon accounts, and Deliveroo meals.
What I want to propose as an antidote to this loss of a world-building capacity is a version of what James Scott dubbed a while ago ‘anarchist calisthenics’, but with a twist. Instead of imagining challenges to authority/status quo, I believe we must, every single day, engage in practising existing differently. I also think this need not (necessarily) take the form of ‘transgression’ or violation; many ways of existing differently are not explicitly proscribed. Perhaps we could dub this ‘existentialist calisthenics‘.
One way to start practising existing differently is engaging in simple acts of not contributing to capitalist reproduction. For instance: instead of going ‘shopping’, go for a walk, but not with an intention or purpose or to ‘exercise’ or to ‘think better’. Just walk. Or do nothing: as Jenny Oddell among others has written, not succumbing to the dictate of constant busyness can be surprisingly difficult for people who got used to being constantly plugged into the digital capitalist machinery (I recently learned that zoomers have become so unaccustomed to, as Pascal would have put it, coexisting with their own thoughts that apparently there is a term for not distracting yourself endlessly during car or plane rides – ‘rawdogging’.)
For instance: instead of spending the weekend preparing for the work ahead, or doomscrolling in an attempt to postpone this work, sleep. Or hang out with friends. Or go to a library and pick up a random book, spend ten minutes reading it, and then return it to the shelf. Do this several times over. Do not do this in order to “select one to take out” or “inform yourself about” or “see what else is new in”. Do it without purpose. The whole point is to break the cycle of ‘usefulness’ or ‘purposefulness’, which has, for most people, come to stand for ‘service to the capitalist economy’. You don’t necessarily need to go to the lengths of spending the weekend painting banners or distributing meals to the homeless or protesting the war in Palestine (though, as you learn to reclaim some of your personal time from the circuits of production, you may find out that there are more worthy ways of investing it than doomscrolling or spending money).
Making a conscious decision not to invest your energy and time into something that feeds the system, and to redirect it into something that does not, is the first step off the treadmill. It is, of course, even better if you do something that helps other people, non-humans, and causes, even if it’s a tiny thing: plant some flowers, pet a cat, chat to a person in the street. These small acts of redirection – out and away from the circuit of capitalism and into something else – will help sustain your ‘world-building capacity’, your ability not only to dream about a different world (which we are all prone to doing, given how terrible the one we inhabit is), but to begin to create it.
P.S. It’s important to note that I believe these three steps need to go together, and in sequence: just refusing the validation systems, methods and ceremonies of capitalism (How much do you earn? How many followers do you have? How thin, or coiffed, or made-up – by which we mean, how much money have you spent on looking it – are you? How successfully do you perform the usually unpaid labour of care, either by parenting, or cleaning, cooking, or just making capitalism look nicer?) will probably leave you feeling empty or lacking purpose (plus, possibly, deflated, once you realize how much of your life has been dedicated to them). Just restricting your expenditure on capitalist forms of (re)production will probably leave you with a much larger volume of time and energy, which is obviously fine – most of us have been so wrung out by constant competitive demands of capitalist overwork that everyone can benefit from a bit of extra time to recover, heal, and care for oneself. After that, however, you will probably feel the need to channel that energy somewhere. Old work demands will be quick to offer you relief from the shocking freedom of your own time. Redirecting this time and energy – even if it’s 10 minutes each day or one hour every month – into something that serves dismantling these oppressive systems, or helps other humans/non-humans, or the planet – will both make it easier for other people to exit them, and for you to resist being sucked back in.
More about how to do that in some future post. For the time being, start practising.
- I would ask you to suspend, if only for the time it takes you to read this post, the impulse to think about all the ways in which we are different (“easy for you, you don’t have children” or “maybe you can do that, you don’t have a student loan” or even “ah but it’s different for those in Russell Group institutions”), and focus on what we might have in common – or what, despite differences, you can use to create your own version. I move to these, however, I want to clarify two major structural affordances, which we do not discuss enough: migration status and finance.
Migration status: migrants on Skilled Worker (Tier 2) visa in the UK are required to work full time, for a single employer. This is the visa I have been on since I started working at Durham, having switched from Tier 4 (Doctoral Extension Scheme, which has a similar set of rules).
On a Tier 2 visa, your right to reside in the country is dependent on your employment status, which is dependent on your employer. So, for instance, if you lose your job – or for any reason, for instance, injury or partial disability, become unable to perform it on a full-time basis – your right to exist in the UK is automatically terminated. You are also not eligible for benefits, as the little sentence “no recourse to public funds” reminds you. In the eventuality that, say, you contracted Covid in the course of doing your job, developed long Covid, and as a consequence became incapable of working full-time, you would receive a kind letter from the Home Office giving you about ten days to leave the country. This, obviously, puts migrant workers into a slightly disadvantaged position. This is in addition to financial inequality (visa application fees, which few academic employers cover, plus the Immigration Health Surcharge, which, to the best of my knowledge, none do, mean that every single migrant worker is by definition between £2,500 and £5,000 poorer than their hypothetical non-migrant counterpart hired on the same salary – and that’s if they don’t have dependents). It also, needless to say, makes the stakes in retaining our jobs – assuming they even meet the minimum income threshold for Tier 2 visas – quite high.
In 2023, I switched to the Global Talent visa, which has a wider scope of flexibility in terms of employment (in itself a telling reflection of UK’s tiered immigration system), after which I became eligible for Indefinite Leave to Remain, the legal resident status that gives one similar rights to full citizens. The sheer feeling of relief came as a surprise even to me – I had not realized, up until that point, how much anxiety I had carried around my immigration status; as a relatively privileged, white, highly educated and securely employed person, I always compared myself with migrants in significantly less secure positions. Now, as anyone who has worked with me will testify, I am hardly the type to not raise their voice when something is unjust or can be made more equitable. But the difference that knowing I am not legally indentured to my employer made came as a shock, not least because it really made me re-appraise the absence of agency among people who did not have the same kind of legal constraint.
Financial. In summer of 2024, I was promoted to Associate Professor. This meant I was able to drop my working hours without a significant loss of income (though, of course, I did not know this would happen at the point when I chose to reduce my working hours). It also, of course, means I forfeited the additional salary. I had done similar things before, on several occasions; one included leaving a prestigious tenure-track postdoc (in Denmark) to pursue a second PhD (on a doctoral stipend); the other involved leaving a tenured position (in Belgrade) for, initially, a visiting fellowship (at an international university in Hungary). On how to plan for this, what to do, or what not to do, on some other occasion. At this point, one thing worth remembering is that a chunk of your expenditure is probably oriented towards mitigating the effects of (over)work. As Benjamin Franklin has said, whenever faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty; otherwise, you end up with neither. ↩︎
We could spend another 10,000 words just on discussing the meaning of ‘exploitative’ (as with any other term, which I use casually, this being a blog post). If you’re interested in exegesis of concepts, try my academic work. Given that this isn’t academic work, I would say that ‘exploitative’ does not apply to just about any relationship where you give more than you receive (clearly – in some cases, such as parenting, reciprocity is impossible), but to any relationship that tries to extract more than you had committed to, are contractually obliged to, and had agreed to give (of course, ‘agreed to’ involves a lot of variation, depending whether we see choice and consent in purely liberal or a bit more nuanced terms).
In this sense, exploitative institutions are institutions that, for instance, normalize invisible labour and keep it invisibilized (see: care). Exploitative systems are systems that make your participation in them (for instance, capitalist economy) conditional on willingness to accept some forms of exploitation, regardless of whether done by you or to you, or, frequently, both (see: white feminism and outsourcing of care to migrant, often ethnically-minoritised women, for instance).
Let me be clear: I don’t think all forms of labour – perhaps even under capitalism, which is a system based on exploitation – need to be exploitative. But I think most are. I also do not think (despite the academic tendency to allocate all responsibility to “management”) that exploitative relations are limited (or necessary) to explicitly hierarchical relationships. You can have non-exploitative supervisors, and you can have exploitative peers and even (though this is rare in hierarchical systems) ‘juniors’. Nor are organizations, institutions or collectives exploitative by necessity. However, under contemporary capitalism, many are. It should also, at least by now, go without saying that certain characteristics mean you are more likely to be seen as exploitable, including by people who may nurture perfectly equitable relations with others. ↩︎
Jana Bacevic 