Vulnerabilities, complicities and injustices: ‘Timadical’ actions for change in the neoliberal academy

Early career academics face their own particular set of issues when it comes to struggling with the neoliberal university. In this note, we consider how our responses to the neoliberalization of academia – whether in teaching, research or other activities – promote justice or not. Rather than theorize justice in the abstract, our goal is to tease apart the injustices, vulnerabilities and complicities of our workplaces. We draw upon our individual experiences, which span six institutions across six countries, to explore how mundane choices and everyday actions might enable us to resist the neoliberal pressures on our work and our labour. We do this by acknowledging that there is a real possibility that we come to embody neoliberalism in our choices, decisions and habits. That is, we are disciplined and become self-disciplining in turn, in order to survive. We explore this tension through a series of experiential vignettes that help to frame our everyday resistance as ‘tim-adical’ action, both radical and timid at the same time.