To Be Liked: On the Politics and Ethics of Likeability

• In Event: Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Discipline and Resistance in Education: On the Limits and Possibilities of Teachers and Other Subjectivities

Abstract

This paper offers an engagement with the politics and ethics of likeability. We ask what it means to be "liked" by someone - such as a hiring committee (a job candidate), or one’s students (a teacher). What is the role of “being liked” and “being like others” in educational institutions? This strikes us as particularly pressing as MOOCs gain speed (and funding) and the reality that academia is moving to a temporary worker model characterized by disempowered adjunct labor which is cheap and perhaps more compelled toward likability in order to survive. The paper utilizes philosophical and historical argumentation indebted to feminist, queer, and poststructural theories that allow us to look both at the material conditions and issues of discourse.

Authors

• Adam Joseph Greteman, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

• Kevin Burke, University of Notre Dame