Flourishing in Community

• In Event: Cultivating Transdisciplinary Educational Research Through Dialogic Reflexivity: Facets of Theory and Practice

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This presentation addresses what it means to be productive and vulnerable while in community. I grapple with neoliberal notions of productivity and optimization. I suggest, through the example of learning together in the form of a workshop, that we can resist neoliberalism by prioritizing being in community. I further address how vulnerability can be a form of resistance to neoliberalism.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
I am informed by critiques of the dominant neoliberal ethos that has permeated academia (e.g., Olssen & Peters, 2005). I define neoliberalism as a philosophical and political orientation toward public spending mandating peak efficiency and market logics (Author, forthcoming; Brown, 2015). Further, neoliberalism has tangible impacts on the way individuals are forced to be maximally productive in contemporary society. In a neoliberal view, all of education and academic educational results has to be both quantified and quantifiable in order to be productive (Johnson, 2018). Instead, I ask how we can be vulnerable in academic spaces.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
I use a thinking with theory approach in this presentation (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). I analyze my/our experience and my interpretation of the collective experience in conversation with anti-neoliberal scholars to problematize and critique what productivity ought to look like and what it means to be vulnerable in a scholarly space (Levin, 2017).

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Materials come from the two-day dialogic reflexivity workshop in which I and colleagues from various corners of education and psychology came together to address what it means to do truly interdisciplinary work in a theoretically-rich and vulnerable manner. Further, we were grounded in both theory and our own experiences existing in a neoliberal academic culture. This presentation reflects on this experience and also troubles the idea of productivity and suggests instead a place of flourishing, care, and vulnerability (Author, 2020; Mehrotra, 2021; Rose, 2010).

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
As a result of being in community, we produced texts, art, drawings, what we lovingly called a murder board, Google Docs pages, and our own notes. In this piece, I sit with the tensions of documenting and describing what we produced but aware that it is neoliberalism that encourages us to make every minute productive (Masta, 2022). I wonder: does work have to do anything? I deliberately leave this tension unresolved.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
I argue that although neoliberalism encourages everyone in the academy to focus on how to optimize and maximize every minute of every day in service of the productivity machine, it is possible to resist and say no. We can be un-neoliberal by questioning why scholarship needs to be effortful and its products visible. We can still, however, do things by what. I suggest how vulnerability can inform our scholarship. I hope this piece can encourage scholars to reclaim their time for themselves and redefine what it means to be productive while still being vulnerable.

Author

• Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley, Baylor University
  Presenting Author