Compelled to Care: Academic Work in a Mother-Fucking Dystopian Hellscape

• In Event: Fabulating Futures With Academic Mothers: Provocations for Higher Education

Abstract

Objective/Purpose: This feminist speculative fiction (e.g., Haraway, 2016) imagines how ‘care’ can/does/will go wrong when neoliberal institutions seek accountability for care work. Our purpose is to provoke and evoke – to unsettle the assumed goodness of ‘care,’ to illuminate dystopian horrors of education policy-making and enforcement, and to caution against present and future policy trajectories of care in a vivid and all-too-relatable account of care-gone-wrong.

Perspectives: We draw on Haraway’s (2016) caring in kinship, Ahmed’s (2014) caring as socially and materially productive, and Berlant’s cruel optimism (2011) to invent a world where universities have, without irony, put into action (and policy) the Care Manifesto’s (2020) vision: “Universal care means that care – in all its various manifestations – is our priority not only in the domestic sphere but all spheres!” (p. 19).

Modes of Inquiry: We composed this speculative fiction in a cathartic attempt to make (non-) sense of our university’s attempts to accommodate and account for care responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The content and structure of our dystopian critique is the product of planned and spontaneous conversations about: a) annual review committee instructions to “show how the pandemic impacted your productivity by comparing how many journal articles you publish in a typical year to how many you published this year,” b) by tenure committee requests to “explain why your care responsibilities during the pandemic interrupted what would be your typical level of productivity,” and c) department meetings in which faculty and administration argued over what should count as a care responsibility and therefore warrant lowered expectations for annual productivity. Our conversations led us to worry what might happen if ‘care’ went the way of ‘research,’ ‘teaching,’ and ‘service’ -- verbs converted to nouns, a ready-thing for standardized scrutiny.

Results: Our speculation on dystopian future of care is fictionalized in the hellish Holmes University, an institution that prides itself on centering care in everything it does and in holding itself accountable for caring. The story centers on Morgan, a mother and faculty member, who consistently receives less than ‘satisfactory’ evaluations for care. Following Morgan through a dystopian hellscape, we make the point that ‘care’ is not a stable concept, that centering ‘care’ may not work because it is enacted in fluid socio-political contexts, and that caring cannot be assumed to be universally good, let alone able to produce universally good outcomes. If Sarte (1955) is correct, that “hell is other people,” care may sometimes be the mechanism by and through which (well-intended) people make living hell.

Significance: We show how focusing on care as a fix for the cruelties of neoliberal capitalism might go wrong. Focusing on care without appreciating the underlying pain, suffering, and/or needs it might address can render care a vacuous. Ahmed (2014) speaks of emotional intelligibility -- our pain matters when it is recognized and when recognized, it is legitimated. The question of care is always one of mattering. What and whose pain, suffering, and needs matter? What can we do about it?

Authors

• Mandie Bevels Dunn, University of South Florida - Tampa
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer R. Wolgemuth, University of South Florida
  Presenting Author

• Lodi Lipien, University of South Florida
  Presenting Author