Reimagining meaningful academic careers: Collective learning through yarning in the neoliberal academy

Finding meaningful careers within the neoliberal academy can be a challenge. When we – a group of nine academics – reflected on our careers, we struggled to comprehend meaningful alternatives in academia. We found ourselves caught within a web defined by competition, performance metrics, and notions of the enterprising academic, as well as by neoliberal logics that shaped our career paths and ideas of success. Still, we were determined to reimagine otherwise. This article explores how we collectively learn to reimagine meaningful academic careers within the neoliberal academy, focusing on how temporality, place, and values shape this meaning. Drawing on yarning, an Indigenous conversational practice of communal and explorational learning from Australia, alongside collaborative autoethnography, we carved a window for “epistemic rupture” – a term we use to describe our efforts to (temporarily) disentangle from dominant neoliberal ways of knowing. Through this process, we created space to critically reflect on how neoliberal career logics constrain and compel us, while opening up possibilities for alternative academic careers. In doing so, we reconceptualise meaningful academic careers as relational, situated, and values-based, challenging individualised and performative career logics.