Higher Education in the UK is facing sector-wide cuts, redundancies and uncertainty. It is a fearful landscape to enter as PhD researchers. As we contend with the instability of a sector which we hoped to make our career home, we reflect on the challenges and emotions that arose during our doctoral training. This timely article draws upon the PhD experience of three women working within Sociology in the UK, utilising ‘gut feelings’ to explore the conditions and processes that constitute the neoliberal academy. Specifically, we focus on the emotions of disconcertment and joy to examine our ‘emotional voices’ as PhD researchers (Askins & Blazek, Citation2017, p. 1093). On the surface, these emotions seem to reflect an affective binary of our experiences. We–the three authors of this article–argue that through embracing and being attuned to disconcertment, we were free to engage in joy as active resistance within the neoliberal academy. In writing this article about our collective affective experiences we hope to encourage other PhD researchers and members of Higher Education to take emotions seriously as a resource for navigating and understanding neoliberal life.
Molyneux et al. (Fri,) studied this question.