Briony Lipton

UNSW Canberra

Metaphors enable us to understand organisations in distinctive ways and explain the paucity of women in leadership positions, and yet, when gender discrimination is addressed via metaphor, women’s responses, resistance and agency are rarely included in such analyses. In this article, I employ a narrative writing practice inspired by the work of Hél...

This paper examines the reworking of gender in the measured university and the impact this has on gender equality in academia. Neoliberal market rationalities and measurements embedded in academic publishing, funding and promotion have transformed Australian higher education and impacts upon the careers of academic women in ways that are gendered....

This article explores academics’ appearance and gendered performativites in the neoliberal university. Institutions’ demands for academics to form scholarly identities on campus and online reproduce and legitimise traditional workplace discrimination on the bases of gender, race, class, and the body in new ways. Based on data collected as part of a...

A doorway is an entrance into a space. A gateway that denotes passage and movement. In the contemporary university, doors separate, connect, and demarcate belonging and exclusion. In our experiences as academics and in our qualitative interviews with academic women at universities across Australia, there are many accounts of the liminality of doorw...

The curriculum vitae (CV) is a short account of one’s career and qualifications typically prepared for a position or promotion. In academia, the CV chronicles a representation of the academic self in terms of scholarly activities such as publications, research grants and projects, conference participation and teaching awards. Far from being a neutr...

Government policies are forcing universities to narrowly emphasise employability, which does not bode well for the Creative Industries (CI). Despite being one of the fastest-growing and diverse employment sectors, CI degrees have been criticised for failing to deliver adequate employment prospects. The employability focus, which serves ‘the [econom...

Hélène Cixous delicately reminds us that doors perform a material and affective liminality between what is and what might be, and questions the reason and rhyme of doors as ways in and out of spaces which denote passage and movement; and as structures which separate, connect, and demarcate entanglements of being, becoming and belonging on the insid...

This chapter explores the possibilities, limitations, and conditions for academic collegiality, through analysis of the transient space of the academic conference. Academic conferences are inter-corporeal spaces for the transferal of academic cultural norms. Hence, this chapter is concerned with how the performance of collegiality, collectivity, co...

The transformation of higher education into a (quasi)market, packaged with increased measurement and shifting values, has a significant impact upon the careers of academic women. Increased gender representation obscures the fact that women’s participation continues to be measured and evaluated in relation to male norms, participation, and achieveme...

The conclusion of this book moves towards an ethics of self-care and the embodied and affective dimensions of feminist research on gender inequality in higher education. Despite contradictions and complexities emanating from the entanglements of feminism and neoliberal managerialism, there are glimpses of feminist practices of leadership, influence...

This chapter traces the shift in conceptualisations of academic time to understand what affect time and temporality has on academic women’s identities and performativities. The traditional linear career trajectory of an academic is being displaced by far more fractured academic life course. This chapter focuses on how new technologies of time opera...

This chapter considers the methodological implications behind a changing higher education environment. The often-routine structures in academic writing—of introduction, body, conclusion; overview, background, data collection, data analysis, results, and implications—pervade and invade our sense of what ‘real’ and ‘rigorous’ academic research should...

Laughter is a socio-embodied phenomenon that is often found in research accounts. Rather than simply relegate these moments to the square brackets of an interview transcript this chapter explores the affective dimensions of laughter. Once constructed as emotion-free zones, prefaced on masculine notions of rationality and objectivity, universities t...

This book investigates the gendered dimensions of academic life in the contemporary Australian university. It examines key discourses – most notably academic performativity and identity – through a feminist lens, and scrutinises how discourses of neoliberalism and feminism are entangled in the structure, systems, operations and cultures of the univ...

These storied and aesthetic offerings are presented as an alchemic tapestry of experiences and responses to the conference MAKING shiFt HAPPEN. This innovative (un)conference was fully virtual, and connected us across disciplines, countries and time zones. In this review we respond to how MAKING shiFt HAPPEN offered flexible, sustainable and inclus...

This chapter is an exploration of how academic collegiality is constructed in and shaped by the spaces of the neoliberal university. Based on a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with women academics at several Australian universities as well as critical autoethnographic reflections. It is possible to see how collegiality is a set of gendere...

In this chapter, we play with the metaphor of a recipe to explore arts-based research practices and the impact they have on research on sexism and gender inequality in higher education. Drawing on Hélène Cixous’ bodily and experimental form of writing known as écriture féminine, we challenge the androcentrism of scholarship. This chapter sifts, sti...

The neoliberal transformation of higher education has a significant impact upon the careers of academic women. Despite women's inclusion across the organisational hierarchy, neoliberal new managerialism in Australian universities exacerbates gender inequity and inequitable practices in the way it redistributes power and reproduces and reinforces tr...

Inspired by children’s nursery rhymes, this research poem is an autoethnographic exploration of the processes of bodily learning that takes place in the neoliberal university and what it is like to bring a baby along to a conference. The academic conference is a key site for academic socialization and the passing on of norms and values. In focusing...

We conclude this book with further provocations about what it means to ‘only talk feminist here’ in contemporary Australian higher education that raise much broader methodological, epistemological, and ontological issues. This chapter emphasises why it is still so important to continue to talk feminist, examining the ways in which feminist academic...

Concepts of voice and feminism and feelings of agency are in many ways connected to our multiple subjectivities as women and as feminists. In this chapter we explore the paradoxical concepts of voice and feminism, and focus on what speech acts do, whom they include and exclude, whose voices are valorised and whose are silenced. We critically interr...

In this chapter we explore the methodological underpinnings of this book and ask how do we do feminist research which works towards the gender just society we hope for? Here we ground our work in the writings of Hélène Cixous and Sara Ahmed, two different women writing at different times in different places but arguably searching for ways to work w...

What does it mean to only talk feminist? How do feminist academics effect change? How are feminist voices sounded, heard, received, silenced, and masked? This book aims to provide a contemporary account of what it might mean to ‘only talk feminist’ in the neoliberal university and draws upon qualitative interviews and conversations with feminist ac...

This chapter asks ‘when is it safe to reveal our feminist talk and when we might conceal our personal-as-political agendas?’ It explores the micropolitics of public and private reprimand for talking feminist and the ways in which such censure of feminist voices elicits a fight or flight response. Further, we also ask, in what spaces are feminist ac...

This book explores what it means to ‘only talk feminist here’ in the contemporary neoliberal university. How do feminist academics effect change? How are feminist voices sounded, heard, received, silenced, and masked? We Only Talk Feminist Here offers insight into the complexities, contradictions, and possibilities of ‘talking feminist’; of writing...

For decades feminists in Australia and overseas have decried academia and university management a ‘boys club’. Women are by no means absent from the contemporary academy; and yet women are far from achieving parity with men in professorial and formal leadership positions. Approximately forty-four per cent of academic staff in Australia are female....

Quality assurance policies and practices are critical to the performance of Australian universities both in terms of national funding and international prestige and are redefining the future of the academic enterprise. Quality assurance is not merely the systematic measurement of quality. It is a political and heuristic process, which has significa...

Leadership is now central to the management of the neoliberal, corporate university. Despite the introduction of equity policies and guidelines to improve the gender profile of Australian universities academic women remain underrepresented in the professoriate as well as in formal academic executive and faculty decision-making positions. This paper...

Australia has a shameful history of genocide, miscegenation, colonial violence and sexual objectification of Indigenous women and its legacy continues today with Aboriginal women subjected to violence, discrimination and marginalization. Indigenous women’s writing draws attention to Australia’s ‘hidden history and colonial legacy’ through the persp...