Who Cares for Academics.pdf (292.54 kB)
Who cares for academics? We need to talk about emotional well-being including what we avoid and intellectualize through macro-discourses
journal contribution
posted on 2019-07-29, 15:23 authored by Charlie Smith, Eda UlusThis paper explores academics’ wellbeing through analysing published sensitive disclosures,
bringing to journal space the pain, rawness, and emotional suffering of individuals’
experiences. We confront the taboos of speaking openly about mental health and emotional
wellbeing in academic institutions, with masculine structures and encroaching neoliberal
discourses that create hostile atmospheres unsupportive of vulnerability and uncertainty. We
also challenge existing discourses about academics’ wellbeing, implicitly burdening
individuals as responsible for their pain and creating walls of shame, rather than building new
healthy structures. By spotlighting the voices of academics’ emotional disclosures, intensified
by embodied social inequalities, we plead for openness in formal academic outlets for sharing
pre-existing emotional struggles and new wounds created by cruelly competitive, winnertakes-all structures, fortified by neoliberal ideals. Led by individuals’ voices and experiences,
we make recommendations for supporting academics as an attempt to extract academia from
its current perverse state and commit to repair and transformation.
History
Citation
Organization, 2019Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, ARTS AND HUMANITIES/School of BusinessVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Published in
OrganizationPublisher
SAGE Publications (UK and US)issn
1350-5084Acceptance date
2019-07-05Copyright date
2019Available date
2019-09-03Publisher DOI
Publisher version
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1350508419867201Language
enAdministrator link
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