Open lecture on academic anxiety, in Malmö

“Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University”

26^th of April 15.00 – 17.00

Open Lecture

ROOM: NI: B0E07 (B2)

Niagara

Nordenskiöldsgatan 1, Malmö

A joint event with Department of Urban Studies,

Department of Social Work, Research Platform CRUSH,

The Centre for Work Life and Evaluation Studies (CTA)

Lawrence D. Berg, University of British Columbia,

and Henrik Gutzon Larsen, Lund University

This presentation provides a theoretical analysis of the neoliberal production of anxiety in academic faculty members in universities in Northern Europe. The paper focuses on neoliberalization as it is instantiated through audit and ranking systems designed to produce academia as a space of economic efficiency and intensifying competition. We suggest that powerful forms of competition and ranking of academic performance have been developed in Northern Europe. These systems are differentiated and differentiating, and they serve to both index and facilitate the neoliberalization of the academy.  Moreover, these audit and ranking systems produce an ongoing sense of anxiety among academic workers. We argue that neoliberalism in the academy is part of a wider system of anxiety production arising as part of the so-called ‘soft governance’ of everything, including life itself, in contemporary late liberalism. (Co-author Edward H Huijbens, School of Business and Science, University of Akureyri, Iceland).

Lawrence D. Berg is Professor of Critical Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada.  He is leader of the Social, Spatial and Economic Justice Research Cluster in the UBC Institute for Community Engaged Research. Lawrence has published more than 80 works in critical geography, including numerous papers on the neoliberalization of higher education.  Lawrence is one of the founding editors of ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, currently in its 15th year of publication.  He recently completed 18 years as a member of the international steering committee of the International Critical Geography Group.

Henrik Gutzon Larsen is Associate Professor of Human Geography at Lund University. His work revolves around relations between power and space. More specifically, his current research addresses questions concerning urban politics and change, housing, histories of geographical thought and (small-state) geopolitics. Henrik is part of the CRUSH (Critical Urban Sustainability Hub) research project.