Affective Equality in Higher Education: Resisting the Culture of Carelessness

There is a care crisis in higher education, not only in terms of how care is devalued at the boundaries of family and paid work, but in the devaluation of care of the self, and the care work required for good teaching, learning and research. Neoliberal policies, instituted through new managerial practices, have extended, and reconstituted an older liberal perspective that the ‘normal’ student is care-free and without relational commitments. A highly individualised entrepreneurialism at the heart of the academy has allowed a particular care-less form of competitive individualism to flourish. But the carelessness endemic to new managerialism can be challenged, and part of the resistance is naming it and critiquing it intellectually. The challenge is a deep epistemological one in the first instance. It involves teaching and researching in a care-centric and social justice oriented-way. It requires thinking-with-care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012) combined with a new epistemology of resistance (Medina 2013). If we are to move away from capitalocentric to care and social justice-centred thinking inside and outside the academy, an intellectual appreciation of the relationality and interdependence of the human condition, and of mutual dependencies, human and non-human are vital (Lynch 2021).