Making the Sandwiches: Affective Conversations on Teaching and Research

This chapter reflects on my early experiences teaching and researching in the neoliberal academy as a feminist researcher striving to implement feminist, anti-racist, and anti-militarist pedagogies, whilst also navigating the gendered and racialised structures that govern academic labour. To make sense of these early experiences, and acknowledge the wider context of depletion, labour, and precarity that structures how universities, departments, and schools are run, I loosely draw on feminist International Political Economy scholars who describe how the gendered division of labour and gendered inequalities are embedded in the structures of political economy. These inequalities mirror expectations about who does what labour? Who gives what? Who carries what? And, for how long? Through three short vignettes about my early experiences, I engage the reader in an affective conversation about teaching, research and the unequal, gendered and racialised, distribution of academic labour.