Archiving Academic Melancholia

In this chapter, we develop and present a melancholic sketch of the emotional impacts on academic workers (i.e. affective injuries) of pressures to embody neoliberal fantasies of ‘excellence’ and ‘success’ across contemporary universities as well as of the affective possibilities of troubling the reproduction of such injurious institutional values. Methodologically, we draw on a meta-ethnography of academic workers’ autoethnographic and collectively biographical accounts of their struggles with neoliberal interpellation. Our findings foreground four affective injuries (i.e. ‘I am tired of performing’, ‘I am not enough’, ‘What I am doing is bullshit’ and ‘We are living different shades of privilege and precarity’) constituting the haunting of academic melancholia, along with four affective pathways to freedom (i.e. making space, making time, having fun and being naked) that spring from academic melancholia and are grounded in an ethics of mutuality, vulnerability and care. In doing so, we contribute to institutional scholarship on emotions and values by synthesizing the affective injuries of neoliberal hegemony under the umbrella concept of melancholia on the one hand and add to the literature on institutional control, oppression and resistance by underscoring the emancipatory potential of affective injuries on the other.