From Sadness to Joy: The Potentials of Transforming the Impact Agenda
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2023 Number 110 & 111
From Sadness to Joy: The Potentials of Transforming the Impact Agenda
Jonathan Paylor pages 113-130
DOI: 10.3898/NewF:110-111.07.2024
Abstract
This article seeks to envision a mode of university governance that takes us beyond a neoliberal audit culture and its affective organisation of academic life. It takes up this task by probing the potentials of transforming the ‘impact agenda’ (i.e., the trend towards audit systems and funding mechanisms that assess academics on the basis of their non-academic research impact). Grounded in an ethnography of a UK university, and informed by a Spinozist ethics of joy, the article draws attention to an alternative conception of subjectivity to that which the impact agenda propagates, one that is conceived in terms of collective creativity and which breaks with the neoliberal notion of the competitive individual. I argue this understanding of subjectivity points to a threshold where the impact agenda can become something else. More specifically, drawing inspiration from the idea of ‘collective joy’, I map an alternative that is centred on the goal of enhancing academics’ and non-academics’ capacity for collective creativity. What is at stake in making this conversion is moving from a mode of governance that is debilitating to one that is empowering.
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To cite this article
Jonathan Paylor (2023) From Sadness to Joy: The Potentials of Transforming the Impact Agenda, New Formations, 2023(110 & 111 ), 113-130. https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:110-111.07.2024