Compliance and Resistance Within Neoliberal Academia

This open access book reflects on academic life under a neoliberal regime. Through collaborative autoethnographies, the authors share stories about the everyday experiences, dilemmas and conflicts of three academics: the struggle for promotion, teaching’s challenges, the race to publish, confronting bureaucracy and institutional politics, as well as the resulting emotional stress. These stories reveal the impact of neoliberal culture on ideological, economic, social, collegial, and emotional integrity which are integral to academics’ lives today. But along with the challenges, the authors present their vision of hope, and transformation through academic solidarity - and for the silenced voices to be heard, inside academia and beyond it. This is an open access book

Compliance and Resistance Within Neoliberal Academia

This open access book reflects on academic life under a neoliberal regime. Through collaborative autoethnographies, the authors share stories about the everyday experiences, dilemmas and conflicts of three academics: the struggle for promotion, teaching’s challenges, the race to publish, confronting bureaucracy and institutional politics, as well as the resulting emotional stress. These stories reveal the impact of neoliberal culture on ideological, economic, social, collegial, and emotional integrity which are integral to academics’ lives today. But along with the challenges, the authors present their vision of hope, and transformation through academic solidarity - and for the silenced voices to be heard, inside academia and beyond it. This is an open access book

Seeing and Hearing the Other: A Jewish Israeli Teacher Grapples with Arab Students' Underachievement and the Exclusion of Their Voices

This paper addresses my political and pedagogical resistance to the institutional discrimination of Palestinian Arab students in Israeli academia. Describing my instinctive negative reactions (frustration, helplessness, anger) towards what seems at first sight as their reluctance to study,  I go on to criticize my own and other lecturers' tendency to blame the victim by analyzing the structural, cultural, political and social obstacles encountered by Arab students in Israeli institutions of higher education. The paper mainly focuses on the story of my resistance to this prevailing social and political structure. Adopting feminist critical pedagogy in my course "Representing Disability in Literature and the Cinema", I have created a space for my Arab students to overcome at least temporarily their repression by the Israeli academic system. The process of empowerment and the subsequent educational transformative and liberating exchange has enabled all participants to grant Arabs' transparent and excluded knowledge a significant social, cultural and political place, thus creating new and more culturally sensitive knowledge. Confronting the empowering effects of this method, I conclude my paper by suggesting some explanations as to the rarity of critical feminist pedagogies in Israeli academia

The Battle of Bad Mothers: The Film Mama as a Commentary on the Judgment of Solomon and on Contemporary Motherhood

The modern horror film genre has incessantly dealt with questions of parenthood, pregnancy and the status of mothers, particularly with “bad mothers.”From the heart of popular culture, horror films engage in these issues unexpectedly, and sometimes even radically. These films enable us to recognize cultural taboos and to expose secrets that are not expressed in other genres. In this article, we examine the successful horror film, Mama (2013) that centres on two “bad mothers” involved in a fatal conflict over two girls. Through a comparison between Mama and the biblical myth of the judgment of Solomon, with which it dialogues and comments upon, we investigate the cultural hierarchy existing between two types of bad mothers, whom we term the “overfeeding mother” and the “starving mother.” The film disassembles and deconstructs this cultural hierarchy, while clarifying its social motivations. Proposing a radical alternative to Solomon’s judgment, the movie challenges the prevalent conception of bad mothering by exposing both mothers’ human faces, hence acquitting them in the eyes of the viewers

Compliance and Resistance Within Neoliberal Academia: biographical stories, collective voices

This book reflects on academic life under a neoliberal regime. Through collaborative autoethnographies, the authors share stories about the everyday experiences, dilemmas and conflicts of three academics: the struggle for promotion, teaching’s challenges, the race to publish, confronting bureaucracy and institutional politics, as well as the resulting emotional stress. These stories reveal the impact of neoliberal culture on ideological, economic, social, collegial, and emotional integrity which are integral to academics’ lives today. But along with the challenges, the authors present their vision of hope, and transformation through academic solidarity - and for the silenced voices to be heard, inside academia and beyond it

Non-Cooperation within a School-Based Wellness Program during the COVID-19 Pandemic—A Qualitative Research

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of COVID-19′s impact on the development, delivery, and uptake of “Favoring Myself”, a school-based interactive wellness program conducted via Zoom during 2020–2021. “Favoring Myself” targets resilience, self-esteem, body-esteem, self-care behaviors, and media literacy among 5th-grade preadolescents. Data were obtained from meetings, 23 semi-structured interviews with parents, teachers, and principals, and other modes of correspondence. All data were transcribed and thematically analyzed. The analysis highlighted the barriers faced when delivering external programs during COVID-19. Parents’ difficulties in cooperating with the program, distrustful relationships between parents and the education system, as well as teachers’ overload and stress, were identified as barriers to the external program’s sustainability. These challenges are discussed in light of previous studies of school-based programs, the psychological and social contexts of an ongoing crisis and the impact of neoliberalism on education. This study concludes that school-based prevention programs and accompanying research should be more flexible and focus on understanding and relating to parents’ and schools’ fears, uncertainties, and resistance. It is the hope of the authors that knowledge created through this exploration will be helpful in future coping vis-à-vis prevention program teams and recipients in times of unpredictable, unmanageable, and overpowering crises

From Self-Doubt to Pride: Understanding the Empowering Effects of Delivering School-Based Wellness Programmes for Emerging Adult Facilitators—A Qualitative Study

Ample literature exists on the impact of prevention programmes on their target audience, while much less is known about how delivering such programmes influences their facilitators. Even less literature exists on the emotional and social processes that form this potential impact on facilitators. The current study analysed qualitative in-depth, non-structured interviews, as well as written essays provided by 33 student-facilitators who delivered the “Favoring Myself” programme in Israel during 2019–2021. This school-based wellness programme comprised 10 weekly, 90 min sessions on self-care behaviours, media literacy, self-esteem, and positive body image, which are well-known protective factors against risky behaviours. A thematic analysis was applied to explore the main themes in the collected data. An interesting affective transformation from self-doubt to pride in themselves emerged as a shared experience of these young facilitators. Facilitators related their ability to facilitate the programme, as well as to undergo an individual maturation and empowerment experience, to certain components of the programme itself, such as the preparatory course, individual supervision, and the peer-group experience. This shift from doubt to pride is discussed using two frameworks—a theoretical discourse of emerging adulthood as a developmental stage, and the self-determination theory