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

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

The Colors of the Israeli Mirror

This article deals with the rise and fall of the Israeli television show The Mirror, which focused on a physical transformation, implemented by a series of plastic surgeries, that provided the participants—mainly working-class Mizrachi women—with a new visibility. The show and its controversial reception raise questions regarding the aesthetic criteria of physical beauty in Israeli culture, and their political-, ethnic-, religious-, and class-related dimensions. By following one participant in the show, we examine how the visual narrative of The Mirror constructs the formation of the beautiful body through popular media, and its political complexity within Israeli culture

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