Doing the document: Gender studies at the corporatized university in Europe

Mainstreaming

Contemporary gender researchers like us appear to be fully included in the treadmill of academia. On top of our daily responsibilities at work (and in our private lives), we are just as eager to get research funding as our male or mainstream colleagues and work as hard to meet the criteria of quality assessments of research and teaching. And we are successful in many ways: we publish enough articles in A-journals each year, European Gender Studies has its own ERIH list of top journals ¹ and, until recently, we managed to get competitive research monies from our national governments and/or the European Commission. Should we conclude that academia has become more open to critical perspectives? Or did academia’s particular norms and values that pass for unbiased universality change in the last couple of years? That is to say, has it changed in such a way that it is now to be characterized as a different ‘culture of no culture’ (Traweek, 1988)?

Since the Bologna process, European universities promote purpose and productivity, measurable outputs with economic benefits, collaboration and outreach to civil society, and an international, European climate (Keeling, 2006). It is certainly possible for gender researchers to claim all of these characteristics. But, then, to what extend are we being the critical researchers we think we are? To what extend has criticality become a false essentialism, an identity that we live by but do not actually perform? What is this ‘Gender, Inc.’? Joan Scott has formulated the paradoxes of ‘mainstreaming’ as follows:

… the university into which we have been incorporated is itself undergoing major structural change. Having been critics on the outside, we are now advocates on the inside, looking to preserve the institution – as a faculty-governed, tenure-granting, knowledge-producing space of critical inquiry – from those who would reorganize it according to corporate models. … The need to prevent the ‘ruin’ of the university casts feminists more often as defenders of the status quo than as agents of change. … Our protectionism sometimes even leads us to collaborate with those administrators who are intent on commodifying the life of the mind. (Scott, 2011: 29) ²

How to go about all of this is a difficult question. Can we still rely on the established methodologies of feminist engagement with the university?

Feminism and the university

Rosemarie:

11 p.m. I have had dinner in the meantime. I read Iris’s text additions in the B2 part and am now reading my e-mail before starting to prepare for a bit of sleep. There will be friends for an Xmas-brunch tomorrow. Our Austrian partner e-mails: ‘Thank you both – I got both your mails. I am supposed to be on holiday tomorrow – hope it’s ok that I do this after Xmas. Hopefully Wednesday! I can help describing what each PhD candidate will be doing, but my original concept that one would do X. and the other Y., doesn’t work anymore, now that Y. has pulled out. But my contact person at X. says there is enough work for both to do oral history. So I’ll try to think of two oral history projects that will work with writing the biography of a place. Will get back to you asap!! All best, B.’ And another e-mail from Germany. Hurray, the German colleagues have managed to get their documents together! ‘Dear Rosemarie, dear Iris. Please find enclosed all the letters and other documents you asked for. We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!!! Sincerely, G. (working for the last day this year!)’ I shut down the computer. I’d better taste the wine for tomorrow … I’ll SMS Iris, maybe she is still awake and also needs a sip.

Feminism can pride itself on an extensive history of critical and creative engagement with the university. It is not very hard to generate a feminist genealogy of projects of the past for the purposes of understanding the current academic system in Europe and its effects on gender research. For starters, a feminist academic space was first created following the dual-track strategy devised by the earliest academic feminists. Women’s studies had to be integrated into the existing disciplinary structure as well as remain autonomous so as to develop a discipline of its own. We are still working in this Janus-headed mode (see Reference Points for the Design and Delivery of Degree Programmes in Gender Studies [2010]), but what is the realm into which we seek integration? We are not meaning to be nostalgic about a sacred university system – one that is seemingly unaffected by the market economy. The issue at stake is this new paradigm of running a university; the ‘corporatized university’ defined by economic determinism; which generates vehement competition and precarious jobs. Both the competitive mode that tenured staff are entrained in and the flexibility that is asked of the non-tenured are predicated on a running-after-the-money that is mind-boggling.

One goal of the critical and creative engagements of feminist research practitioners within university contexts is giving the culture of no culture a face. Naming the evident as not so evident is part of the feminist project. Let us quickly mention equality projects calculating percentages of women employees in all academic ranks (famously Wennerås and Wold, 1997 and recently Van den Brink, 2010), difference projects working on the embodied nature of the (institutional) life of the mind by ‘French feminists’, and feminist discourse analyses of, for instance, the very notion of academic excellence (e.g. Brouns and Addis, 2004). We want also to mention briefly the analogy of this kind of work with the continuing tradition of feminists calculating the invisible and often unpaid labour done by women in the household. ³

With this Open Forum piece, we want to add to the projects we have just mentioned and situate ourselves in the current-day university paradigm. Taking a bottom-up approach from our own institutional and personal lives, gathered in the vignettes, we try to get a grip on the changes in academia. These changes have been implemented in a manner so swift that they are hard to track. We were complying with them before we knew it. This article has been written in an attempt to pause and respond, to question after what it is that we are engaging in. The operationalization we have chosen for this meditation is Sara Ahmed’s work on ‘doing the document’. We will try to show how a corporatized university works by allowing gender research to claim a certain space which parameters our research to comply with economic determinism. This suggests that the university has changed and the field of gender studies has been mainstreamed with it, but the question of the power of definition remains an issue for feminists to take into close consideration. We wonder where we were at, when paradigms changed. Now we can only notice that the definition of scholarly excellence has changed and that gender research is mainstreamed, but for how long and what is it that we are prompted to do in order to stay on board? And to what extent is the very core of a feminist epistemology being affected? The research project from which we will take our clues and that we are seeking funding for, that is, the project that leads us astray in our attempt at being both critical about and pragmatic towards market-driven mainstream infrastructures, is called INTER(P)LACES.

Doing the document: INTER(P)LACES

10 January 2012. After months of negotiating research goals and methodology, acquiring non-academic partners, visiting museum houses to keep them informed about the process, getting the budget through the university’s financial controllers and a whole lot of other infrastructural concerns, the consortium has now officially been established. All formal documents and letters of commitment have safely arrived. All museum houses have agreed to open their archives and private spaces, and have designed research projects that suit their entrepreneurial goals. They are, in the end, excited about the possibilities to utilize their space better. They are looking forward to co-operating with the academic partners. We are now at the stage where we finally submit the application and are struggling to interpret the legibility of some of the last headings in the application form. What means what, i.e., which details should be where. We contact our EU consultant, who had trained us in writing EU proposals, to use a few more hours of coaching funds. We urgently ask her if she can help us to allocate the so-called ‘work packages’. The consultant replies: ‘Dear Rosemarie and Iris, I quickly scanned the S&T part as you requested me to do. It looks fabulous already. The only thing which strikes me is that you describe the Individual Research Projects mainly in B2 (S&T), while you don’t refer to them in B3, the chapter about the training schedule. Every evaluator will want to read an elaborate description of every Individual Research Project. So do mention a title for every IRP, followed by a short description of what every fellow will be doing exactly, and think of mentioning the secondments. You did put this information in B2, now divided between table 9 and 10. I am not quite sure the evaluators will buy this. So if you still have the time and energy to rewrite that part I would advise you to do so. And once you’re rewriting the IRP’s try to insert them in B3 instead of B2. If time allows me I’ll read the other parts of the application and let you know. All best, D.’

In ‘ “You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing:” Diversity, race equality and the politics of documentation’, Ahmed studies the making and circulation of ‘diversity documents’ in UK Higher Education. In 2000, these documents became required for each institution so as to foster inclusive institutional space. Ahmed claims, however, that the documents rather ‘create fantasy images of the organizations they apparently describe’ (Ahmed, 2007: 607) and therefore ‘such documents can be used as supportive devises, by exposing the gap between words, images and deeds’ (Ahmed, 2007: 607; emphasis in original). Ahmed’s is an interesting proposition for operationalizing our study of the corporatized university through our own experiences with the development, writing and submission of research applications to the European Commission (EC) within the 7th Framework Programme (FP7). Because, just like the diversity documents that Ahmed has been studying, our applications have only been filed somewhere. We do not see the INTER(P)LACES project that we have been drawing up in minute details around us, just like the UK universities have not become ethnically inclusive. A diversity policy paper is obviously not the same as an application for research, but the analogy is not in their respective identities; the analogy is in their shared non-performative effects. Therefore, we ask: what do EC applications do? Are these documents models that allow for gender research to intervene in the context and content of contemporary academe or do they do nothing but re-instate existing power relations?

The case study that we are working from has ‘INTER(P)LACES’ as its acronym. The drafting of the project proposal is led by the Graduate Gender Programme of Utrecht University and Castrum Peregrini, an Amsterdam-based cultural centre. ⁴ INTER(P)LACES is currently a European consortium that aspires to train graduates in Transnational Memory Studies (TMS) and Cultural Heritage Management from a feminist perspective. Starting from the founding assumption within TMS that memories are always mediated and thus subjected to processes of in-and exclusion, we stage the project as a means to educate future scholars and cultural entrepreneurs in the bridging of linguistic, visual, spatial and material turns in the Humanities. We focus on the ways in which buildings (places) are interlaced with layers of meaning and we focus on the processes of inclusion and exclusion performed linguistically, visually, spatially and materially. We are looking at Europe in its post-Second World War, post-colonial and post-Soviet complexities. By now, the consortium consists of 22 academic and non-academic partners from four European countries, plus one university from the USA (notably Harvard University). ⁵ INTER(P)LACES has been designed to be submitted to FP7 People, a fraction of FP7 as a whole. ⁶ In this article, we focus on our 2011–2012 experiences, which include an application for an MC ITN (Marie Curie Initial Training Network) – an application that entails devising a structure of three mobility periods for each prospective student – and an EMJD (Erasmus Mundus Joint Degree), which has two mobilities. What have been our investments in the doing of these two INTER(P)LACES documents and what do these investments tell us about the state of our academic context?

Investments

3 May 2012. We receive the ITN rejection letter a few weeks after already having gone through the whole circus again for the EMJD application. We recycled parts of the ITN – embracing the motive ‘there is triumph in trying’ – to enhance our chances to set up the so much wanted PhD training programme in European Transnational Memory Studies and Cultural Heritage Management from a feminist perspective. In the letter, we read that for the ITN we score high on implementation, whereas the evaluators are critical about the theoretical approach and methodology: ‘This is an interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral project that addresses a number of relevant training needs and research fields. … However, there are ambiguities regarding the appropriateness of research methodology and approach, as the proposal does not clearly detail the way in which they complement each other.’ We have used the same theoretical and methodological tools for the EMJD. We get a bit worried.

24 July 2012. We receive the feared-for letter from Brussels: ‘You have submitted a proposal under Action 1 in the framework of the Erasmus Mundus Call for proposals EACEA/42/11. I regret to inform you that your proposal has not been selected. The agency received 133 proposals under Action 1B out of which 9 were selected for funding. … Sincerely yours, J. Fronia. Head of Unit.’ What we see next is that we score the highest possible award for our Academic and Research Quality: ‘The main objectives are clearly described. … The innovative aspects concern the methodology and the contents of the programme itself as it starts from a spatial angle and puts its scientific focus on the material environment assuring by this way future employability.’ We also see very good scores for 2. Partnership experience and composition, 3. Provisions for EMJD candidates and fellowship holders. But we could have done better for the criteria concerning 4. European integration and, yes, 5. Quality assurance. Gender studies did not help either: ‘The strong dominance of gender study experts is not well explained, since gender studies are not a focal point of the proposed research.’ The evaluator is not impressed …