Stewart Riddle & Marcus K. Harmes 
Producing Pleasure in the Contemporary University 

Academics working in contemporary universities are experiencing unprecedented and unsustainable pressure in an environment of hyper-performativity, metrics and accountability. From this perspective, the university produces multiple tensions and moments of crises, where it seems that there is limited space left for the intrinsic enjoyment arising from scholarly practices. This book offers a global perspective on how pleasure is central to the endeavours of academics working in the contemporary university, with contributors evaluating the opportunities for the strategic refusal of the quantifying, stultifying and stupefying delimiters of what is possible for academic production. The aim of this book is to open up spaces for conversation, reflection and thought, in order to think, to be and to do differently – pleasurably. Contributors rupture the bounds of what is permissible and possible within their daily lives, habits and practices. As such, this book addresses increasingly significant questions. What are some of the multiple and different ways that we can reclaim pleasure and enhance the durations and intensities of our passions, desires and becomings within the contemporary university? How might these aspirations be realised? What are the spaces for the pleasurable production of research that might be opened up? How might we reconfigure the neoliberal university to be a place of more affect, where desire, laughter and joy join with the work that we seek to undertake and the communities whom we serve?

Table of Content

Acknowledgements; Partaking of Pleasure: Regenerating the Working Lives of University Academics; Producing Moments of Pleasure within the Confines of the Neoliberal University; ‘Do What Sustains You’: Desire and the Enterprise University; The Pleasure of Writing: Escape from the Dominant System; Wild Choreography of Affect and Ecstasy: Contentious Pleasure (Joussiance) in the Academy; The Joy in Writingassemblage; Female Pleasure in the Academy through Erotic Power; The Intrinsic Pleasure of Being Present with/in Humanistic Research; For Hermann: How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways. Or, What My Dog Has Taught Me about a Post-personal Academic Life; Where Have All the Flowers Gone? The Future for Academics; Reducing the Drag: Creating V Formations through Slow Scholarship and Story; Testimonio and the Idios Kosmos of the Contemporary Academic: Charting the Possibilities for Pleasure in Personal Accounts from Inside the Academy; Self-Determination Theory and Academic Life: Strategies for Reclaiming Pleasure and Professionalism Distilled from Universities in Australia and Europe; The Pleasure and Pain of Aboriginal Being in the University; Academic Writing, Creative Pleasure and the Salvaging of Joy; From Frustration to Flow: Finding Joy through Co-teaching; Pleasure, Pain and the Possibilities of Being and Becoming: Robustly Hopeful Reflections by an Australian Personal Fitness Trainer and His University Academic Client; “Don’t Cry – Do Research!” The Promise of Happiness for an Academic Killjoy; List of Contributors.