What is this moment we are caught in?

• Published in: Gender, work, and organization work, and organization, 2020-01, Vol.27 (1), p.117-128
• Main Authors: Bansel, Peter, Perell, Daniel, Tang, Shawna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic staff; Accounts; affect; Candidates; Cruelty; higher education; intimate public; neoliberalism; Optimism; Public spaces; queer; Vignettes
• ISSN: 0968-6673; 1468-0432
• DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12405

Our response to the question ‘What is this moment we are caught in?' is articulated through our collaborative reading of Berlant's (2011) Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Cruel optimism, Berlant suggests, is a desire for something that undermines its own potentiality. As queer academics we expose the cruelty of our desires to live a good academic life, and we do so from our different positions as postdoctoral fellow, tenured academic and PhD candidate. In labouring to consolidate relationships and practices that hold the promise of our own sustainability, we give accounts of the material and affective work we perform to constitute what Berlant calls an intimate public, a collective space of mediation that functions as a key tactic to manage our academic life. These accounts take the form of three vignettes, each inflected by the specificities of our different positions and histories of becoming academics. We use Berlant as a point of departure to both interrogate practices of self‐management and find possibilities for a collective response to the moments in which we find ourselves caught.