Over the course of this series, we’ve talked about the importance of education beyond the university. We've taken you to a public park, a cathedral, an art gallery, a library, a living room, a laundromat and to the streets. But universities do matter, as institutions and as places. In our final episode, we visit two – Goldsmiths, University of London, and Bard College Berlin – and listen to conversations taking place in- and outside their lecture halls.
First, host Agata Lisiak travels to Goldsmith’s Centre for Urban and Community Research to take part in an event with sociologists Emma Jackson, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Suzanne Hall. They discuss how community and care can be practised in academia despite its hostile and discouraging structures.
Then, from Berlin, political scientist Aysuda Kölemen discusses threats to academic freedom posed by authoritarian regimes and neoliberal universities alike. Sociologist Aslı Vatansever tells us more about academic labour activism in Germany, where over 90% of academics work on precarious fixed-term contracts.
Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guests: Yasmin Gunaratnam, Suzanne Hall, Emma Jackson, Aysuda Kölemen, Aslı Vatansever
Writer and Producer: Agata Lisiak
Senior Editor: Susan Stone
Sound Producer: Reece Cox
Music: Studio R
Artwork: Bose Sarmiento
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation
Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.
Episode Resources
Doreen Massey’s work quoted or mentioned in this episode:
Also mentioned:
More resources available at The Sociological Review
Over the course of this series, we’ve talked about the importance of education beyond the university. We've taken you to a public park, a cathedral, an art gallery, a library, a living room, a laundromat and to the streets. But universities do matter, as institutions and as places. In our final episode, we visit two – Goldsmiths, University of London, and Bard College Berlin – and listen to conversations taking place in- and outside their lecture halls.
First, host Agata Lisiak travels to Goldsmith’s Centre for Urban and Community Research to take part in an event with sociologists Emma Jackson, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Suzanne Hall. They discuss how community and care can be practised in academia despite its hostile and discouraging structures.
Then, from Berlin, political scientist Aysuda Kölemen discusses threats to academic freedom posed by authoritarian regimes and neoliberal universities alike. Sociologist Aslı Vatansever tells us more about academic labour activism in Germany, where over 90% of academics work on precarious fixed-term contracts.
Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guests: Yasmin Gunaratnam, Suzanne Hall, Emma Jackson, Aysuda Kölemen, Aslı Vatansever
Writer and Producer: Agata Lisiak
Senior Editor: Susan Stone
Sound Producer: Reece Cox
Music: Studio R
Artwork: Bose Sarmiento
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation
Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.
Episode Resources
Doreen Massey’s work quoted or mentioned in this episode:
Also mentioned:
More resources available at The Sociological Review
Aslı Vatansever reading Doreen Massey 0:03
"There are many shortages in academic life but, in my opinion, perhaps one of the most serious is the shortage of time, specifically, time to think. Really to think. ... For this sense of engagement and immersion to happen, wider conditions have to be met. Life has to be liveable in a way that nurtures it. It is a kind of richness and depth of intellectual texture. And there are many ways in which it is coming under pressure."
Agata Lisiak 0:35
Welcome to Spatial Delight, a podcast about the politics of space inspired by geographer Doreen Massey. I'm your host, Agata Lisiak, Associate Professor of Migration Studies at Bard College Berlin.
Agata Lisiak 0:48
Over the course of this series, we've talked about the importance of education beyond the university. We've taken you to a public park, a cathedral, an art gallery, a library, a protest march, a living room, a laundromat and to the streets. But universities do matter, as institutions and as places. They mattered to Massey, they matter to my guests, they matter to me and I'm guessing they matter to many of you, too. So, in our final episode, we'll visit two universities and listen to conversations taking place inside lecture halls and outside them.
Agata Lisiak 1:24
We'll also talk about the threats to academic freedom posed by authoritarian regimes and the neoliberal university alike. We'll hear how academics are organising for a better university and we'll reflect on how community and care can be practiced in academia despite the hostile structures actively discouraging it. We'll also consider how institutions can be "hacked" and their logics circumvented to allow for meaningful connections rather than the calculated, transactional exchanges that are currently so rewarded.
Agata Lisiak 1:54
In February 2023, I travelled to Goldsmiths, University of London, to take part in a rare type of academic discussion.
Emma Jackson 2:03
Hello everybody and welcome to the event "A Global Sense of Place Revisited". My name is Emma Jackson. I'm the Director for the Centre of Urban and Community Research here at Goldsmiths. This is our first in-person evening trying to bring up people from outside event since the "before times". So I'm really glad to be able to welcome you here tonight.
Agata Lisiak 2:30
For this event, Emma -- whom you may remember as my co-host from Episode 3 -- invited Yasmin Gunaratnam, Suzanne Hall and me to revisit Doreen Massey's essay "A Global Sense of Place". Yasmin is Professor of Social Justice at King's College London and was a guest on our podcast earlier in the series. Suzanne is Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics. In Episode 3, we talked about her book, The Migrant's Paradox.
Agata Lisiak 2:58
In the UK university landscape, Goldsmiths has become a vivid example of neoliberal carelessness. Its university leadership prioritises quick profits over commitment to education and research. A couple of years ago, after Senior Management announced redundancies across humanities departments, poet and public intellectual Michael Rosen summed up the situation: "Goldsmiths has mismanaged its finances, got itself into debt and brought the bankers in. The bankers are demanding cuts. This means that bankers are making educational decisions. It has changed the whole purpose and intention of what a university is and what it's for".
Agata Lisiak 3:36
In an open letter of support for the faculty and staff now threatened with redundancies, colleagues from around the world wrote: "It appears that Goldsmiths' management sees its core mission as no different from fast fashion, as a business built on precarity and the misguided flexibilisation of labour force rendered unable to develop long-term commitment to their discipline. In this, Senior Management show utter disregard for the integrity of the education they want to sell".
Agata Lisiak 4:04
Goldsmiths' faculty and staff fought back with boycotts and strikes and managed to halt plans for further restructuring. In 2023, they went back to the pickets as part of a nation-wide dispute over pay, working conditions and pension cuts. We heard about those strikes in Episode 8.
Agata Lisiak 4:22
To me, Goldsmiths has always felt very special. I'm a big fan of the work my colleagues there do in sociology, media and cultural studies, feminist theory and more. And I'm not the only one. Here's Suzi Hall:
Suzanne Hall 4:35
I'm so pleased to be here. I love this university. I especially love this department. I think the work that you make is magnificent. And it's been incredible to see how hard you fight for it, and all strength to you. Thank you for the fight.
Agata Lisiak 4:52
Yasmin Gunaratnam worked at Goldsmiths for many years before taking up a professorship at King's College London:
Yasmin Gunaratnam 4:59
I want to say that it's been very strange to actually come back to Goldsmiths. This is the first time I've come back since I left. So even the journey here and walking through a corridor that I've been down probably hundreds of times was really -- also resonated with some of the themes in Massey's essay for me. But also, I think, in my work, I've been really interested in hauntings and multiple temporalities. So just the sense of moving through a space, there's very different versions of you and times that are all commingling in that. And that was a very visceral feeling for me just in terms of coming here. Goldsmiths' Department of Sociology is incredible. We were encouraged to experiment. We would go off and do little ethnographies, things that didn't work and share them. And that's something that is really, really rare. But also, the people who work within the department as academics are just genuinely nice people, fully human. And again, you don't see that very often.
Agata Lisiak 6:11
The creativity and collegiality Yasmin holds so dear was also evident at the Goldsmiths event Emma Jackson organised. Our exchange was fuelled by warmth, curiosity about people and ideas, and commitment to political thinking. It was our time to think together.
Agata Lisiak 6:28
In this section, you'll hear parts of our conversation about "A Global Sense of Place", in which Doreen Massey uses the example of Kilburn High Road (her neighbourhood street) to question top-down ideas of globalisation. The essay was first published in Marxism Today in 1991, and it's been anthologised countless times since.
Suzanne Hall 6:48
I think that I came across the essay first as a PhD student, but I'd come into the world of academia as a practicing architect. I don't think I had anything like what we could call a developed theoretical vocabulary. I'd come from a world of making and literally watching buildings come out of the ground. And so for me, the essay in the first instance was much more about attending to a how than a what. It kind of liberated a way forward for me. I think at that stage I had thought about the significance of theory as a kind of mind map of concerns and possibilities. But I'd always entered into a kind of engagement with life and politics in place through a kind of fascination of minor details and a fascination that was simultaneously rational and emotional. So for me, the Massey piece it kind of combined what is often characterised as these two different ways of thinking: bringing together interpretation and experience, bringing together the mind map of theory and the ground or the street.
Yasmin Gunaratnam 7:59
In terms of this essay, I can't remember when I first came across it, but also -- and I don't think it's just me, Suzi and I were just talking about this -- you know, you read a piece and you put it away and then you read it again and you're like: oh, you've moved on, the piece has moved on, the world has moved on. So every reading is a rereading and a finding of something. I used to live just off the Kilburn High Road, a big road that joins West Hampstead to Kilburn stations, Iverson Road, lived there in the mid-80s. And so there are parts of this essay, like, I used to go into one of the sari shops and buy bangles and scarves and things like that. And I gather from listening to the podcast that they're no longer there anymore. And they had those really crass models in the window with pointy nails, very kind of femme, dressed with saris. So that -- Doreen's sort of description of the actual high road -- I remember really well. And then to learn who was living there at the time, so Doreen, Stuart Hall, across the road in Brondesbury, and Mike Rustin -- they came together to write the Kilburn Manifesto. So I think when I read this and I see all of these voices and conversations in the essay as well. Also, I used to buy Marxism Today and it was one of those A4 quite glossy magazines, and lots of it I didn't understand. So I don't know if this essay could have been in one of those copies that you read a bit, you put it away and you come back. But there was a sense for Marxism Today of an intellectual community, which is also something that I want to come back to in terms of what's being done to our universities at the moment. So in this essay is the generosity of lots of conversations, I think, between people who kind of lived there at the time and were doing this thinking.
Agata Lisiak 9:59
Just to follow up on this, that Emma and I, we have walked that street a lot together. And very often in literature on walking, there is a singular walker, right? In classical western walking literature it's the flâneur, the walking upper-class male. But even the literature on the flâneuse, it's very often a woman walking alone. And we found it very important to walk the street together and to chat as we walk and to point to things and to recall Doreen Massey's essay. But then also, when you read it and you read that part about her walk through Kilburn High Road, you realise that it's a composite, right? It's not just one walk. As Yasmine said, it's very strongly situated in a particular time and place, but, actually, she wrote it -- or she finished writing it -- in Mexico City. So she was far away from Kilburn High Road when she completed it. And so, because it's a composite of various walking moments, it's very likely that some of those moments happened in conversation with others. Maybe Stuart Hall, maybe another neighbour, maybe a friend who was visiting from elsewhere, from the North. And so, Emma and I were talking about it, and we feel like it's in there, it's not explicit, but, as Yasmine said, this essay is informed by conversations with many different people, with her comrades, but also neighbours, visitors, and perhaps that's why it resonates so powerfully, because it's a conversation.
Yasmin Gunaratnam 11:37
There's quite a bit of fun in the essay as well. So there's a lovely bit towards the end of the essay when she's talking about wider connections and I have to read this to you because I won't be able to summarise it and do it justice. So she's talking about how consciousness of place is always link to wider context. So she says: "This is not a question of making the ritualistic connections to 'the wider system' -- the people in the local meeting who bring up international capitalism every time you try to have a discussion about rubbish collections". And I really like that because we all know, we've all been in those meetings! You're like: oh god, here we go... But it's also the seriousness, because those things are absolutely important to her. As a Marxist informed thinker, she is thinking about global capitalism. But imagine in her community meeting about local rubbish collection, she's also really interested in the detail of how are we going to get this done? So I think there's another reference as well which gives a sense of her as being someone involved in lots of different conversations. And I think people have mentioned this about her being so curious and her willingness to -- she was just genuinely interested in people and how their worlds worked. And I think that, again, is a space that's rare, the space to talk to colleagues and students. And that's the thing that I really miss with the neoliberal university regime breathing down my neck, the chance to sit and have a proper conversation with someone and to be really interested in them beyond maybe they're part of your module or whatever they're doing -- it's just shrinking.
Agata Lisiak 13:32
Yasmin echoes Massey's own concerns about the shrinking time to think in academia. Massey emphasised the importance of "having ample time to talk to colleagues, and not just in formal structures such as seminars". As we know from previous episodes, for Massey, that kind of thinking happened also in the car, on the train, in restaurants, in reading groups and in friends' living rooms. For me, this podcast has enabled exactly that kind of thinking. At Goldsmiths, Emma Jackson asked me to reflect on this:
Agata Lisiak 14:07
To go back to some of the things we're already discussing, how so much beautiful thinking can happen in conversation, and that it takes time to nurture those conversations, to allow for pauses or silences. I've been extremely lucky that so many wonderful people I invited to this conversation said "yes" and so many of you are in the room. So it's absolutely, it's such a joy and privilege. You know, what you hear on the podcast are just tiny excerpts of those conversations, but those conversations happened first over email, over a shared script, a google doc, then a long conversation, sort of more informal. So we have a new episode titled "Space Invaders" with Nirmal Puwar as the main guest and when Nirmal invited me to her home in Coventry, we spent the first two hours, I think, just talking about the books we read, and we didn't record any of that. So the podcast is one thing, but I feel like what is invisible -- or rather inaudible -- are those amazing connections and conversations and sharing space together and thinking together that happen around it.
Agata Lisiak 15:17
As we discussed at the Goldsmiths event, collegiality, kindness and care are key to our survival in academia, yet they're not written into the university design. They happen despite the university structures that promote individual academic success. A sense of community and care matters not only within individual universities, but also beyond them and across borders, too, especially when academic freedom is at risk.
Agata Lisiak 15:46
On a sunny day at the campus of Bard College Berlin, I met with my colleague Aysuda Kölemen. Aysuda is a political scientist energetically involved in programs to support threatened scholars.
Aysuda Kölemen 15:58
A threatened scholar is a person who cannot conduct research or teach or be active as a public intellectual in their own chosen country, home country, where they want to be or where they are legally allowed to be. So they have to leave that place, or even if they're not allowed to leave that place, they cannot work as an academic anymore in that particular location.
Agata Lisiak 16:26
And what is the threat that makes them threatened scholars?
Aysuda Kölemen 16:30
So the threat can come in many different forms. One thing that everybody is aware of is conflict. If they're in a war zone, any type of conflict zone -- it could be an international war or a civil war -- they're obviously threatened. The second form of threat might be because their country or city had a big natural disaster and the circumstances do not allow them to continue working there anymore. The third reason that we are most familiar with, I believe, is when there's an autocratising regime. And I make the distinction "autocratising" as opposed to "authoritarian" on purpose because most people who grow up and who get jobs in authoritarian regimes don't easily become threatened because they're used to working in that context and they take the risks and they know the risks. But when the system becomes more and more autocratic, that's when things get complicated and they take risks that get them into trouble because they're used to a more liberal, more free environment in academia and generally the political milieu. And then they usually end up losing their jobs, being persecuted, even their lives might be threatened and often they need to leave the country.
Aysuda Kölemen 17:49
Another form of threat is because of who you are, because of your identity. For example, you might be threatened -- again, this is usually a result of autocratisation -- because you are an LGBTQ+ person, because you come from a religious minority or an ethnic minority, so your identity becomes dangerous, and because your identity starts becoming persecuted. And the final threat that we talk much less about, but it's becoming more and more visible and prominent also in liberal democratic regimes is when you conduct research in an area that the government doesn't necessarily have a problem with, but you start receiving from private groups and people -- for example, especially people in gender studies are being threatened in countries like the United States and Germany and Denmark more and more often, they might have to hide their identities and their addresses because they get death threats. And that is something we don't talk very much about and those people rarely if ever define themselves as threatened scholars or apply to threatened scholars programs because they often live in what we call democratic regimes and they're presumed to have recourse to legal protection although in reality that is not always the case.
Agata Lisiak 19:18
It's important to realise that it's not only authoritarian regimes and armed conflicts that pose a threat to academic freedom. Aysuda recently co-edited a book called Academic Freedom and Precarity in the Global North: Free As a Bird.
Aysuda Kölemen 19:32
That book came out of our personal experience with my co-editor, Aslı Vatansever. We both had to leave Turkey because of our threatened status. Around 2016 almost 1,200 Turkish scholars signed a petition against the Turkish government calling for ending the massacre against Kurdish civilians. And that led to firing, dismissal of a lot of our colleagues and then the prosecution of most of our colleagues, including me and we had to leave Turkey. And a lot of us came to Germany between 2016 and I would say 2019, although some people continue to come today. And when my colleagues arrived in Germany, they expected this land of milk and honey, academically speaking, a place where you could say anything, but also you could write about anything, you could conduct research on anything, you could teach anything -- this perfect academic freedom. And what a lot of Turkish academics found was that that was not the case at all. The government was not a threat. The government did not care whether you conduct research in this area or that, whether you publish this or that. They didn't care what you taught. But you were just as much limited and, in certain cases, you were much more limited in Germany in your research. And the problem was money.
Aysuda Kölemen 21:02
The problem in Germany is that over 90% of the academic force is on contingent contracts, and a lot of them are between two to five years -- five years if you're very lucky -- most of them are two to four years. And that means you're always thinking of the next grant, if you don't want to be unemployed. And then there is also a limit to that because after a certain while an institution either has to hire you and give you tenure or they cannot hire you anymore, which is a law meant to supposedly protect academics from precarious labour, but actually it renders them even more precarious because no one wants to hire people for longer than a certain period because they do not have the resources to give them tenure. So more and more we found that this is very restrictive of our academic freedom although that is not necessarily visible, especially if you are in that system. But if you're coming from outside, you have the outsider perspective, it becomes very clear to you that you cannot do the things that you used to be able to do in your own country, which didn't have as many academic freedoms.
Agata Lisiak 22:09
The absence of an immediate threat of persecution doesn't guarantee freedom when it comes to choosing research agendas and curricula. Economic freedom matters too, and -- just like colleagues on the Goldsmiths picket line and other scholars on strike -- Aysuda and Aslı's book urges us to acknowledge what we are: workers. The depressingly low chances of academic job security that we just heard about are even more harrowing when we consider them with gender, race, class, citizenship and disability in mind.
Agata Lisiak 22:40
Aslı Vatansever is a sociologist and currently a fellow at Bard College Berlin. Aslı is Aysuda's co-editor and has a book of her own titled At the Margins of Academia: Exile, Precariousness and Subjectivity. Her most recent research focuses on labour struggles in academia. I asked Aslı to define precarity.
Aslı Vatansever 23:02
Wow, you asked a monster of a question. What is precarity? Well, there are different approaches to that, of course. Some people reduce precarity to poverty, which is not the case. Some people reduce precarity to being entirely hopeless within the labour market, being unemployable entirely. In my opinion, precarity captures a moment of downward social mobility. It refers to those people with a middle-class background who believed that if you worked hard, you could also play hard and have everything and have a decent middle-class life as your parents did or even better. These people are now faced with grave downward social mobility despite their qualifications, despite their middle-class backgrounds, despite their education and everything. So for me, precarity captures actually this moment where you realize or where you're confronted with the illusions of the system, where the promises of modern liberalism turn out to be lies.
Agata Lisiak 24:13
How did you arrive at this topic?
Aslı Vatansever 24:16
Because I belong to that group of people who experience downward social mobility. I mean, I come from a middle-class family. My parents are the typical boomers, I would say. They are both migrant children. I mean, my father came with his family from the former Yugoslavia to Turkey. He's a migrant, literally. And my mom is also -- she has a migrant background, her mom came from Bulgaria. These are Balkan peasants, actually, and their parents were barely literate and they were the first ones to have a college degree in their own families. And they wanted their children to have an even better life and become world citizens and so on and so forth. So they sent me and my brother to foreign high schools and they put much value on education and everything. And they were hopeful with regard to the future because their lives have been marked by the privileges and upward social mobility of the welfare era. So they believed that if they send their children to even better schools, they will have even better lives, which we did, but not in the economic sense, at least not me. I mean, in terms of social and cultural capital, maybe we're better off than they have ever been, but economically we stumbled on the structural crises of the last decades because I was born in 1980, my brother was born in 1975 -- and this is literally when the contraction phase of the global capitalist world economy started. So our lives were marked by those crises and I realised that I would never even have a secure career. I mean, look at this: academic career used to be this super unilinear, predefined and secure career path. And I got into it not because of that, but having in mind that I will have pretty normal, boring, secure career path, which is far from what I'm going through at the moment.
Agata Lisiak 26:22
Aslı started her research on academic precarity while she was still working at a private university in Turkey. Then, like Aysuda and hundreds of other scholars there, she signed the Academics for Peace petition.
Aslı Vatansever 26:35
And then the Academics for Peace crisis happened and they fired me on political grounds. So economic precarity and political oppression converged in my case and then I came to exile and I found myself in an even more precarious situation as a migrant non-tenured scholar at the post-doc phase and it made me think the political oppression that you see in the periphery and the economic precarisation that you see in the core are actually two sides of the same coin. They both boil down to the disempowerment of a very actually intellectually armed labour force.
Agata Lisiak 27:12
Aslı has done research on academic labour activism across the Global North which allows her to analyse the situation in Germany from a comparative perspective. As you'll hear, there's a unique reason why solidarity is so difficult here.
Aslı Vatansever 27:27
A union is an important tool in organising people, which you unfortunately don't have in Germany for various reasons. First of all, because the academic funding scheme in Germany is very intricate, which brings about a very fragmented labour force where everybody is subjected to different contracts, different employment conditions and different situations and the unions are kind of helpless in front of that. And also the tenured faculty cannot organise at all, they're legally prohibited from going on a strike. And why would they anyway? I mean, they are the feudal lords in their respective faculties. But the academic precariat cannot unionise because against whom should they unionise? I mean, most of them are externally funded. So this is a problem. But what the academic precariat in Germany tries to do to solve this issue is they create local Mittelbauinitiativen which means local mid-career academics networks at different campuses which then convene under a nationwide umbrella network which is called the Network for Decent Work in Academia, which also has a coordinative circle that deals with integrating different demands and coordinating the organisation of bigger protest events like the one we had in front of the Ministry of Education and Research a couple of weeks back.
Aslı Vatansever 29:05
Hallo allesamt! Sorry für meine Stimme gerade, die Revolution bleibt mir die Stimme aus. The reason why we gathered here may seem like an internal problem of German academia, but if you look closely, you will see that it's part of a global problem and the protesters that you see here today are each part of the enormous spectre that is haunting European academia -- the spectre of the academic precariat.
Aslı Vatansever 29:39
Usually our understanding of labour activism is pretty much masculinist in the sense of being super outcome-oriented and expecting heroic stories and leading personalities. This is not the case in current academic labour activisms, which I find actually good. This is what I call the feminisation of academic labour activism actually: a more open-ended understanding of success at the moment, like incremental success, step by step, building trust, making the issue visible, which is very important. For example, the discursive shift that we have witnessed in the German academia since 2017 -- since the Network for Decent Work in Academia has been established -- has been immense and this is a success in itself. I mean, to most people, okay, the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (the fixed-term academic employment law) is still intact and we are even threatened with the aggravating of it. But this is not where I would focus energies on or struggles on. It's an ongoing struggle and we have various battlefields, of course, various fronts, but in the sense of making academic precarity visible, the fact that it even made it into headlines of journals and newspapers or even to a plenary session of the German parliament -- and these are successes because even up to five years ago, people were not talking about this issue in this frequency that we have right now. But right now we have politicians trying to get in touch with the Network for Decent Work in Academia and with union leaders. This is an important step. And it did not come up in one night, like overnight; it did not happen through heroic actions and charismatic leadership or organising combative action protests and so on and so forth. It came up through solidarity. It came up through resilience. It came up through hugging each other and crying after meetings and emailing one another every once in a while to just find out if everyone's okay. These are things that we want to see in today's academia. And in that sense, the struggle is much more personal, much more humane, I would say. We are changing the relationships within academia from the ground.
Agata Lisiak 32:22
I sometimes wonder if Doreen Massey's career would have been possible in today's academia. Would she have opted out? Or would she have fought for a better university? In a previous episode, James Marriott said that she was "basically badly behaved a lot of the time" and didn't follow the class and gender standards expected of established scholars. I can definitely imagine her on picket lines -- like Emma Jackson and Aslı Vatansever -- megaphone in hand, speaking at teach-ins, offering analysis, occupying lecture halls. Or maybe she wouldn't even pursue an academic career under the current conditions? When she was hired as a professor at the Open University in the early 1980s, Massey was already a published, politically active scholar, but she didn't meet the standard requirements of today's academia. She never even got a PhD.
Agata Lisiak 33:14
As we've discussed on this podcast, the university is not the only intellectual space in the world. There is really no good reason to romanticise or fetishise academia. But I keep thinking about the brilliant minds and generous hearts that the neoliberal university keeps out and spits out. It's a tremendous loss not only for students, but also for society at large, when teaching and research are censored for political reasons, and when they rely on contingent labour, strict metrics and reductive market driven ideas of 'impact'.
Agata Lisiak 33:50
Still, as I hope becomes clear in this episode, the struggle is worth our time and effort. And there are many ways to resist the neoliberal push. Massey's insistence on thinking and acting together, in conversation, continues to inspire. Organising through industrial action remains key -- that's historically how most workers' rights have been won. What's also important is building and nurturing the kinds of communities of care that we heard about today.
Agata Lisiak 34:28
Unbelievably, this is our final episode. It's been an amazing journey. I'd like to thank everyone who agreed to appear on this podcast. Thank you for your time and generosity. I'm also grateful to listeners who have sent us feedback: from Chile to Egypt, Australia, Germany and beyond. It's a true delight to hear your thoughts.
Agata Lisiak 34:51
Over the ten episodes, you've heard a lot of my voice, but this podcast is a collective effort. And it's been a particularly joyful one as I got to collaborate with former students: Reece Cox, responsible for the crisp and smooth sound production; Adèle Martin, who assisted with production and herself produced the bonus episode titled "Visual Delight"; Bose Sarmiento, who designed our gorgeous illustrations and hosted Episode 9; and Eric Moreno Superlano, who hosted Episode 5.
Agata Lisiak 35:24
We've been very fortunate to work closely with Susan Stone, a journalist and audio producer, who has her own podcast called the Dead Ladies Show. Give it a listen, it's great!
Agata Lisiak 35:35
We wouldn't have been able to make this podcast without funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. Thank you to the Foundation for the financial support, and special thanks to Pierre Schwidlinski and Barbara Neubauer.
Agata Lisiak 35:48
Last but certainly not least, the Sociological Review Foundation team created a home for this project and supported us along the way. Big thanks to Michaela Benson, Karen Shook, George Kalivis, Danielle Galway and Attila Szanto.
Agata Lisiak 36:05
If you're looking for informative podcasts to listen to after Spatial Delight, check out the rest of the Sociological Review's expanding podcast collection. Uncommon Sense, for example, is the place to learn about key sociological ideas in an accessible way. I particularly enjoyed their episode on cities with Romit Chowdhury. We'll put a link in the episode notes. That's also where you'll find links to other things we discussed today.
Agata Lisiak 36:32
Our series ends with this episode, but it will live on the internet forever -- or at least for a long time -- so please continue sharing it with friends and using it as a learning resource in your classes. It's here for you. Thank you for listening.