Why French Academic Journals are Protesting

Abstract

Written by an anonymous collective of academics as well as an alliance of academic journals on strike, “Why French Academic Journals are Protesting” firstly operates as an archive of struggles unfolding in the world and on the future of research and higher education in France. Documenting a wave of transformations, from the bureaucratization of student-teacher relations and the commodification of university diplomas to the contractualisation of academic labor and cuts to employee benefits, the article exposes the loss of autonomisation and the diffusion of precarity in French academia. More than merely chronicling devastating legislative and administrative reforms, it acts as a testament of a unique form of scholarly disobedience or scholar-activism. In doing so, the author-activists open up a space of hope for alternative futures or perhaps even a sanctuary, wherein the university-as-it-were might be salvaged from or imagined beyond neoliberalism.