Universities as Spaces of Possibility: Towards More Creative, Caring Academic Labour

Abstract

In Spring 2025, we had the opportunity to read, write discussion questions and organise a conference panel for the book Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University by Roberta Hawkins and Leslie Kern, published in 2024 by Between the Lines Press, Toronto. We write this commentary to compel geographers to read this book and to share an example of how reading this book encouraged us to construct our academic conference labour differently, offering our discussion questions to facilitate discussion groups for other readers. We see the book as a guide for the current moment in higher education, including the ongoing neoliberalisation of the academy and limits on academic freedom, processes that structure our everyday university labour. In this commentary, we draw on our own experiences of burn out, combined with the book's call for more caring academic labour practices, to invite readers to rethink, reframe, to do and be otherwise, in their academic journeys. In highlighting all the ways, we can change our academic labour, the book recalls an energising space of possibility, a space from which we might reimagine the university.