Writing the university through poetry

This chapter explores – through poetry – the difficulties of being an academic intent on critiquing the neoliberal university. One effect of the centrality of neoliberalism in current times is the renewed demand for university research to produce (particular kinds of) “evidence”. Such evidence rarely countenances qualitative, creative, or aesthetic forms of research but, rather, demands large-scale (funded), numerical studies, and even randomized control trials – the supposed “gold standard” of research. These empiricist approaches to research, of course, produce particular kinds of knowledge at the expense of others. Poetic forms of representation might be a kind of subversive research output, one that fulfils the neoliberal desire, while also subverting the powerful forms of writing of the academy, the gold standard of research methods. Poetry undoubtedly opens up spaces for uncertainty, for texts to be both destabilized and made multiple in meaning.