ABSTRACT
In this chapter Brita Bergland describes contemporary challenges related to the neoliberal university and its negative impact on interdisciplinary scholarship. While interdisciplinary scholarship relies upon an idea of knowledge as multi-faceted, perspectival and partly subjective, neoliberal university structures work in the opposite direction, seeking singular and objective knowledge as cultivated within highly specific domains and disciplines. The neoliberal system creates hierarchy and competitiveness over resources and claims of expertise, while the knowledge it produces has a lesser impact, due to its specificity and lack of recognition of insights and methodologies from other fields. In this context, Bergland recommends feminist slow scholarship which emphasizes knowledge as lived and experienced across multiple domains, and relational, utilizing a feminist ethic of care. This essay is interesting in its assessment of neoliberalism over the past 50 years, while its impact in the contemporary period is vividly portrayed in the context of western higher education.
