ABSTRACT
The university is in crisis – a crisis compounded by dominant government and management responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis is immanent to multiple, interactional crises at all levels, from the local to the global, the root causes of which are intensified and accelerated processes of neoliberalisation. Across UK Higher Education, staff and students are experiencing the immiserating consequences of processes of perpetual neoliberal restructuring, through which the university is both being neoliberalised and is neoliberalising of itself and wider society. However, the university has long been a site of contestation and struggles from below and to the left. This chapter explores and critiques the roles and trajectory of Learning Development in the increasingly neoliberal university, in order to facilitate understandings of where LD and LDers are located in our historical present – and how, through the emergent critical Learning Development movement and a conception of critical academic literacies, we might best respond in ways that contribute to addressing the crisis of the university and the wider convergent and cascading crises of our contemporary conjuncture. It concludes by considering such struggles as oriented to ‘working in, against, and beyond the neoliberal university’, and reflects on the urgency of building critical hope.
