The Academic Productivist Regime: Affective Dynamics in the Moral-Political Economy of Publishing

Abstract

With proliferating neoliberal modes of science governance, publishing has become more important. Recent studies point to researchers’ feeling of exhaustion and anxiety as responses to academic performance regimes. Yet how affects underpin publishing in scientific cultures and communities, and what this implies for STS scholarship has remained underexplored. Drawing on insights from ethnographic fieldwork and the cultural studies of affect, this article traces the role of emotions, including hope, contempt, and excitement for understanding the new academic productivist regime at a Czech research institution. While junior researchers’ orientations are fostered through rendering publications objects of hope, a moral-political economy intersects with geopolitical history and values of research organization to shape the publication practices of many senior scientists. An affective labor of combat and equanimity is necessary for managing these orientations that are corporeally energized by a dynamic of thrill. This four-pronged approach makes palpable how emotions render scientists’ bodies hopeful, combative and excited while intersecting with ideals of meritocratic research organization and assessment. Frustration and failure are never entirely absent but serve as an immanent driving force for a publishing culture that thrives on adrenaline, combativeness, and hope. This makes it difficult to leverage failures towards criticism of the academic productivist regime—both for the scientists differently affected within the institution and STS researchers. Different engagements with this regime require a more capacious accounting for the pleasure and thrill generated by the uncertainty of publication outcome as well as by unacknowledged practices of care.

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