Neoliberalization, Universities and the Public Intellectual ─ Species, Gender and Class and the Production of Knowledge

This book employs an an intersectional feminist approach to highlight how research and teaching agendas are being skewed by commercialized, corporatized and commodified values and assumptions implicit in the neoliberalization of the academy. The authors combine 50 years of academic experience and focus on species, gender and class as they document the hazardous consequences of seeing people as instruments and knowledge as a form of capital. Personal-political examples are provided to illustrate some of the challenges but also opportunities facing activist scholars trying to resist neoliberalism. Heartfelt, frank, and unashamedly emotional, the book is a rallying cry for academics to defend their role as public intellectuals, to work together with communities, including those most negatively affected by neoliberalism and the corportatization of knowledge.

Heather Fraser is Senior Lecturer at Flinders University, Australia and is a feminist social work academic with twenty-five years teaching subjects such as human rights based social work practice and anti-oppressive practice. She has published in community work, narrative analysis, critical social work and social action and advocacy, and more recently, human-animal studies and animal assisted social work.

Nik Taylor is Associate Professor at Flinders University, Australia and has been researching, and advocating for, other animals for over 15 years. Nik has published widely on the treatment of animals; links between human aggression and animal cruelty; slaughterhouses; meat-eating, and, animal shelter work. Her most recent books includeThe Rise of Critical Animal Studies (ed., with Richard Twine), and Humans, Animals and Society.