Specifically true about debate

While rethinking academic labor obviously involves work on multiple fronts, one clear need is a transformation in our shared understanding of what is acknowledged, measured, and documented as important work. We believe that FPE is useful for such a reframing because it conceptualizes care labor as a structural necessity and refuses the totalizing representations of capitalism that devalue such work. In this section, we borrow from these theoretical frameworks to outline two strategies for making visible and measuring the diverse components of academic labor. The first idea we borrow from FPE is to classify the currently invisibilized and/or devalued forms of work we have been discussing thus far are under a broad umbrella of care labor. Feminist political economy scholars define this as work that is structured around service to others and/or involving caring motivations (Folbre & Nelson,2000; Nakano Glenn,2010). For a few decades now, FPE scholarship has focused on making visible and/or revaluing the enormous amount of caring labor, the majority of it done by women, that is essential to human flourishing in the economy. For instance, FPE scholars have challenged the inadequate metrics used to measure economic productivity for excluding or devaluing this work, from national income statistics to job performance measures (Folbre,2006; Waring,1988). They have also highlighted how caring labor fits into the diversity of values, motivations and economic forms that exist within workplaces themselves. As FPE scholars have shown, caring labor is essential to the functioning of organizations and economic systems – even those that define efficiency and productivity around masculinist ideals of individualism and detachment (Gibson-Graham,2006; Nelson,2010; Steinberg & Figart,1999). Reframing these aspects of academic work as care labor is an important move because it allows us to recognize it as proper work, requiring effort and resources that are not in infinite supply. However simply recognizing it as work is not enough. Paid caring labor is recognized in the economy, but often devalued because it is viewed as an extension of unpaid caring labor and something to which women are “naturally” suited, rather than legitimately skilled work (Folbre & Nelson,2000). Attention to intersectional politics is important, as class, race, and migration status structure the valuation of care work as well. Caring labor is not just gendered but also racialized (Nakano Glenn,2010). In higher education, women of color face higher expectations to under-take support and service work than White women, and men of color taken on more than White men (Miller & Roksa,2017). Thus a truly gender and race-equitable approach would require a change in the flawed metrics of productivity in higher education, reinstating the importance of teaching, mentoring and student support work, under-lining the contribution this labor makes to the university and economy as a whole. Yet another issue to tackle is the widespread representation of the political economy of academia itself as an entirely neoliberal and capitalist sphere, in which there is no diversity or alternatives. Feminist political economy scholars have transformed thinking about the economy at large by showing it is made up of more than the activities of rational, self-interested individuals in markets, drawing attention to essential contributions of unpaid household and subsistence labor as well as a diversity of motivations and processes. We can apply these insights to university settings. University administrators will often claim their hands are tied by the “realities of the market” when they employ discourses of competition and market discipline to justify policy changes, adopt corporate models of “effi-ciency” to evaluate academic labor, reframe students as “customers” and education strictly in terms of human capital development for the workplace and so forth. Interestingly, the critical literature on academic labor often reproduces this same discourse in their representations of capitalism as a totalizing force in higher education, where managerial techniques, performance rubrics, rankings, and curricular reform all line up under a regime of “total administration” to serve neoliberal agendas (e.g., McCann etal.,2020). Essentially, these representations, albeit from different power and ideological positions, all reproduce the idea that the logic of neoliberal capitalism now drives higher education such that there is no alternative. But, as FPE scholar J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996) argues, this representation of the economy and/or individual organization as subsumed to the neoliberal order, even when employed in service of social justice projects, can para-doxically contribute to neoliberal capitalism's continued dominance. When applied to the university, such representa-tions help constitute the neoliberal ideal of the entrepreneurial, individualistic, self-managing subject and neoliberal measures of productivity and worth as the standard against which all motivations and contributions will be, for better or worse, assessed. This makes it harder to recognize or fight to support the diversity of economic practices and motivations that constitute the university and help it to achieve its goals. It also lends credence to individualist expla-nations that end up blaming academics who do perform undervalued care work for their own “imprudent choices” while failing to address underlying structural inequalities. What Gibson-Graham calls for, echoing a long history of FPE scholarship, is a transformation of our understand-ing of the economy by acknowledging the diversity of non-capitalist practices that exist in the sometimes unruly and incoherent spaces of our economic system, including universities. This is a strategy of reading for difference rather than dominance. Reading for difference allows us to foreground the diversity of economic activities that contribute to the well-being of the university, and to see ways that these may not “line up” with dominant readings of economic life as determined by capitalist logics. We recognize that this is a difficult thing to do in some of the alienating contexts in which some academics find themselves. But in our experience, there is a great value in acknowledging that projects of neoliberalism, including those related to higher education, are not totalizing, and that motivations and activities outside of the neoliberal frame that are more in line with our values exist (Roelvink,2016). Change becomes more of an open-ended question rather than a given, allowing more space for imagining and enacting economic possibility.