Even “small wins” can affect larger institutions
Altan-Olcay and Bergeron 21 [Özlem Altan-Olcay is associate professor of Political Science in the Department of International Relations at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her primary research interests include gender and development, transnational networks, and citizenship studies. Some of her recent articles have appeared in Development and Change, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Feminist Economics, Gender, Place and Culture, Sociology, Social Politics, and Women's Studies International Forum.; *Suzanne Bergeron is the Helen Mataya Graves Collegiate Professor of Women's Studies and Social Sciences at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her current research traces out the implications of using efficiency arguments to achieve gender equity goals in various areas of development policy, and examines the possibilities for recognizing and fostering diverse, non-capitalist economic practices in neoliberal times. She is a collaborating researcher with the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on Social and Solidarity Economy, The Community Economies Research Network, and the Women on the Verge Collective.; “Care in times of the pandemic: Rethinking meanings of work in the university”; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gwao.12871; Accessed 7-6-23]//LASA-mackerel
Of course, we recognize that these gains are not in any way revolutionary. The strategy is focused on effecting change through “small wins” (MacKay, 2021). In our pessimistic moments, we each worried that our work on these Task Forces might be reproducing a “cruel optimism” (Berlant,2011) in which a desire for paid care activities to be more visible and valued institutionally would be futile while ironically adding to the service burden of largely women members on the committees. Yet we both also believe, and in fact have written about in other contexts, that there is a need to challenge overly pessimistic views of feminist engagement in institutions as always already coopted by neoliberalism (Altan-Olcay,2020; Bergeron,2017). In the contingent, contradictory and diverse economic spaces of the neoliberalizing academy there remain openings for feminist change to occur. Also, we know from other institu-tions' experiences that if such initiatives receive support at the highest level, the space is widened for the formerly hidden scripts to become part of larger institutional narratives about the value of caring labor activities to the success of the university, without formulating it as something we do in addition to our “real work” (Clark etal.,2020) which can only lead to its depletion. A final point here is that such change is worth pursuing given that a far worse form of “cruel optimism” can occur when existing gender equality policies promise a fair outcome but fail to deliver because they do not challenge current definitions, measurements, and valuations of academic labor (Lipton,2017). Thus, universities committed to gender equality would be well-served by undertaking such activities.