Against Reform and Defence: Towards an Abolitionist Feminist Praxis in, against, and beyond the Neoliberal University

This article draws on both authors’ PhD projects to consider how academic activism can respond to marketisation and “audit culture” without exceptionalising these “crises”. By situating perceived “crises” in UK Higher Education within a longer trajectory of colonial capital appropriation, we argue that academic activism should be wary of reformist approaches to audit and marketisation, and of defending universities and critical knowledge production within them. We think with recent work on university abolition and abolitionist feminism, to think through our complicity in reproducing universities and imagine “non-reformist reforms” while keeping in mind the larger aim of abolition. We argue that such an abolitionist feminist praxis should begin by acknowledging our complex entanglement with the institutions in which we work, but rather than considering this to be an impasse, to organise in coalition with those situated differently against and beyond the university.