Technologies of self-care in precarious neoliberal academia: Women academics’ craftwork as strategies of coping and complicity

This article explores the use of craftwork as a technology of self-care by women academics to cope with work demands and commodified narratives in academia. It combines discussions about work pressures in academia and technologies of the self to theorise selfcare strategies used to navigate academic demands and identify new research avenues. Through the memory work of the four women academic authors, the article shows craftwork as a strategy of self-care: self-control, self-preservation and self-(re)positioning. The article extends the theorisation of self-care showing its simultaneous function as a coping and complicity mechanism that responds to and engages with individualised well-being narratives in academia. It also advances and complicates understanding of how technologies of self-care sustain the power structures of the academic labour process, showing the visceral and emotional dimensions of these technologies. The article outlines the contours of a research agenda to interrogate ethical self-care in academia.