An actual proper strategy academics could adopt to resist marketisation, casualisation, and precarity is a total boycott of grant applications. It would end both the worth of work AND permanent jobs being based on the lottery of “grant capture”.

But actually, ultimately, most academics would be too self-centred for that kind of radical organising, and would always argue their little hobby horse is more important that sectoral solidarity of global trends.

There is this disheartened constant chatter on Twitter about grants and funding: I’m worn down by this, colleagues are pressured into it, it produces two tiers of academics on the basis of a lottery, it favours the fashionable over the important, its part of marketisation

And yet people continue on the treadmill, making themselves unhappy, kvetching, perpetuating the trends, and *structurally* fucking over casualised, burnt out, and less fashionable colleagues

I don’t think I’m gonna make myself any friends with this thread but I think it’s something people need to think about

In my own case I don’t even NEED the fucking grant money. All I need to do my research is some paperbacks, access to a library, and a stable job that builds in and protects SOME research time. Yet I’m constantly told I need grants for my career. Stupid fuckin system.