Unequal expressions
Emotions and narratives of leaving and remaining in precarious academia
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In reflections on modern ‘neoliberal’ universities, narratives of quitting academia hold a special fascination. This is evidenced by the recent proliferation of ‘quit lit’: emotionally charged public statements elucidating people’s departures from academia. Yet scholarly examinations of quitting are exceedingly rare, especially those of precarious and ‘early career’ academics whose likelihood of departure is high. In this paper, I reflect on interviews with precarious academics in Australia, as well as reviewing worldwide Anglophone ‘quit lit’ authored by such academics. I distinguish accounts of quitting, leaving, remaining and returning, exposing how these labels reflect different positionalities and narratives. Uncovering the emotional dimensions of leaving and remaining, I reveal how emotions are expressed unequally depending on people’s capacities to depart and temporal proximity to leaving. Well‐rehearsed declarations of love and passion intersect with claims of no longer caring or losing hope, as well as with expressions of grief and anger. Expanding on literatures on the ‘hidden injuries’ of academia and the pernicious effects of ‘hope’ and ‘love’ on workers, I demonstrate how unequal expressions – in precarious academics’ ability to tell ‘quitting stories’ and to express less‐than‐optimistic emotional accounts – expose hierarchies among precarious academics and reflect their uneven capacities to resist.