Notes on loving a university that doesn’t love me back

I came to academia for the feeling,

that particular one of sheer joy when I feel inspired or when an idea opens up or when I read that perfect thought someone has written and shared. It is the feeling that time loosens, that I can linger here, dwell and stay with something difficult or beautiful.

I came for curiosity instead of urgency.

I came to think and write, unrushed.

I came to create, without haste.

I came for criticality, unleashed.

I came because I believed that knowledge generation was the kind of thing that needed time, and that here, inside the university, time might be given.

I write this piece as someone occupying the position they call “early career scholar” or worse “junior researcher,” which is to say that I have a fixed-term contract and that I am learning the academic temporality of how to live in fragments. Three years twice. That’s my experience of being an employee of the university: first as a PhD researcher and now as a post doctorate. It’s long enough to begin belonging, but short enough to ensure you never fully arrive. I view my working life through these carved up temporalities.

When temporality becomes the organising principle of employment itself, endurance might also become more manageable: I can keep this pace of productivity for 3 years. Can’t I?

I comply. I continue to make myself more employable, not for now (because I am employed!), but for the future. It feels important to name the tension of my position: I write from the anticipation of precarity, not from within it. I write from employment, from a position that grants me access to resources, time and forms of recognition that many are denied. And yet, this access is structured by its expiry. What kind of orientation is this? An orientation towards what comes next, not an orientation that allows me to settle into what is. I am always, in some part of myself, auditioning for what comes next. Of course, this orientation is itself produced within a brutal capitalist temporal structure, one in which I become an embodiment of productive capitalism itself.

So, I continue along this path, unable to really say whether I follow desire or expectation. I do enjoy it. More than that, I think, I love it. Academia.

And yet, this is the question that lingers: What is it that I call love here? Is it the institution or the moments that happen within and despite it that I love? The affective intensities of thinking, the relations that hold me, the sense of being oriented towards something that I feel matters?

Perhaps what I love is not academia as institution but the forms of relations it makes possible. I love the fulcrum of academic community, the togetherness and possibility of finding others who are curious about the same questions. I get to move and choose, at least in part, to work alongside people who inspire me. I can reach across institutions, disciplines and borders and find the people with whom thinking begins to feel like love. We can build collaborations and create relationships that make this work feel shared, even when the structures around it insist otherwise. There is something like love here – not from the institution, perhaps, but among us: collegial, intergenerational, uneven, but it’s there.

I think of the women in academia who have been mentors, guides and confidants to me and the way their dispersal of knowledge has felt like a form of love.

I know academia is not going to love me back if I do not produce the things that it values, but there are people within it who do, or might.

I am interested in how this love might be what orients us differently: towards collective connection and solidarity rather than individual survival. Can love, here, become a way of sustaining academic life otherwise?

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) writes that what she has been most proud of “is having a life where work and love are impossible to tell apart.” I read this and feel both its appeal and its unease. There is something in it that sounds like the life I want: absorbent, devoted, undivided and something that names the mechanism through which neoliberal institutions extract our most intimate energies and feelings. When work and love are impossible to tell apart, the institution gets both our labour and our longing. Work extends into the body itself, into the texture of attachment.

Where is love in this academic temporality? Love wants to linger, it wants to stay, dwell and suspend itself for a moment. But academic time is relentlessly forward moving, organised around productivity, output and progression.

This leaves me with another question: Did someone arrange the conditions so carefully that I would mistake this arrangement for love? Perhaps this exposes the tension at the core of this piece: I am attempting to write about rest as resistance while being almost entirely unable to rest.

It also leaves me here: not simply attached to an illusion but entangled in something more ambivalent. Loving something that does not reliably love me back, and still, finding within it reasons to stay. I remain, desirably, attached to what does not quite hold me.

As feminist scholars have long argued, exhaustion is neither pathological nor individual but political. It’s not an individual failure of balance, resilience or self-care. Institutions function precisely because they can exhaust us (Holvikivi and Pandit, 2022). Universities survive and endure through added, unrecognised and devalued workloads, emotional labour, mentoring, reviewing, organising, caring and worrying. So much of academic life is sustained by forms of care that are never named as such, or named at all.

We are told to manage ourselves better.

To learn to say no.

To whom? How?

Instead of saying no, I follow. I follow with too little resistance. Why am I not more bothered, or angry even?

In a podcast episode of Academic Feelings, Rose Marie Frang (2026) asks whether expressing what we really feel might itself counter an institution structured around competition and acceleration. I wonder if writing this is my attempt at such a counter-act or whether I am merely instrumentalising my feelings into another academic output?

Even when my body grew heavy with grief, loss, worry and responsibility, I held myself in place; conditioned to continue. A moving mourning. I kept working, kept answering, kept appearing intact. The institution does not stop, and so, I learn not to stop either. Was work what made me survive? Is that naïve?

No one could see my exhaustion. Is exhaustion ever visible? Or is its invisibility precisely what also makes it functional: for the institution, for those around me, but also, I suspect, for myself. To name it would require pausing.

The feelings of grief and loss arrived as inconveniences, out of step with the demand to keep going. Grief does not wait for permission. Some feelings become inconvenient not because they are excessive, but because they interrupt the churn of productivity and endurance we are trained to maintain (Berlant, 2022). And so, I learned to hold myself upright inside them, accommodating the crisis rather than stopping and resting for it.

Sometimes I joke that it must be my Capricorn ascendant that makes me able to just keep going. But underneath the joke is another question: Did my time always belong to someone else?

Black feminist thinkers remind us that care and refusal interrupt systems that demand constant productivity (Gumbs, 2021; Hersey, 2022; hooks, 2014). Collective rest refuses extraction. It asserts that bodies and desires are not endlessly available. I admire practices devoted to rest, naps and slowing down. I cite them. I teach them. I believe in them. And still, I do not rest enough. This is not hypocrisy, I tell myself; it is a structure. It is a structure that I reproduce even in the act of critique, which is perhaps the most demoralising thing about it (me).

So, I keep going.

This tension produces a familiar figure: what Sara Ahmed (2023) calls the institutional killjoy, the one who complains, who points out the inequality, who refuses happiness scripts. The killjoy names the problem and therefore becomes the problem. She speaks because she cares enough to remain in relation. I recognise her in myself. But I also learned that to complain does not necessarily produce response or continued relation. Three years after submitting an official complaint, I have still not received an answer from the university. The silence is not neutral. It is a technique: a way of absorbing the complaint into institutional time, which moves at a different pace than the person making the complaint, until the complainer moves on or runs out of steam or contract.

I also recognise another figure: the one who diagnoses institutional neglect while continuing to reproduce its tempo. Or the one who critiques acceleration while accelerating.

What can I do with this figure of myself?

Perhaps burnout lives precisely in this gap between critique and participation. I know too much to believe in the system entirely but have too little to step outside it. What, then, does resistance look like when withdrawal does not feel possible?

Feminist and queer scholars ask us to imagine otherwise: Even within structures organised by extraction, other ways of being together remain imaginable.

To want something else, to desire beyond what institutions deem realistic or sustainable is already political. It is to imagine another relation to time, one not wholly organised by productivity and acceleration.

Perhaps rest belongs here too, not only as recovery but as imagination.

Rest as the rehearsal of another world.

Slowness as recognising the collective ruin we are all affected by and refusing to abandon one another within.

In a recent collective project on affective learning within our university, we developed a shared language of repair (see also Jackson, 2014), which allowed us to think about the university not as something awaiting salvation through innovation, but as something worn, leaking, exhausted and still expected to function. A bit like us. The university persists through strain, sustained less by renewal than by the continuous labour of those within it who keep it running despite depletion.

If repair is a commitment to staying with what is broken because one cares for it, then my participation is an exercise in remaining within an institution that does not easily allow withdrawal or rest. Staying, here, is not optimism. It is an ambivalent attachment that continues alongside discomfort, exhaustion and constraint, not to overcome them, but to acknowledge how institutional life is sustained precisely through this ongoing, uneven maintenance.

Perhaps resistance begins not with perfect refusal but with imagination. To invite what exists otherwise into thoughts, into being. To make the absent present while remaining attuned to what is already broken. To sit within the tension between what is and what might become otherwise. Will staying with these feelings for a second be one of the forces that can transform it? Or is that naïve, too?

Perhaps resistance begins with returning to love.

Or perhaps resistance sometimes looks like continuing together while naming the cost. Maybe it looks like admitting: I do not know how to rest yet. I am still learning how not to disappear into work. I am still here.

I do not wish for academic life to be this relentless. And yet, I cannot step outside it, I love it, I cannot rest.