Toxic times for feminist academic freedom?

Taylor, Gannon, Scantlebury, and Osgood focus on feminism and academic freedom in toxic times through their perspectives as feminist academics and editors of a major journal in the field of gender and education. The chapter begins with biographical narratives illuminating the personal effects of toxicity and why academic freedom matters to them. The next section widens the scope to theorise their work as a politics of location (Haraway, 1988) which sits in uncomfortable relation to Brown's (2015, 2019) concerns that neoliberalism is 'undoing the demos'. From this, they conceptualise feminist academic freedom as a politically charged contested terrain possessing particular risks for feminist work. The subsequent section outlines how feminist academic freedom has been conceptualised in Gender and Education and feminist work more broadly. Following that, they identify a number of examples which highlight the increasing threat feminist work frequently attracts as a consequence of the rise of the right. After that, they turn to their work as editors of Gender and Education, to explore how feminist academic freedom is entangled with their affective labour as editors and how it shapes their desires to enact a feminist ethics of care. The chapter contributes a novel perspective in conceptualising feminist academic freedom as an opportunity for producing collective spaces of hope within toxic times for feminists.