Care (noun)
The provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something.
Serious attention or consideration applied to doing something correctly or to avoid damage or risk.
(Oxford English Dictionary)
“Performance has no room for caring” (Ball, 2003: 224).
This statement stands out to me most starkly when reading Stephen Ball’s ‘The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity’. Here, I consider some of the implications for Higher Education (HE), in which caring labour tends to be systematically pushed out of sight. Feminist economist Susan Himmelweit (2005) reminds us that caring work involves the development of a social relationship. Ball’s statement suggests that the relational content of teaching is stripped out, because it is not readily quantifiable and measurable, cannot be captured as an outcome, a performance to be judged. This reflects the experience of a teacher, in Ball’s study, who feels unable to care about the children she teaches because she is compelled to invest so much energy in producing the correct kind of target-oriented performance. This hollowing out of the teaching relationship resonates with Furedi’s argument about learning outcomes (LOs) in HE, in which he problematizes the valuing of measurable outcomes over deeper, more open-ended and enriching process. His protest against the vacancy and cynical artifice he observes as associated with LOs references a wider set of prevailing conditions in contemporary academia with its ‘culture of speed’ (Berg and Seeber 2016) and performance management, and the obsession with productivity. The kind of ‘care’ that is privileged reflects the second definition listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, cited above: we must care about, and carefully construct, our professional performances, and those of the organisation (Ball 2003: 224).
My interest in foregrounding care stems partly from my own positionality. As an early career researcher and mother of young children, there is no possibility of ‘no room for caring’ in my work and personal life and the indistinct boundaries between the two. Caring shapes, constrains and enables my engagement in knowledge production. This is not exactly the kind of ‘caring’ to which Ball refers, but performativity culture in contemporary HE risks crowding out ‘room for caring’, with respect to a range of dimensions of care and caring labour. I should add that while women with children are systematically disadvantaged in the academic and wider UK labour markets, I come at this topic from a position of relative privilege which shapes my experience and ability to speak about it, being white, middle-class and in a hetero-relationship with an earning partner, who shares childcare, albeit not equally.
One implication of ‘no room for caring’ is that people with caring responsibilities cannot readily craft themselves into the ‘ideal neoliberal subjects’ (Amsler and Motta 2017: 11) that marketised HE and its culture of speed and managed performances demand, who is, as mother-academic Sara Motta argues, free from care responsibilities or embodied constraints, and infinitely flexible. Paradoxically, the flexibility of academic work is particularly appealing to me as a primary caregiver to young children, but it is double-edged. Pick-up time from childcare is ruthlessly inflexible and young children’s needs are immediate, disruptive and unruly. When the workload is heavy, flexibility means returning to the desk at 10pm every night after they go to sleep, sometimes for hours. The 6am start is equally inflexible. During the teaching term, ‘flexibility’ can mean little sleep and no leisure time.
The question of care is not only a personal one. Himmelweit (2005), among other feminist scholars, draws attention to the uneven distribution of responsibility for caring labour, and care needs. Feminist research has long connected care with the reproduction of structural inequalities. If the important work underway to diversify curricula and make learning more inclusive at LSE and other institutions is to be more than yet another measurable performance in which boxes ticked are valued over substantive change (what Ahmed (2007) calls, ‘doing the document, instead of doing the doing’), we must pay serious attention to the issue of structural inequalities and inclusion/exclusion within academia: the persistent gender pay gap, the motherhood penalty, the under-representation of women at senior levels and of BME scholars at all levels, barriers to access for students from lower income backgrounds, and backlashes against efforts to decolonise. Care is not the only valid lens through which to attend to these issues, but it is a critical one which can also shed light on what kind of labour we are seeking to perform, and constructing as valuable, under contemporary conditions of HE.
Responding to the EDI agenda in HE, assessment mechanisms have tried to create and acknowledge, ‘room for caring’. For instance, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) used to take no account of maternity leave in assessing scholars’ research outputs. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) subsequently allowed maternity to be treated as an ‘extenuating circumstance’. In the 2014 exercise, researchers were allowed to submit one less output for each period of maternity leave within the cycle, but only after HEFCE was pressured to drop an arbitrary 14 month time limit – longer than most periods of maternity leave (Amsler and Motta 2017: 14). I have been advised by mother academics to literally calculate the impact of caring on my output-productivity and make this highly visible on my CV when applying for permanent jobs. However, Amsler and Motta (2017: 2) argue that such solutions remain unsatisfactory, because they construct care as a ‘professional deficit’.
The reason for this sense of irresolution lies in prevailing constructions of work and productivity. Marketised HE is premised on the sharp division between productive and reproductive work that underpins capitalist economic logic, which is highly gendered and maps onto the public/private divide. There is irony to this, given how porous the boundaries are between work and life for academics. That work time is unboundaried and seeps into personal life is an accepted norm, but professional competence is constructed as encompassing the ability to insulate one’s work from contamination by caring labour.
Care, after all, is about maintaining. It is not a quantifiable output. It literally doesn’t count, because it is not productive. Or is it? Feminist economists have long troubled not only the undervaluing of care but its distinction from, and subordination to, productive labour. Care is not straightforwardly antithetical to academic work. The significant relational aspect of teaching work disrupts any such neat distinction. There are ongoing debates about responsibilities for pastoral care in HE, given the pressures on students and concerns about their mental health. It is not clear that better ‘outcomes’ in terms of student achievement and satisfaction, for instance, are independent of the work of maintaining and fostering wellbeing. Intellectual labour and development has emotional offshoots which are more than just incidental. Insofar as there is a place for pastoral care in the university, however, ‘room’ has to be made for it: it should be recognised and remunerated as part of the overall workload and where necessary, performed by professionals with appropriate specialist training and skills, rather than unofficially piled on to heavy workloads and unequally distributed.
Indeed, the mental health of academic staff is itself a potential cause for concern, which has been linked the stresses induced by the performance culture. In working environments which afford ‘no room for caring’, self-care may be eroded before other forms of care. A decade after ‘the terrors of performativity’, Ball and Olmedo (2013) identify ‘care of the self’ in the Foucauldian sense, as a locus of resistance to ‘subjectification’ for teachers. If we are to achieve genuinely better outcomes, by equitable and ethical standards and which effectively challenge and begin to dismantle discriminatory and exclusionary structures of power in HE, we cannot afford not care about care.
References
Ahmed, Sara (2007) ‘‘You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing’: Diversity, race equality and the politics of documentation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30: 4, 590-609
Ambler, Sarah & Sara C. Motta (2017), ‘The marketised university and the politics of motherhood’, Gender and Education
Ball, Stephen J. (2003), ‘The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity’, Journal of Education Policy, 18:2, 215-228
Ball, Stephen J. and Antonio Olmedo (2013), ‘Care of the self, resistance and subjectivity under neoliberal governmentalities’, Critical Studies in Education, 54:1, 85-96
Berg, Maggie and Barbara K. Seeber (eds). (2016). The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. University of Toronto Press.
Himmelweit, Susan (2005), ‘Can we afford (not) to care? Prospects and Policy’. LSE Gender Institute New Working Paper Series, Issue 15. Available here.
Contemporary Issues in Teaching and Learning 
Thank you very much Natasha for highlighting such a relevant issue in your blog post. I think that the way in which you link the question of care both within and outside the classroom is particularly though-provoking. In particular, I find your argument that care work cannot be neatly separated from supposedly productive one, in a moment in which measurements and performance outcomes rule over academic lives, a compelling one. Indeed care labour is necessary to keep social relations going, for maintenance is at least as relevant as production in the making of social worlds. The fact that performance-based teaching fails to acknowledge this certainly brings about significant inequalities that follow class, race, and – centrally – gender lines. I completely agree with the fact that caring labour must be taken into account as a fundamental part of academic work, within and beyond the classroom.
Undoubtedly, questions of mental health are relevant in today’s educational environment. Pressures deriving from outcome compliance, performance measurements, and a general sense of competition and individualism might be leading to increasing mental health problems. This, as you mention, affects both students and staff, with often terrible consequences. I agree that, in this regard, rethinking care as an integral part of academic life and work can lead to specific measures that take action against this health problem. This implies recognising that teaching and learning are essentially relational processes, which exceed that which can be accounted for by the rigid numerical measurements that underpin the commodification of higher education.
Finally, I wonder if we can take this idea further. How would a care-centred teaching and learning process look like? To start with, I believe this could very well go beyond issues of mental health. In many ways, the patologisation of education can act as a deterrent to think our teaching and learning practices as always already deeply political questions. If the issue of care was to be critically linked with the ways in which orthodox economics conceptualises what is valuable or not, perhaps a more radical curriculum could be put forward.
Conversely, focusing on issues of care might highlight the fact that most of the processes that make life possible are not focused on innovation, production or creation, but on the often discreet and invisible worlds of maintenance. Perhaps by recognising this, different ways to think about possible collective futures can be brought forward, for a world that is centred on care might be one in which questions of equality, social justice, and environmental sustainability become intertwined. By placing care at the centre of our thinking, perhaps we can think equality and justice beyond the necessary question of class, integrating the gender and race dimensions that also structure the social relations that take place in our classrooms and outside of them.
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This is an excellent post and I agree with almost everything it says. I’m myself a female assistant professor with a toddler to look after, and my husband and I are both suffering from the lack of acknowledgement of the time it take to care. At the time of writing, the nursery just called me (not my husband!) to say that my son was sick and I needed to go an pick him up. It is 3.30pm on a Monday, and I was already struggling and wondering exactly how I would get everything done even without having to pick up my son early.
Although maternity leave (and paternity leave to some extent) are slowly become recognised as times during which you cannot do normal work, and is being taken into account in academia through the “stopping of the review clock” for example, this is not so with parenting of young children.
I think one thing you did not really say in your post is that academia suffers perhaps more so from this issue than other disciplines, mainly because there is an informal agreement that the worker will work long hours in the evening and weekends. Because parenting (especially of very young children) eats into exactly those chunks of time, young parents will necessarily fall behind in terms of research output and other work commitments compared to workers at the same level without children.
It is really a significant issue. Thank you so much for writing this up so clearly in this post.
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