The Micropolitics of Care in Indonesia’s Neoliberal Universities

Scholars of numerous theoretical traditions have criticised the effects of neoliberal reorganisation of universities worldwide, including the impacts of its performative culture on academia. Feminist scholars have critiqued the increasingly neoliberalised universities as careless institutions where care practices, which can be located in the teaching–learning nexus, are too often overlooked. This article explores the micropolitics of care in Indonesian higher education and identifies ‘caring practices’ as subjugated knowledge, despite their criticality in day-to-day teaching and learning. Based on policy review and interviews, we identified three insights into the micropolitics of care as practised by our participants, which may challenge the neoliberal careless doxa – namely, lecturers as educators; caring practices as resistance; and embedding care in organisational settings. Only by acknowledging care as a value, practice, and conceptual lens in understanding gender inequalities in neoliberal academia can we re-imagine universities as having equalising effects rather than otherwise.