A Reflection on the "Teaching for Change" Conference and Its Challenges in My Workplace

My Situation

Since 1995, I have worked as a Humanities scholar at the University of Western Sydney. I am trained as a sociologist, specifically a feminist sociologist of religion, but my research interests cover feminist theology, women and religion, and popular culture and religion. I have had a long involvement with feminism and religion, with Catholicism as the major faith tradition in my life. I now consider myself post-Christian. As an undergraduate I worked full-time for the Tertiary Catholic Federation of Australia, affiliated to the International Movement of Catholic Students, which was very radical in the 1980s, concerned with social justice, the alleviation of poverty, and political freedom. It was a powerful personal formation. I had my liberation as a woman in the Catholic Church, a fact that many of my secular feminist friends find hard to understand. As a postgraduate, I worked with a leading anthropologist of religion, Linda Connor, and for my PhD, I wrote an ethnography of the Sydney Women-Church group, theorizing women's religious experiences in Western neo-colonial modernity. I first visited Harvard in 1993 as a postgraduate, meeting with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza to interview her for my thesis. In 1995, I joined the fledgling New Humanities School at the University of Western Sydney. This school began with eight scholars from a mix of humanity disciplines from around Australia; the core intellectual value was the dynamic concept of transdisciplinarity, which we read as a radical critique of disciplinarity and on the cutting edge of knowledge production, in the sense that the formation of ideas was freed from ideological boundaries and where all knowledge was understood as contextual and political. All my colleagues were committed to social justice and worked through myriad political and intellectual pathways to introduce students to the social world. Feminism, post-colonialism, and post-modernism were givens. We did not have to fight for these discourses to exist; they underpinned our teaching and research, and our lives. There was a magic in those early years, which subsequently has diffused with the deterioration of universities under a harsh funding program from the current conservative government. I have lost count of the number of mind-numbing economically driven restructures I have been involved in and the curriculum changes I have had to instigate. These are the material conditions in which I do my intellectual work and under which I live.

The Challenges

On Being Institutionalized—The Material Conditions of My Work

What does it mean to say one is institutionalized? To experience the impact and effects of institutionalization? For me, it meant that the effects of patriarchal, neo-colonial arrangements on my life were beginning to erode my sense of worth and my creativity. I felt I was working to meet the needs of the institution: teaching, curriculum changes, meetings, and so on. At times, I felt I was losing my voice. I seem to spend my life running to meetings, writing documents, teaching, and spending long hours on e-mail. Because I was one of the lucky ones that actually had an academic job, I found it very difficult to raise this issue with colleagues and friends. The corporatization of the university system was particularly anathema, where knowledge not only has to sell but also has to make a profit to survive: what we teach has to be "marketable to our client base." We discussed this as a school, even wrote papers about it, and we struggled to understand and deal with the effects of this on our bodies and lives. We could analyze it, but we couldn't change it. We were active in the union, but the union itself was patriarchal and I found myself battling sexism in the one place where support was most needed. We began to strategize not just how to survive, but how to live in an environment that was clearly going to get worse. I discovered the joys of a fractional appointment, which diminished my stress levels, I connected with people at work who had similar values to me, and I joined...