Making sense of academic service in unpredictable times: exploring the risks and benefits of academic activism in higher education

Despite operating in unpredictable times and rhetoric to the contrary, universities make it hard for academics to pursue transformative agendas, meaningful community engagement, and activism to inform social and policy changes. This disjuncture is acute for academics working in fraught areas, such as forced migration. The frailty of higher education, caused by decades of neoliberal governance, increasingly restricts what ‘counts’ as academic service to activities that ultimately preserve the status quo, rendering activism invisible and unvalued. Misalignments therefore exist with what counts as academic work which create risks in the forms of critique, misrecognition and exploitation for both scholars and their students. Drawing on a collective biography with academics from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the UK involved in refugee-focused social movements, we explore academic activism against a backdrop of hegemonic assumptions about what academic service is and can be. We also consider what this means for academic work, and the implications for collectivising for change, both in and beyond the classroom. We argue for institutions to better value the kinds of academic service that amplify diverse perspectives, voices, and knowledges, and help us to navigate uncertainty.