Today, neoliberalism is the driving factor which determines the principles and values which governs how academic scholars operate within universities. Like so much else, universities are modelled after the unjust neoliberal structures which perpetuate economic inequalities across the globe. These conditions encourage fierce competition, myopic individualism, unsustainable growth, irrelevant metrics and hopeless complicity within academia. Yet despite the desire for a more just, democratic, equitable, and diverse society, academics struggle to challenge the neoliberal behemoth which continues to grind us to a pulp.

As a vignette of the Australian academic diaspora, many within this collective were cast out of our home countries (Malaysia, Brazil and Mexico) as critical intellectual labour became progressively defunded, weakened by the extractive relationship with countries - such as Australia - which rely heavily on the continual seduction of international students and their capital, providing financial stability to universities in order to compensate for the lack of federal support for higher education institutions within Australia. 

Even funding - the basis for all research within universities - rests upon the belief that positivist anglo-saxon scholarship holds standing as the most desirable form of knowledge production, despite the reality that the values, concepts, theories, and technologies that are designed for the global north are unequally translated to the global south, from where resources, labour and experiments are drawn. Here, academics participate in the continuation of the settler colonial project, in which ideas, people and communities are taken and put out of place.