Universities as Spaces of Possibility: Towards More Creative, Caring Academic Labour
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT In Spring 2025, we had the opportunity to read, write discussion questions and organise a conference panel for the book Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University by Roberta Hawkins and Leslie Kern, published in 2024 by Between the Lines Press, Toronto. We write this commentary to compel geographers to read this book and to share an example of how reading this book encouraged us to construct our academic conference labour differently, offering our discussion questions to facilitate discussion groups for other readers. We see the book as a guide for the current moment in higher education, including the ongoing neoliberalisation of the academy and limits on academic freedom, processes that structure our everyday university labour. In this commentary, we draw on our own experiences of burn out, combined with the book's call for more caring academic labour practices, to invite readers to rethink, reframe, to do and be otherwise, in their academic journeys. In highlighting all the ways, we can change our academic labour, the book recalls an energising space of possibility, a space from which we might reimagine the university.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it