Community-university partnerships in the neoliberal university through an ethics of care and slow scholarship lens

There is an established body of higher education (HE) literature on the different purposes of universities (Boyer 1996; Harkavy 2006) and the current context and impacts of neoliberalisation on the academy (Giroux 2002; Fisher 2009; Hill 2016). There is also significant research on engaged scholarship and community-university partnerships (CUPs) (Hart et al. 2013; Beaulieu et al. 2018). However, the role and concepts of care, emotions, and emotional labour, as well as the voices of the participants, are largely absent from both sets of literature. There is, however, a growing body of feminist literature interrogating the impacts of the current HE context on academics from an Ethic of Care (EoC) and Slow Scholarship (SS) lens (Tronto 1993; Mountz et al. 2015; Puawai Collective 2019; Evans 2016). However, here too there is a gap in terms of the majority of this literature not focussing on the role that care and emotion play in CUPs and how they are experienced. My research is both located in and framed by this intersection of the three literatures and combines an ethnographic approach with traditional methods including interviews. Applying an EoC and SS lens and highlighting the voices of resident and academic participants, the findings from two UK case study sites suggest that participants benefit most from the relational aspects of CUPs and that CUPs have the potential to be transformative. Contributing to critiques of the neoliberal university and contrary to the current civic and impact rhetoric, this research argues that HE’s audit and temporal cultures and structures are ‘care-less’ and: incompatible with the practical, and more importantly, the essential relational and temporal aspects of long-term, participatory, relationship-based CUPs; can lead to embodied impacts for some engaged academics; disincentivise potential engaged academics; and also disproportionately negatively impact those already doing slow, relationship-based work in and with local communities.