Description
โTweet, Tweet, a little birdie told me you got the scholarshipโIt all started with hope on a bright sunny day. A naรฏve young woman sat waiting for an email that would determine the next step of her destiny, a fate which had been pushed by her desire to be independent. I entered academia, with a utopic image of it being a place where great minds gathered to create ideas. I left having realised everything I thought to be true was an illusion.
This is a story about a young womanโs journey through the neoliberal academia and the souls it has consumed. Through a story that begins with an email that changed the course of my life, I reflect on the quiet yet highly political and ideological corridors of higher education institutions and the paradoxes of life, independence, science, objectivity, and freedom it continues to create and maintain.
The story shifts through moments of hope, inner dialogue, challenge, realisation, loss, oppression, abuse, and letting go which highlight the realities of neoliberalism, but also the lingering colonial remnants in academic spaces and knowledge itself. Seeping through the cracks of capitalism, industrialisation of education, individualism, patriarchy, racism, and coloniality in the political corridors of higher education, from the time when I entered my PhD in Malaysia, to the last day when I decided to leave academia, I narrate the beauty and the beast of academia.
With it, I move through to the realisation that freedom, as I had come to embrace, is simply an illusion. It is a story of realisation that freedom indeed begins with thought, and thought begins at discourse, and discourse is drowning in ideology. ISBN:9789670076317
