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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores how academic activism addressing gender-based violence disrupts neoliberal masculinist culture of science and higher education. Drawing on ethnographic research and affect theory, it argues these initiatives reclaim academic spaces, reimagining power and knowledge production.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the affective texture of academic activism addressing gender-based violence, shedding light on how these efforts challenge the patriarchal underpinnings of the institutional structures. While the neoliberal university operates through an affect of competition, prioritizing market-driven values and efficiency, activism on gender-based violence disrupts these frameworks, foregrounding what I call a queer culture of knowledge production based on mutual aid. Drawing on ethnographic research in Eastern European academia, this paper highlights how such activism works to “unwrite” the university's hegemonic narratives, revealing the unseen and untold power structures shaping education. Informed by affect theory and queer phenomenology, the paper argues that such movements offer an alternative vision of education and knowledge production—one that resists the masculinist culture of science and traditional academic spaces by interrogating dominant gender and power hierarchies. This paper focuses on the unwritten side of universities, not only as sites of learning but as arenas of resistance. In doing so, it uncovers untold causalities in how education has been shaped, historically and structurally, by gender-based exclusion and marginalization. Within the local apolitical discourse rooted in the specific intersection of post-socialist and neoliberal transitions, activism is seen as inherently suspect. The paper un-writes this notion and proposes an oppositional thesis: for academia to become a safer and more resilient space for all, it needs academic activism. Ultimately, the paper argues that feminist and queer activism within the university have the capacity to reconfigure academic hierarchies, creating more equitable and resilient higher education environments.