This paper explores the psychosocial and emotional dimensions of academic acceleration through the lens of personal experience, highlighting its complex interplay with feelings of emptiness. At the age of six, my decision to skip a grade initiated a trajectory of intellectual stimulation, yet it inadvertently amplified emotional isolation and developmental dissonance. While celebrated academically, this acceleration created a profound void, marked by a sense of separation from peers and a detachment from emotional needs—a void that continues to shape my adult life.

Using heuristic inquiry and psychodrama, I engage with the embodied memories of this journey, revisiting emotionally charged spaces through dreams, drawings, and creative improvisation. These methods allow me to uncover the hidden narratives of academic acceleration, focusing on how the pressures and expectations of early intellectual growth have lasting emotional consequences. The feelings of emptiness that emerged from this experience reflect a broader existential crisis, mirroring the precarity of development when hope for progress collides with unforeseen emotional costs.

In alignment with the conference theme of crisis as both danger and opportunity, this presentation frames the emotional consequences of academic acceleration as a personal crisis that catalyzed transformation. By embracing playfulness, humility, and curiosity, I explore how creative methodologies provide a reparative framework for navigating this internal landscape. Through this process, I demonstrate how emptiness, often dismissed as a deficit, can become a space for reflection, critical insight, and personal growth.

This paper contributes to the dialogue on crisis by examining how early academic challenges shape our inner worlds, offering a unique perspective on the interplay between intellectual advancement and emotional well-being. It aligns with the conference’s aim to foster critical reflection, demonstrating how personal crises can transform into opportunities for healing and profound understanding.

The argument culture—the privileging of agonistic forms of rhetorical exchange that underscore skepticism, dispute, and suspicion as synonymous with critical thinking—has been an object of rigorous critique in rhetorical thinking since at least the 2000s (D. Tannen, 1998; E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2002; P. Elbow, 2008; W. Booth, 2005, among others). The many interlaced crises that have come to define our polarizing and adversarial contemporary condition compel us to question once again the centrality of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (P. Ricoeur, 1970) in standard practices of academic production and exchange and increasingly, in larger digital cultures where these logics often circulate in dilapidated, stultifying, and dangerous ways. How to engage with and respond pedagogically to the exhaustion of the argument culture? This presentation advances the concept of implicated reading as a pedagogical orientation that privileges the practicing (Pont, 2017) of receptive, expansive, and attuned forms of textual engagement that refuse regimes of “ritualized opposition” as synonymous with critical thinking and suspend the relief of closure and safe return to the self-gathering gesture of the “I claim.” I further elaborate on the pedagogical, rhetorical, and ethical implications of this reading orientation on academic knowledge exchange and on the dynamics of civic engagement in the digital age.

References

Booth, Wayne. “Blind Skepticism versus a Rhetoric of Assent.” College English, 67.4: 377-88.

Elbow, Peter. “The Doubting Game and the Believing Game: An Analysis of the Intellectual

Process.” In Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press, 1973. 147-91.

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling. Duke U.P., 2002.

Tannen, Deborah. The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words. Random House,

1998.

Pont, Antonia. A Philosophy of Practicing: with Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Edinburgh

UP, 2023.

Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage.

Yale U.P., 1970.

Competitive performance culture, individualism and instrumentalisation of research are features of neoliberal academia. As mid-career employees of a university in the grip of austeritiy, we face increasing demands for efficiency and deliverables – and less resources for just about everything. With these work conditions contributing to an increasing sense of anxiety and despair, we ask: how can we maintain a basic sense of wellbeing and keep agency alive? Is there hope for a good working life within the university?

Feminist scholars (Kostera 2024, Stengers 2017) are speaking out against a culture of assembly-line research. From a psychosocial perspective, Gerard (2023) calls out “labor’s eclipse of life”, critiquing neoliberal work environments that perpetuate self-absence, while destroying our sense of feeling alive. In the neoliberal university, spaces and time for feeling, thinking, lingering, and experiencing are diminished. Collaboration becomes challenging. So many of our generation withdraw from it due to lack of financing, or the stress associated with appalling pressures from organizational restructuring and redundancy. Global politics add to a sense of impending doom. The university has a responsibility to respond to the world but many academics are too worn-out to engage. We long to be participants in an academic culture that is more vital, collaborative and caring.

Stengers (2017) calls for slow science as a form of social resistance and collective survival strategy. In this spirit, we started Creative Experience Lab (CEL). CEL is an intervention for neoliberal academia, which is fastpaced but deadening. In it we explore different ways of being and doing together: Articulating despair helps to process and endure, while creative, collaborative and caring strategies offer sustained hope for meaningfulness in the university.

Addressing the theme: Our paper emerges from a sustaining friendship and conversations about detrimental conditions for academic life and what we might do about it.

75% of people in Great Britain are worried about climate change (Office for National Statistics, 2021). Eco-anxiety encompasses emotional distress associated with environmental issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and waste. It may be assumed that students, like the general population, are likely to experience eco-anxiety in a similar way. Kelly (2017) reported that there was a higher level of self-identified eco-anxiety amongst those who were on courses that directly dealt with climate change than those who were not.

This study set out to assess levels of eco-anxiety, general wellbeing, coping mechanisms, perceptions of support and the impact of eco-anxiety on the studies of undergraduate and post-graduate students across the university studying a variety of modules. A mixed-methods approach was used. 219 students responded to a survey and semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty students.

Findings showed that eco-anxiety is significant among students across disciplines and correlates with lower well-being, especially among females and younger students. Studying environmental issues can intensify eco-anxiety but also boosts empowerment and determination to act. Students tended to cope with eco-anxiety by focussing on learning about solutions, taking action in their own lives and taking breaks from studying when needed. Students currently rely on friends and family for support, rather than the university.

It is recommended that a) eco-anxiety is acknowledged but not pathologized, and reframed as motivation for action by course leaders, equipping students to turn concerns into meaningful change and b) student communities to connect and share experiences should be fostered to enable emotional engagement alongside action.