Casualisation, mindfulness and the working lives of academics

Recent studies have demonstrated the ways in which mindfulness might be beneficial in higher education contexts, both for students and also, increasingly, for staff. On the one hand, mindfulness and other contemplative practices offer a way of easing some of the stress, anxiety and pressure of the contemporary university. This has the potential to give both students and staff new ways of managing what can be very difficult learning and working environments. On the other, however, the individualistic and instrumental version of mindfulness typically encountered or enacted in universities can be understood as little more than a neoliberal technology of management that does nothing to address the structural causes of stress, anxiety, and pressure in the university. Instead, this version of mindfulness relies on the individual to simply find new ways to cope. In this chapter, we use a critical sociological mindfulness framework to explore the ways in which mindfulness might be brought to bear on the problem of casualisation in the contemporary university. The increasing casualisation of the university workforce is one of themost significant and visible effects of neoliberal ideologies and policy settings in universities, and a strong contributing factor to the stress, anxiety, and pressure of university workplaces. We are a casual and a continuing academic working in similar contexts in contemporary Australia, and we come together to ask: what might happen when we pay mindful attention to the problems of casualisation?.