Women, 'Failure' and Academia

Marina Cano is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Valencia, Spain. She is the author of Theatrical Afterlives: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Novels on the Stage (2026).Rosa García-Periago is Senior Lecturer at the University of Murcia, Spain. She is co-editor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance (2019) and Women and Indian Shakespeares (2022) and has published extensively on Indian Shakespeares in Shakespeare, Adaptation, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Borrowers and Lenders, Atlantis and other journals.

As a contribution to critical university studies, this is just superb, drawing on multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary forms of inquiry, providing new methods for critique, and drawing on multiple university locations as well both in terms of geographical locations and institutional positions. This would also be a fine companion to Critical Race Theory counternarratives, showing another path for doing institutional critique in relationship to what inhabiting and being impacted by institutions feels like.

• “I regret to inform you…”An Introduction to the Politics of Academic Failure, Marina Cano (University of Valencia, Spain) and Rosa García-Periago (University of Murcia, Spain)Part I: Resistance to Failure, Resistance Through Failure1. Whorademia: Deluxe Professionals for Hire, Marina Cano (University of Valencia, Spain)2. The Fantastic Failure of the Ideal Worker and the Promises of the Virtual Phoenix forWomen Faculty in the Post-2020 Academy. A Post-2020 Ideal Faculty Workplace, Jessi L. Smith (University of Colorado, USA) and Michele G. Wheatly (Syracuse University, USA)3. Embracing the Unfinished, the Unattained, the Unconventional: Reframing Failure to Support Wellbeing, Narelle Lemon (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) and Sharon McDonough (Federation University, Australia)Part II: Living in Failure4. Lost in the Maze: Failing to Find My Way in Dark Academia, Theadora Jean (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)5. Complaint and Ambivalence as the Last Line of Defence for a Casual Academic, Djuna Hallsworth (University of Sydney, Australia)Part III: Restoring Failure6. The Materiality of Failure, Dawn Lyon (University of Kent, UK)7. Digital Spaces as Places of Feminist Dissent for Women of Colour, Dinithi Bowatte (Massey University New Zealand) and Helen Yeung (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand)Part IV: After Failure8. Transness as Radical Hospitality in Academia:Field Notes from an Interloper, Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University, USA)9. It was a Festival of Slaps: On Grief, Failure and Getting Lost: A Black Femme Navigates Academia , Opemiposi Adegbulu (University of Edinburgh, UK)10. Holding the Space for Failure: Death Doula Feminism as a Guide Through the Claustropolitan University, Tara Brabazon (Charles Darwin University, Australia)