A Badiouian Enquiry Into Hope Labour: Affective and temporal disorientation in contingent academic careers during the Covid-19 event

Hope labour, defined as work undertaken in anticipation of realising an idealised academic career, functions as a core strategy for contingent academics, sustained by an affective attachment to a utopian future. Mobilising Badiou’s theoretical ideas of the event, in this paper, we draw on forty in-depth interviews to explore contingent academics’ experiences of hope labour during the disruption and prolonged uncertainty brought about by the Covid-19 event. We unravel the process of enquiry in which our participants engage and identify the subjective responses of contingent academics – disaffection and temporal disorientation of hope – that challenge the future-oriented logic of hope labour. We contribute to existing research in organisation studies that examines the commitment and attachment of the subject to the normative, neoliberal belief in hope labour, by explaining the commitment of the subject to change when the ordinary is disrupted. We conclude by discussing the potential of our conceptualisation for hope labour and its implications for contingent academic careers.