This project will develop a ‘Crip’ Political Economy approach to understand the dual problems of burnout and ableism in the UK neoliberal academy. Responding to the crisis of chronic overwork, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the rise in long-term chronic illness due to Long Covid, this project’s central thesis is that academics living with Energy Limiting Chronic Illness (ELCI), conditions involving symptoms of debilitating fatigue, offer vital insights into the operation of neoliberal capitalism within UK academia as an ‘exhaustion economy’.

Methodologically, innovation will come from adapting qualitative methods for exhausted bodies, allowing asynchronous and remote participation. Focus groups and qualitative surveys with people with ELCI who work in, or have left, academia will feed into a narrative network analysis of the academic political economy. Autobiographical and energy-budget-based interviews will explore energy limitation at two temporal scales: career and everyday. Critical analysis of equality and diversity policy from key institutions (e.g. funders, publishers, research and teaching assessment bodies) within the UK academic political economy will be carried out.

Theoretical innovation will come from bringing Crip Theory into conversation with Political Economy scholarship on capitalist hyperproductivity and neoliberalisation, along with work on slow scholarship and failure. It will extend work on Crip Time in academia, largely focussed on the US, by attending to UK specific institutions and processes. It will also ask how attention to embodied energy, as a limited commodity, might add a new dimension to Crip Time.

Current policy approaches to disability focus on reasonable adjustments made by the employing university. The Crip Political Economy approach developed here asks how ableism and exhaustion might be addressed across the broader academic political economy. In diverging from current approaches, and seeking to reimagine processes that currently exclude and/or debilitate, this research will contribute to ISRF goals to diversify social science.