In reflections on modern ‘neoliberal’ universities, narratives of quitting academia hold a special fascination. This is evidenced by the recent proliferation of ‘quit lit’: emotionally charged public statements elucidating people’s departures from academia. Yet scholarly examinations of quitting are exceedingly rare, especially those of precarious and ‘early career’ academics whose likelihood of departure is high. In this paper, I reflect on interviews with precarious academics in Australia, as well as reviewing worldwide Anglophone ‘quit lit’ authored by such academics. I distinguish accounts of quitting, leaving, remaining and returning, exposing how these labels reflect different positionalities and narratives. Uncovering the emotional dimensions of leaving and remaining, I reveal how emotions are expressed unequally depending on people’s capacities to depart and temporal proximity to leaving. Well-rehearsed declarations of love and passion intersect with claims of no longer caring or losing hope, as well as with expressions of grief and anger. Expanding on literatures on the ‘hidden injuries’ of academia and the pernicious effects of ‘hope’ and ‘love’ on workers, I demonstrate how unequal expressions – in precarious academics’ ability to tell ‘quitting stories’ and to express less-than-optimistic emotional accounts – expose hierarchies among precarious academics and reflect their uneven capacities to resist.

中文翻译：

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不平等的表达：离开和留在不稳定学术界的情绪和叙事

在对现代“新自由主义”大学的反思中，退出学术界的叙述具有特殊的魅力。最近“quit lit”的泛滥就证明了这一点：情绪激动的公开声明阐明了人们离开学术界。然而，关于退出的学术考试极为罕见，尤其是那些不稳定和“早期职业”的学者，他们离职的可能性很高。在这篇论文中，我反思了对澳大利亚不稳定学者的采访，并回顾了这些学者撰写的全球英语“戒烟”。我区分了退出、离开、留下和回归的叙述，揭示这些标签如何反映不同的位置和叙述。揭示离开和留下的情感维度，我揭示了情绪是如何根据人们离开的能力和离开的时间接近程度来不平等地表达的。精心排练的爱和激情宣言与不再关心或失去希望的声明以及悲伤和愤怒的表达相交。扩展关于学术界“隐藏的伤害”以及“希望”和“爱”对工人的有害影响的文献，我展示了不平等的表达——在不稳定的学者讲述“辞职故事”和表达不足的能力方面——乐观的情绪描述——暴露不稳定学者之间的等级制度，反映他们不平衡的抵抗能力。