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Within Australian universities, neoliberalism has transformed education into a marketplace and product, where academic employees are regulated and controlled through metrics, productivity, and pressure to maintain and increase 'value'. In this environment, disabled academics face increasing barriers to workplace participation and meaningful inclusion. To explore the lived experiences of disabled academics, this article draws upon qualitative survey and interview data collected from disabled academics to consider the ways that the academy excludes and disables them. Specifically, we argue that the way time is regulated and managed within the neoliberal university is ableist, and fails to account for the crip temporalities by which disabled academics live their lives. The concept of crip and cripping time in relation to disabled academics opens up new ways of thinking, doing, and being that are not constrained by normative (clock) time that marginalises disabled subjects. While we focus on an Australian context, the near-universalising 'logics' of normative time and neoliberal-ableism inherent to universities and societies more generally has implications for everyone. We argue that it is incumbent upon universities to rethink prevailing notions of time that currently elide the experiences and capacities of disabled academics.

Numerous scholars have identified the 'neoliberal thought collective' as the key driver of the neoliberal transformation. These accounts emphasize the building of neoliberal hegemony through the mobilization of this collective, and the New Right parties who aligned to these ideas. We argue that Australia's corporatist road to neoliberalism pushes against this thesis, as the movement found little sympathy among policy makers. Rather, the thought collective acted more like a 'ginger group', attempting to radicalize public debate and create space for new neoliberal arrangements. In Australia, successive centre-left Labor governments rolled out neoliberalism in a series of formal corporatist arrangements with the trade union movement. This paper sets out a reconsideration of the role of the thought collective, on the basis of the Australian experience, and argues this can move us beyond the ideational determinism that has come to characterize key accounts of how neoliberalism developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical explanations of neoliberalism regularly adhere to a dominant narrative as to the form and implementation of the neoliberal policy revolution, positing neoliberalism in its vanguard period as a project implemented by governments of the New Right, imposed coercively on civil society by state elites and only subsequently adopted by social democratic parties. In such accounts, labour is typically posited as the object and victim of neoliberalising processes. In contrast, this article focuses upon the active role of labour within the development of neoliberalism. The period of social democratic government in Australia (1983–1996) is used as a case study to illuminate labour’s active role in constructing neoliberalism. Indicative evidence from the USA and UK is then presented to argue that the agency of labour can usefully be ‘written in’ to the presently dominant narrative regarding the rise of neoliberalism to provide a more satisfactory account of its nature and resilience over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]