This seminar offers a critical and dialogic space to reflect on the effects of neoliberalism in contemporary academic life, especially in the early stages of a research career. Through the collective reading and discussion of four powerful and thought-provoking autoethnographic and reflective texts — Dark Clouds on the Horizon by Karen Barbour, Diary of an Assistant Professor by Oskar Szwabowski and Dominika Gruntkowska, Publish or Perish: The Myth and Reality of Academic Publishing by Icy Lee, and Making a Spectacle of Oneself in the Academy Using the H-Index by Andrew C. Sparkes — doctoral students will be invited to confront their own experiences, tensions, and dilemmas related to the imperative to publish or perish.These texts serve as windows into the lived consequences of higher education reforms, the culture of quantification, extreme productivity demands, emotional precarity, and the reproduction of power relations in academic spaces. From diverse geopolitical contexts — New Zealand, Poland, Hong Kong, and the UK — the narratives reveal how neoliberal logic not only reshapes institutional structures, but also affects bodies, relationships, and the ways we inhabit the university. The inclusion of Lee’s critique of metric-driven scholarship and Sparkes’ reflection on the internalization of the H-index as a marker of value further problematize how scholarly worth is constructed and negotiated.The seminar is designed as an active learning experience. Participants will be encouraged to share personal reflections, contradictions, survival strategies, or forms of resistance. Rather than merely analyzing texts, we aim to question, reimagine, and reclaim our academic subjectivities. The seminar will foster mutual listening, collective meaning-making, and the imagination of alternative ways of doing, feeling, and becoming researchers — grounded in care, dignity, and critical agency

Discuss about the culture underlying the motto of Publish or Perish and its implication in current academic trajectories. 

Luana Bruno, is a Doctor of Education and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alcalá, has an extensive career in research and teaching. She is a co-creator, alongside Dr. Iborra and Dr. Lindquist, of the free emotional management app EMOTONGUE. Currently, she is researching emotional development and change, as well as migration and gender studies. She participates in international projects on migration and affective-sexual relationships in adolescents. As a lecturer, she has taught at the Faculty of Education Sciences in Primary and Early Childhood Education programs, and postgraduate courses such as the Master´s in University Teaching and the Master´s in Secondary Education Teacher Training. She holds international certificates in Collaborative Practices and Systemic Therapy. From March 2017 to May 2021, she was a researcher in the FPU program at the Department of Education Sciences at the University of Alcalá. She has conducted research stays in the U.S., Germany, Poland, and Italy.

Cuéllar Alejandro Iborra Cuéllar is a Doctor of Psychology from the University of Valencia and an Associate Professor at the University of Alcalá since 2002. He served as the Head of the Department of Education Sciences from 2013 to 2019 and currently coordinates the Doctoral Program in Education and directs the Daisaku Ikeda Education and Development Institute (IEDDAI). His training includes studies in Integrative Gestalt Therapy, Remodeled NLP, and Systemic Therapy, and he has extensively published on personal identity formation and collaborative-experiential-transformational learning. He has taught in Psychopedagogy, Primary Education, and postgraduate programs such as the Master´s in University Teaching and the Master´s in Secondary Education Teacher Training. He has carried out research stays at universities in the United States, England, and the Netherlands, and participated in international educational projects in Equatorial Guinea, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

Collaborative and dialogical. We will discuss in groups our reading of the proposed articles to finish with a general discussion of personal and institutional implications. 

Registration link (link interno para apuntarse): https://forms.gle/hs4QZtMWPH88jamS9

Link Acceso a los artículos: Articles on Publish and perish seminar

Link al Teams para asistir al seminario: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NzkxODZlYzYtMmZlYS00ZTExLTg0MjgtNDQ5Nzk0ZDMzZDNm%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22ced2c552-7d1f-4731-aa3a-2f0ec9629e26%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22e969e280-7258-4b76-b12d-326aff48a868%22%7d