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AbstractIt is a contradiction that patriarchal power and masculine violence continue to endure in academic spaces that are nominally dedicated to liberation and radical critique. How does a left‐wing patriarchy reproduce itself? I propose an exploratory ethnography of a patriarchal drama in France, focusing on administrative meetings in a university philosophy department. Drawing on Rebecca Lentjes' concept of sonic patriarchy, I propose that an established mode of patriarchal anarchism served to reproduce masculine radical subjects through a culture of aggressive noisemaking. These radical subjects were organized by the exclusion of two sorts of Others: women and conservative men, each excluded by specific sonic processes. The ensuing mode of reproduction was nevertheless unstable, threatened with neoliberal normalization and by internal critiques pointing towards a feminist materialism. When patriarchy becomes self‐dramatizing, dedramatization may become a meaningful political strategy.

After the unsuccessful end of the spring 2009 French university
movement, faculty and student activists searched for new political strategies.
One promising option was an internationalist project that sought to unite
anti-Bologna Project movements across Europe. Yet an ethnographic study of
two international counter-summits in Brussels (March 2010) and Dijon (May
2011) shows that this strategy was unsuccessful. This article explores the
causes of these failures, arguing that activist internationalism became caught
in a trap of political mimesis, and that the form of official international
summits was incompatible with activists' temporal, representational, and
reflexive needs.

In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers' biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum also invites its contributors to reflect on concrete interventions from their respective positions.