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In this article, we respond to Emma Bell and Amanda Sinclair's call for reclaiming eros as non-commodified energy that drives academic work. Taking our point of entry from institutional ethnography and the standpoint of junior female academics, we highlight the ambiguity experienced in the neoliberal university in relation to its constructions of potential. We elucidate how potential becomes gendered in and through discourses of passion and care: how epistemic and material detachment from the local is framed as potential and how masculinized passion directs academics to do what counts, while feminized and locally bound care is institutionally appreciated only as far as it supports individualized passion. The way passion and care shape the practices of academic writing and organize the ruling relations of potentiality are challenged through eros, an uncontrollable and un-cooptable energy and longing, which becomes a threat to the gendered neoliberal university and a source of resistance to it. By distinguishing between passion, care, and eros, our institutional ethnography inquiry helps to make sense of the conformity and resistance that characterize the ambiguous experience of today's academics.

"This book explicates the Nordic response to institutional ethnography, showing how it has been adapted and interpreted within the theoretical and methodological landscape of social scientific research in the region, as well as the institutional particularities of the Nordic welfare state"--

Women leaders are frequently treated as one class – a homogenised group with essentialised skills and competencies in binary relationship to male leaders. We explore how feminist ways of knowing gender and leadership, and circulations of affects, shape women's diverse leadership practices and identities within the neoliberal, and neuroliberal academy in Finland – a Nordic country with a sophisticated gender equality policy architecture. We debate the (re)production of social and material inequalities through epistemic injustice by exploring what possibilities are emerging from the assemblages and relational potential of policy interventions, global speaking back to patriarchal power, the revisioning of gender, and the inclusion of women in higher education leadership. Theoretically, the study intersects feminist affect notions, neoliberalism, neuroliberalism, and epistemic inclusion/injustice. We conducted 10 interviews with middle-classed women university leaders in five universities. They described how, in the absence of possibilities to facilitate major structural changes, they applied their feminist knowledge and invested affective labour in the mediation of neoliberal and neuroliberal cultures. The politics of representation – counting more women into neoliberal universities, as one class, is not, we conclude, a counter-normative force. We need to consider how to apply feminist knowledge for leading post-gender universities and imagining alternative futurities.

The Nordic countries are regarded as frontrunners in promoting equality, yet women's experiences on the ground are in many ways at odds with this rhetoric. Putting the spotlight on the lived experiences of women working in tech-driven research and innovation areas in the Nordic countries, this volume explores why, despite numerous programmes, women continue to constitute a minority in these sectors. Contributors flesh out the differences and similarities across different Nordic countries and explore how the shifts in labour market conditions have impacted on women in research and innovation. This is an invaluable contribution to global debates around the mechanisms that maintain gendered structures in research and innovation, from academia to biotechnology and IT. ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.