TITLE: Working Without Cure: Editorial Counter-Infrastructures and Fabulated Infra-Technobiography After Academic Capitalism.
AUTHOR: paula roush
MEDIUM: Essay
PUBLICATION: University as Infrastructure (Eds: Anikina,A., Bruder,J., Bruin-Molé,M., Cornford,S., Phillips,K. & Cox,G.) Culture Machine, vol. 25, Forthcoming 2026.
Abstract
This essay examines the contemporary university as an infrastructure that organises academic life through administrative procedures, algorithmic governance, and regimes of optimisation that render certain forms of labour surplus. Written from within the experience of redundancy following institutional restructuring, the text does not approach academic capitalism as an object of external critique, but as a lived and infrastructural condition encountered through documents, consultation meetings, workload models, evaluative metrics, and the withdrawal of access.
The essay develops fabulated infra-technobiography as a methodological and operative mode that emerges at the intersection of critical fabulation, technobiography, and infrastructural analysis. Rather than narrating a coherent academic subject or recovering an autobiographical account, fabulated infra-technobiography traces how a life is formatted, fragmented, and redistributed across institutional systems, editorial gestures, and machinic processes. Through close attention to the installation ‘paula’ & work (Borough Road Gallery, London, 2023–2024), the essay reads the bureaucratic archive of the university as an apparatus—composed of documents, furniture, platforms, and spatial arrangements—that continues to act on bodies even after institutional recognition is withdrawn.
From this position, the essay introduces working without cure as a stance toward continuance that refuses narratives of repair, reintegration, or institutional recovery. Drawing on disability and feminist critiques of cure and optimisation, it understands exhaustion, redundancy, and illness not as personal failures, but as infrastructural effects of academic capitalism. The body enters the analysis not as evidence or metaphor, but as the condition under which thinking, making, and teaching persist.
The essay concludes by proposing editorial counter-infrastructures as situated practices that reroute institutional materials—documents, images, archives, and computational tools—without reproducing their logics of extraction, legibility, or closure. Rather than offering solutions or alternatives to the university, the text insists on a different question: how to continue working, thinking, and caring from within damaged infrastructures, without surrendering the terms of life to systems that cannot sustain it.
paula & work: → [see the installation]