Authoritarianism, resistance and mobbing in the 21st century academy: New? faces of an old exclusion

Abstract

This article arises from an autoethnographic case study based on the author’s experience of harassment at work in a Spanish university. The main objective is to examine from an approach of applied ethics, the complex web of power in which emerge and develop practices of violence and harassment in academic and university institutions. Against the dispositive that facilitate the perpetuation of these practices of violence and exclusion, as well as their naturalization; the article proposes to revisit them in the light of the criteria of organizational ethics and moral leaderships, to enrich the tools already existing in different universities to detect mobbing and promote collective ethics of others. The article shows and argues the need to strengthen and radicalize the multimodal strategies to eradicate mobbing in the academy and the university so that they are effective and not part of merely formal protocols. Finally, it proposes to appeal to a deep criticism from the philosophy and ethics around the speeches and practices of academic and university mobbing to eradicate violence not only in these institutions but in any area of social life.