We are exhausted: On burnout,rest,and resistance

Like in many feminist collectives, the collaborations and practices of the European Journal of Women’s Studies’ editors depart from and sit with deep care for the world and for each other’s well-being in what today increasingly seems like a state of permacrisis. Indeed, it is difficult not to be affected, directly and indirectly, by looming and ongoing wars and genocide, climate denial and the rise of authoritarian, fascist and austerity politics with its accompanying attacks on gender, sexual and reproductive politics, and its heightened policing of borders, migrants, and children across Europe and the world that struggles in the wake of (ongoing) colonialism. We live with worry about our children’s futures, for family members and friends living through war, with our diasporic families’ threatened status, our friends awaiting asylum or deportation, and our unemployed and overworked colleagues and family members. How do we live with the sense of powerlessness that the present hostile state of the world leaves us with, and how do we make sense of and respond to the brutal, cynical, neo-colonialist, nationalist, racial capitalist order? As we simply try to keep up with the everyday care labor involved in the social reproduction of feminist academia through journal production, we keep asking: what should and can the role of academia and scholarly work be in these times, especially as science itself is contested? What do our collaborations with and support for social movements, NGOs, and cultural workers look like and what can they look like, as many of us are increasingly coerced into increased “productivity” and scientific output, as we might simply be too exhausted to engage in the much-needed work for change? Insomnia does not come as a surprise.

As we zoom into meetings from crammed offices and home hideouts, part of that care is EJWS editorial conversations emerge from own locations; our different levels and forms of precarious work situations, productivity demands, increased responsibilities and urgencies with decreased resources, and pressures to find individual solutions to structural problems, to be “strategic” and take on tasks above and beyond our contracts. Even when we carry on, as ongoing attacks on academic freedom and critical research meet cutbacks on humanities and social science research, we also watch growing numbers of colleagues across our networks crumble, sometimes leaving us needing to step in and take on their work, in solidarity and care. Why and how do we endure? Is it the power of “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011), the promise of that “someday” when academic work will be different, more joyous or more what we thought it would be, which leads us to stretching above and beyond capacity to teach critical thinking with shrinking education budgets and to meet deadlines that require long nights and weekend work? As critical scholars, we cannot avoid using our (theoretical) tools to examine our own institutions, and we know the meaning of the personal being political.

Exhaustion is not new; it has been a theme through decades of increasing institutionalization of gender research and in struggles to get there (see Do Mar Pereira, 2019); and as such it is also a historical phenomenon that has gone hand in hand with the neoliberalization of the university. In that sense, it has long been a daily reality among many, and perhaps only the most senior among us can now engage in nostalgia for a different time. At the same time, we also know that the European progress narrative that has placed gender equality high on its agenda (and partly legitimized gender research) has also both encouraged and rewarded specific types of scholarship, policymaking, and NGO work. We know all too well that this, often privileged, type of research and policy work has not always considered its implicit departure from and reproduction of many norms, white, middle-class heteronormative frameworks and understandings of problems and solutions, or the degree to which ivory towers might feel more comfortable for some than others. Scholars and activists who are queer and trans, disabled, Black, indigenous, migrant, or non-native speakers in their institutional homes, often remain in the margins, finding our interventions discounted or read as addendums or electives, as provocations. Simultaneously, we often carry an extra heavy load of care work for students and issues that are routinely placed as minoritarian and peripheral. In a broader sense of the current permacrisis, it is worth asking: for whom is the looming sense of apocalypse new? What can be learned from those who who have endured, which skills are needed for survival?

For scholars working at the margins, sometimes alone in a normative structure or in a sea of whiteness (Ahmed, 2012), the current crises are neither new, nor are they only debilitating. Creating (separatist) spaces remain necessary also becoming sites of creative collaboration. Nordic Black feminists Kelekay et al. (2025), for instance, provide an inspiring proposal from a care collective and an ongoing exchange in which “experimenting with how an ethic and praxis of care can redo, reshape our very relationship to the university as a workplace, to academia as a profession, and to academic knowledge production” (p. 4), offer an inspiring framework.

Taking cue from both a sense of exhaustion and from the work of an emerging number of feminist academics, activists, writers and organizers, as journal editors, we paused for a moment and decided to start where we are, and name, describe, analyze, and intervene. We invited others to join in. We made a call. Within the admittedly too short deadline of 2 weeks, we received over 20 contributions to an Open Forum devoted to reflections on burnout and ideas surrounding rest and resistance This choir of voices certainly speaks to the urgency and timeliness of this topic. Among the contributions, as you will find here, are moving personal accounts of (struggling to) live feminist academic lives—many of which from precarious and early career scholars—observations and analyses of the changing conditions of activism and NGOs and reports from emerging scholarly work on exhaustion and burnout, as well as proposals for how to analyze and make sense of it all. In other words, we received a remarkable amount of powerful, sharp, and reflexive accounts aiming to get to the root of the problem, to call for disobedience, solidarity, refusal, this set of papers emerges as an affective archive of the present. Perhaps #metoo—as a movement based in the methodology of sharing stories of similar experiences around a persistent structural problem—is here taking on another shape and meaning. As the exhaust(ion) pipes begin to rattle, we see the multi-sited articulations of a possible moving movement.

Why name and describe what we already know, carry around, or complain about together? The short answer is, of course, our continued belief in the power in numbers. In her work on complaint, Sara Ahmed (2021) extends her long commitment to scrutinizing the ways that the academic institutions so many of us invest in reproduce inequalities and silence those who call attention to ineffective policies, structural discrimination, and hidden forms of power. Ahmed points to how complicity and silence around injustice is encouraged and rewarded and how, in the interest of protecting institutions, launching a complaint itself is made exhausting. Instead of complaining over exhaustion, we are asked to see the bright side of things—we may face cutbacks and redundancies, but we are not yet closed down! Or: we should think of the students, or that senior scholars should not complain but instead consider their power and focus on being good role models who don’t work too much and who care for (sick) colleagues and stressed-out PhD students. Of course, we care and will continue to do so. At the same time, we must recognize that, like all reproductive labor, care itself can be exhausting, and that our crashes (or surprising ability not to) also impact others, literally becoming pedagogy. How do we care when we ourselves are exhausted? How do we recover as we crash over and again, and how do we live with the often permanent, debilitating effects of burnout? As feminists, we have both a long history of answers and strategies, and at the same time, seemingly none that help us navigate the challenges of the present. Ever the inspiring killjoy, Ahmed proposes that we must recognize what institutions do not, namely the effects of institutions that have seemingly stopped caring for their workers and from there, develop collective strategies, complaint collectives. To that end, it is imperative that we move beyond imagining resistance in a vague idealized sense and dare to imagine alternative understandings of flourishing. Ahmed’s call is echoed in many contributions included here.

This Open forum, which due to the number of submissions extends across several issues of the journal, takes seriously the knowledge embedded in stories and analyses from all corners of Europe and beyond and also assembles an archive, a kind of complaint collective. On her blog Feministkilljoys Sara Ahmed (2020) describes a complaint collective as “a collection of stories, of experiences but also more than that, more than a collection.” We learn so much from both the collective picture that emerges from the differently formulated contributions and from how they differ from one another. We learn from the different methodologies proposed, examples shared and the critiques offered. There is no one solution or description, and we must approach these questions on multiple levels at once. Yet, above all, we learn from taking seriously how the impact of burnout, and possibilities and forms of rest and resistance, is also always differently distributed. In other words, we must also learn from who and where this collective reflects. And while many hope and call for collective organizing, we should also recognize the specific challenges that differently situated feminists face, and the distinct contexts in which we work.

As we listen to all who submitted their reflections here, we are provided with multiple frameworks to make sense of our experiences with. One theme that runs through most submissions, is that stress, burnout, and exhaustion are lived as embodied experiences and their effects are stored in the body. We also learn about the imperative of prevention; individual care of our bodies, through appropriated understandings of “self care” repackaged by a thriving wellness industry. We might be asked to develop “a tough stomach,” to practice mindfulness, learn to relax, or schedule rest. We might be expected to live with the consequences of chronic pain, cognitive failures, memory loss or insomnia. We might be urged to bottle our rage, stop crying, or again, “toughen up.” Thankfully, we have a long legacy of feminist thinking around how emotions can be transformed into (collective) resources for mobilization as well as for formulating our problems otherwise.

What, in the end, do we gain by dwelling on exhaustion and burnout? Shouldn’t we, as a colleague insisted recently, at a table where many expressed stress and worry, stop complaining and instead focus on the privileges of academic work, on the freedom that comes with organizing one’s own (research) time, designing one’s (own) lectures? Afterall, in a world on fire, surviving academic burnout might be low on our list of desires. Why not care for our research instead of our own institutional constraints and demands? Lest we want to engage in a survival of the fittest rhetoric and comply with the demand that we smile and not reveal the reality of structural inequalities, dismissing pain and exhaustion does not make the world better. In a recent article on exhaustion, Nash and Pinto (2025) critique the priority given to care as universal solution and instead ask: “what is a feminist theory of exhaustion, one that stays with the exhaustion and acts from it rather than theorizing itself against fatigue’s toll?” (p. 90). Nash and Pinto argue for a post-care feminism, that is, a feminism that not only proposes care as the primary way to deal with ongoing systemic failures. By now, when it has become so ordinary to feel overwhelmed and burnt out Nash and Pinto’s shift in point of departure moves us beyond considering the present as exceptional set against an idealized past or a utopian future. What happens if we think with exhaustion rather than against it? What new ways of teaching, writing, reading, and talking—indeed of conceptualizing care—might we find? How might we live with permacrisis through exhaustion?

Dear colleagues, the irony of turning exhaustion and burnout into another task to be completed on top of everything else is not lost on us, nor do we believe that the care we have sought to extend can ever be read as a simple form of resistance. We do, however, offer this Open Forum as one way of contributing to ongoing conversations and to building a living archive—perhaps to igniting a fire that will keep on burning, keeping us warm in cold times, inviting us to sit with exhaustion, rest in refusal. And as we gather around that camp fire, let’s not forget the power in feminist humor. Afterall, as Preeta (2026) observes in a sharp and cheekily to-the-point column published on March 8 entitled “The Extremely Sustainable Lifestyle of the Burnt-Out Feminist,” the burnt-out feminist is a remarkable sustainability experiment, which, unlike many others, “appears to run indefinitely despite being chronically underfunded and dangerously close to collapse.” It seems that our continued rage and riotous laughter at the status quo and our continued efforts to fight injustices might still be the most – perhaps the only - renewable, sustainable energy source in a burning unsustainable world. Let’s put it to good use.