Intellectual as Hustler: Researching against the grain of the market

In many respects, universities around the world are living through a period of quite extraordinary turmoil as their role and purposes are under serious challenge. In this paper we explore the latest attempt in Australia to push universities even further in the direction of becoming marketised, and we examine what this means in terms of the loss of public space for academics as public intellectuals. In this, we draw some fragments from our own autobiographical experiences in trying to assert what a ‘counter public’ might look like around university research. We find the notion of ‘hustler’ to be a sufficiently playful metaphor around which to begin to frame what happens to knowledge as it is increasingly treated as another commodity.