Abstract

This article emerges from a collaborative autoethnographic exercise carried out by three Chilean women scholars who, from different territories and trajectories, reflect on how neoliberal policies, audit culture, and gender inequalities shape their experiences in higher education. Through personal narratives, we illuminate the intersections between our professional and affective lives—motherhood, singlehood, caregiving, writing, intellectual work, and silencing. We question how well-being can be sustained in contexts marked by constant demands, performance-based surveillance, and the erasure of emotional life. By positioning ourselves as the subject of study through interpretive autoethnography, we seek to narrate our lived experiences and critically connect them with the structural conditions that shape them. While this writing is not intended as a path to individual healing or a substitute for collective transformation, it offers an ethical and political space that sustains us—and enables us to imagine other ways of inhabiting academia: more humane, more just, and more our own. © The Author(s) 2025