REICE. Revista Iberoamericana sobre Calidad, Eficacia y Cambio en Educación

This article analyses, from an approach of Foucaultian origin, the ways in which the university professors currently constitute themselves, in what we have called "neoliberal academic subject". It is a first exploration of a wider investigation. From this perspective, we analyse the processes of neoliberalization in the contemporary academic subject, showing how the formation and university career of young researchers are configured, within the dominant mercantilization in higher education in Spain. Through 24 semi-structured interviews, of a broader qualitative work, the effects of these logics are interpreted in the academic subject of Higher Education in Spain. Believing that they are free in their practices, through the invisible power of soft forms of governance (soft governance), new knowledge-power relations (rankings, quantifying evaluations) and digitalization processes (bibliometric, impacts) are causing new academic subjectivities. The analysis shows changes in the quantification systems in the academic production that causes processes of somatization of neoliberalism, as well as the configuration of new academic subjectivities through digitization and the bibliometric impact.