Im/possibility of compassion in the modern university

Abstract

This thesis explores the im/possibility of compassion within the modern university, using the business school as a site of inquiry. Despite compassion’s prominence in Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS), where it is framed as a valuable and instrumentalizable skill, this work critiques such normative approaches for reducing compassion to a fixed capacity aligned with capitalist objectives. Instead, drawing on Black feminist theory (BFT), I argue for an understanding of compassion as a dynamic, emergent, and inherently relational phenomenon — a critical political practice that challenges systems of violence and oppression embedded within colonial institutions.

This research is grounded in 12 months of fieldwork with postgraduate students and reflections on my own doctoral journey. I read these encounters through a framework of queer and feminist phenomenology entangled with BFT and decolonial theory, which together center the embodied, relational, and contextually situated nature of compassion. This approach encourages a nuanced understanding of the conditions of possibility of participants’ experiences, emphasizing both the context of institutional structures and the agency of participants in navigating these harms through relational, embodied practices.

Drawing on these encounters, I propose that suffering in the modern university is not incidental, but a product of institutional colonial logics. These logics render suffering as inevitable, manifested through embodied and relational violence. Within the Business School, and the modern university, more generally, this unfolds through principles and practices of dehumanization and determinacy, instantiated by the valorization of productivity and the imposition of finite standards of success.

More generally, I illuminate compassion as an unfinished, contextually bound phenomenon that resists prescriptive definition. Compassion, in this framing, is not a universal fix to erase the experiences of student suffering in the modern university, but a radical practice of survival, rooted in the pursuit of liberation for Self and for community. By reimagining compassion through these critical perspectives, this thesis contributes to organizational scholarship by exposing how colonial logics produce suffering in the university and by demonstrating how compassion, as a relational and collective practice, can begin to destabilize these logics. Ultimately, it positions compassion as a living praxis for navigating, surviving and disrupting institutional harm.