Misrecognition and Responsibilisation in Extreme Events: Towards Recognition‐based Accountability in Academia

Abstract

This essay interrogates how extreme events including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate disasters, and political conflict, amplify structural inequalities in academia. Drawing on critical autoethnographic material from an Early Career Researcher with intersecting marginalisations, we show how crises expose and intensify two mutually reinforcing dynamics: </i>misrecognition</i> (institutional neglect of care responsibilities, political vulnerability, and embodied identity) and <i>responsibilisation</i> (the shifting of crisis management onto individuals). We demonstrate how these processes operate through institutional silence and performativity mechanisms that simultaneously erase vulnerability and demand uninterrupted performance, making individual adaptability appear both natural and necessary. By situating these lived experiences within Honneth's theory of recognition and Foucault's concept of responsibilisation, we theorise how their interaction deepens disadvantage for vulnerable groups during and after crises. In response, we propose </i>Recognition-based Accountability</i> (RbA) as a framework for institutional reform. RbA shifts the emphasis from individual resilience to structural responsibility, outlining actionable, care-oriented pathways for embedding equity and recognition into crisis governance in management education. This essay thus contributes to debates on academic inequality and the future of work by revealing the embodied costs of institutional neglect and offering a model for reorienting crisis response toward justice, care, and accountability.