This Special Issue explores how academics live, make sense of, and re-imagine knowledge work in neoliberalising Indonesia using a feminist lens. It situates this inquiry in Indonesia, where the so-called ‘knowledge economy’–like those across Southeast Asia–emerges through uneven encounters between neoliberal reform, state developmentalism, and local moral logics of pedagogy. These intersections have reconfigured the meaning and value of academic work, intensifying demands for productivity and competitiveness by obscuring the relational and reproductive forms of labour–those affective and care-based practices that sustain university life but are taken for granted. Through the diverse lived experience of knowledge workers, this Special Issue interrogates how neoliberal and patriarchal values are intertwined in the production of knowledge. In this Introduction, we reflect on how feminist and critical pedagogical perspectives can unpack the contradictions within the neoliberal reorganisation of universities as experienced by academics, and how practices of care, negotiation, and reflexivity arise from these contradictions as ways of re-imagining what it means to work and think in neoliberalising universities. © 2026 Asian Studies Association of Australia.