Academic Subjectivities Research Articles

Gender drag and parody: Performances of professionalism by two young Chinese women academics

In recent decades, research has extensively explored the contextualized performances of women academics, primarily focusing on their academic achievements linked to career progression, predominantly within Western contexts. This study, however, delves into the nonacademic strategies employed by Chinese women academics to establish their professionalism within China’s neoliberal academic and institutional discourses. This approach contributes to a more nuanced understanding of women academics within the Asian higher education context. To unravel this issue, the study employs Butlerian theoretical concepts of drag and parody, qualitatively examining the experiences of two young Chinese women academics. It investigates how they navigate gender performance to portray professionalism through a feminist poststructural lens. The findings reveal that women academics encounter nonacademic assessments that significantly influence their career advancement. This paper provides valuable insights into the challenges faced by Chinese women academics concerning gender and academic subjectivities. It highlights their utilization of dragging and parodic acts as strategies to redefine their academic “excellence.” These discoveries prompt reflection on the profound impact of academic and institutional discourses as modes of governance on Chinese women academics.

Entangled with the past in Norwegian academia

ABSTRACT This article explores entanglements of matter, space, and temporalities in shaping academic subjectivities in Norwegian higher education. Drawing on conversations with foreign women working at a major university, I explore the forces (re)producing what matters in academia, creating assumptions of who can be a real academic. Leaning on Karen Barad’s (2010, 2017a, 2019) hauntology and Walter Mignolo’s (2011) queering of temporality, this study elucidates how foreign women academics are entangled with the past through gendered and racialised hauntings and more-than-human discursive materialities, such as linear temporality and ideals of progress. Illustrating ways in which Othering are still enacted in the world of academia, I argue the necessity of rethinking institutions of higher education as spaces where westernised and patriarchal geopolitics of knowledge are reproduced. This study carries out a decolonial delinking of linear temporality towards the recognition of pluriversal experiences of now-time, expanding geopolitics of knowledge in Norwegian academia.

Theorizing the subjectivizing powers of market-based technologies: Looking beyond coercion and seduction

Existing theorizations on how the proliferation of market-based technologies within universities come to foster so-called academic performer subjectivities have mainly drawn attention to their coercive and seductive powers. However, while these theorizations help explain why researchers either unwillingly adapt to, or identify with and cherish, their neoliberal ideals, they are less useful to explain recent empirical results showing that many researchers willingly comply yet are very critical of the very same ideals. Drawing upon an interview study of Swedish researchers, we address this theoretical gap in the literature by analytically disentangling three important qualities of the technologies per se, in terms of them producing performance numbers characterized by Specificness, Ongoingness, and Emptiness (SOE). These three qualities do not only have the dual power to interchangeably provoke bitter and sweet feelings, but also to foster the adoption of an academic performer subjectivity. In fact, it is precisely by provoking bittersweet feelings that these qualities break the sharp edges of pure coercion and seduction, thereby fostering a type of low-affective, yet highly persuasive form of reasoning about pros and cons of market-based technologies, which make their neoliberal ideals seem acceptable and reasonable at the end of the day.

Exploring the Textual and Tactile Weave of Academic Subjectivities:

Within the neoliberal university, academics become positioned around market-driven managerialist ideologies and the techniques enacting those principles. Audit cultures actively and continuously measure and shape academic subjectivities defined by a specific kind of success. The market-driven individualistic model can conflict with ethical ideals and longings for self-expression, while the mismatch between institutional goals and personal values creates an academic self that is pulled in conflicting directions. We become subjects of the discourse but we can limit our subjectivity and develop authentic insight. In this paper, we engage in a process of embodied making. We create textual and tactile self-portraits as a way of pushing back at neoliberal subjectivities, and to make visible our multiple selves. Although we recognize that we are always a part of what we resist, we use making as a way to create micro-resistances for our own renewal. Our self-portrait assemblages and stories are ambiguous and fluid but capture a view of selves hidden beneath the professional self. We are reminded that we are creative beings, and that there is room within neoliberalism to open intentional spaces. We may not always succeed in seeing our contradictory identities, yet we are able to occasionally capture glimpses of our shifting selves.

The neoliberalization of Indian business schools: how accreditation-linked institutional pressures shape academic subjectivities

PurposeThis study revisits the discourse on the neoliberalization of business schools and explores how accreditation-linked institutional pressures catalyze cultural change that adversely impact academic labor and academic subjectivities in the Global South.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with academics from elite business schools in India.FindingsThis study shows how academics encounter institutional pressures in Indian business schools. Three major themes emerged from the data: (1) the conception of the ideal academic that existed before accreditation, (2) how the conception of the ideal academic was fundamentally transformed during and after accreditation, and (3) the challenges academics experienced in achieving the performance targets introduced by accreditation-linked institutional pressures.Originality/valueThis study offers two contributions to the extant literature on business schools located in the Global South: (1) it illustrates how organizational changes within business schools in India are structured by accreditation-linked institutional pressures coming from the Global North, and (2) it adds to the growing body of work on neoliberal governmentality by highlighting the implications of accreditation-liked institutional pressures on academic subjectivities.

Digital masks: screens, selves and symbolic hygiene in online higher education

ABSTRACT Given the central role of digital devices and screens in academic work, their use and our relationship to them are under-theorised in mainstream research into digital education. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, rendered the use of digital screens central to life in ‘lockdowns’. This paper will consider the relationships between digital screens and anti-epidemic face masks, considering these artefacts in terms of functionality, academic subjectivities and epistemic practices, drawing on sociomaterial perspectives, Goffman's categories of lecturing self, and the history of anti-epidemic mask-wearing. I illustrate this with a vignette of teaching via digital screens, given by a member of faculty in an interview study exploring the impact of the lockdown on university staff. It will conclude that the digital screen may be viewed as a ‘digital mask’; carrying out a practical function, but also performing an ideology of hygiene and reason. The implications for digital higher education post-pandemic are discussed.

Diaries of Quarantine: Reframing the masculine logos through melancholia, nostalgia, and mourning

Challenging the bodily-detached logos that qualifies as perfect knowledge in academia, in the current account, I expose diary reflections, which I discuss in the context of critical literature debates, to make sense of how the neoliberal ‘success story’ further exposes academic and broader subjectivities, vulnerable embodied and psychological states, under conditions of worldwide lock-downs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. My diary reflections unveil conflated feelings of melancholia, inadequacy, helplessness, and guilt for not being able to satisfy the ideal of the perfect worker, under this crisis. Yet, they also radiate a hopeful sense of nostalgia, which, I experienced as a creative transition from melancholia towards a regenerative practice of mourning. By interweaving these diary notes with literature insights on the inter-connections between melancholia, nostalgia and mourning, I propose academic writing as a mourning practice, with heightened relational, ethical and aesthetical possibilities.

Emerging Neoliberal Academic Identities: Looking Beyond Homo economicus

In this article, I deal with the notion of ‘academic identity’ holistically, seeking to bring together the teacher and researcher roles of academics in the neoliberal university. The article begins from the perspective of early-career academics who occupy the majority of fixed-term, teaching-only contracts in Higher Education, arguing that such casualisation of academic labour entrenches the role of the academic as Homo economicus. Drawing on the work of Foucault, I demonstrate how a neoliberal governmentality is now not only exerted upon academics from without, but increasingly they are subjecting themselves to the logic of efficiency and effectiveness too. The neoliberal governmentality of the university thus influences and shapes academic subjectivities, such that what it means to be an academic is confined to this marketised logic. Despite the pressures placed on academics to ‘produce’ measurable outputs and demonstrate their impact, I argue that moving beyond Homo economicus is possible, arguing instead for a re-claiming of ‘the academic’ as Homo academicus. The idea of Homo academicus can only be supported when three conditions are present: collegiality is afforded greater importance than competition; the discourses of ‘productivity’ and performativity are balanced against simply ‘doing good work well’ (Pirrie in Virtue and the quiet art of scholarship, Routledge, London, 2019), and; academics are mindful to practice the ‘quieter’ intellectual virtues, including the virtue of ‘unknowing’ (Smith in J Philos Educ 50:272–284, 2016).

Lockdown literacies and semiotic assemblages: academic boundary work in the Covid-19 crisis

ABSTRACT In March 2020, populations were forced into home quarantine to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Universities moved the majority of their operations to homeworking, with profound implications for students, academics, and professional services staff. This paper analyses interview and visual data collected as part of a study on the impact of ‘moving online’ on staff at a large UK university. Drawing on sociomaterial perspectives, it considers the status and role of academics’ literacy practices under lockdown, focusing particularly on the ways in which a range of boundaries are negotiated – spatial, temporal, material, digital, professional, personal and emotional – in a setting where conventional boundaries have been profoundly disrupted. We argue that these practices form part of emergent, restless and shifting semiotic assemblages. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this conceptual shift for academic work, meaning-making and academic subjectivities, in lockdown and beyond.

Measuring Monsters, Academic Subjectivities, and Counting Practices

In this paper, we explore the online academic research platforms we are entangled with as tenure-track faculty members in the neoliberal university. We are so embedded in these systems that the assumptions and constructions inherent in practices of counting are often lost, wrapped in the coils of counting practices—a becoming with algorithm. Though academic platforms are intricately enmeshed in our research and lives, they have been operating as “onto-epistemological blind spots” (Sweet et al., 2020, p. 2). And yet, the numbers they produce and rely on (H-scores, impact factors, citation counts, and journal rankings) matter and are “promiscuous and inventive in [their] agential wanderings” (Barad, 2015, p. 487), offering possibilities for intimacy and response-ability to what we are and might become. In other words, attending to the monstrous qualities of counting practices offers an entry point for re-thinking the relational, ethical, and affective aspects of academic subjectivity. So, we attend tothese qualities to become with the neoliberal counting and control mechanisms in innovative ways. Through this paper, we open ourselves to the wild possibilities of academic algorithms, working within and thinking with counting practices to intimately understand the ontologies of number at work in these platforms and how they work on our subjectivities. As we consider how our futures are being modelled and pre-empted, we think the algorithms in relation to feminist new materialist philosophers, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad. We ask: ‘what if?’ we were to think ontologies of number with these theories and see what possibilities emerge. We entangle Braidotti and Barad with Deleuzoguattarian philosophies to imagine different relational becomings; to construct new ways of attending to our monstrous potentials and possibilities.

States of power: Ronan Paddison, Space and Polity

ABSTRACT In this article, I record some thoughts on Ronan Paddison’s accomplishments as an intellectual leader-scholar-citizen who made substantive and consequential contributions to the advancement of the systematic branch of Political Geography. I first consider that portion of Ronan’s body of published research which tackles political geographical themes, commenting in particular upon his scholarship on state power, before exploring in greater detail the meaning and implications of his role as founder and Editor in Chief of the journal Space and Polity. Against the backdrop of the neoliberalising academy, Ronan Paddison’s service to Political Geography serves as a lighthouse for those who survive him: it gestures to the kinds of academic subjectivities which enable privilege to be used wisely and reminds us of the indispensable work the protean scholar performs so that academic communities might prosper.

Slow singularities for collective mattering: new material feminist praxis in the accelerated academy

The contemporary university privileges speed, precarity, competition, and performativity; it operates through modes of accelerationism, work intensification and productivity; and it is oriented to producing academic subjectivities rooted in self-commodification. Much of this is antithetical to feminist ethics and working practices which focus on care, relationality and working together. The article explores these tensions as a basis for moving forward with the question: What does a new material feminist approach offer as an ethical practice to work against these damaging conditions? In response, it draws on the work of Barad (2007) and Haraway (2016) to propose an embodied material feminist ethics of response-ability as an alternative approach to educational research, teaching and mentoring. Further, relating Stengers (2018) insights on the generativity of slow to Deleuze's (2004) concept of ‘singularities’ the article proposes slow singularities for collective mattering as a conceptual and practical means – as a material-discursive feminist praxis – to contest the un-liveable life of the neoliberal accelerated academy. In doing so, it makes the case for feminist work as an un/dutiful response-ability of nurturing decelerated forms of being which might help reimagine the aims and purpose of the university.

Carefree conferences? Academics with caring responsibilities performing mobile academic subjectivities

ABSTRACTThis article explores how academics with caring responsibilities negotiate the mobility imperative, with specific reference to attending conferences. We argue that, in the neoliberal and ‘careless’ context of higher education, negotiating conflicting identities of academic and carer are fraught with tensions for carers as they try to reconcile the mobility imperative with their caring responsibilities. We acknowledge and also challenge the naturalised relationship between care and femininity, and use a feminist poststructuralist approach to analyse the competing discourses surrounding academic and care work. We draw on two distinct, but related, research projects with predominantly UK-based participants. Moreau’s project (‘Carers and Careers’, 2015–2017) explored how academic carers negotiate academic cultures which tend to render care work invisible, using interviews with academic carers and policy staff. Henderson’s project (‘In Two Places at Once’, 2017–2018) focused on the impact of caring responsibilities on academics’ conference participation, using diary-interview method.

Sujeto Académico Neoliberal: Cuantificado, Digitalizado y Bibliometrificado

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.

Staging the Shadow: Writing, Academic Subjectivities, and Hidden Selves

In this paper we explore our writing selves through the metaphors of concealment and display. We discovered the metaphoric possibilities opened up by Jung’s notions of persona and shadow and his emphasis on a rich psychic life that was animated by archetypes and symbolic meaning. This process helped us to glimpse alternative selves, that somehow live within us but are, like the shadow, neglected or pushed aside either due to institutional pressures to conceal or due to our own self-concept and our preferences for displaying certain identity types. Using poetic inquiry to access our unconscious feelings, we engaged in a process of writing that resulted in poetry and poetic vignettes. This type of arts-based practice helped us to disrupt the normative rationalist expectations surrounding academic work and intellectual production, and enabled us to create a space where agency and self-exploration were more accessible and transformative.

Bodies, hoodies, schools, and success: post-human performativity and smart girlhood

ABSTRACT This article adds to the literature on smart girlhood by exploring the topic through Karen Barad's theory of post-human performativity. We focus on the transcripts of two participants from a larger study on girls and academic success in Canada in order to highlight the material, discursive, embodied, and temporal entanglements that co-produce the possibilities for girls’ academic subjectivities. Using a diffractive methodology, we highlight the mutually arising agencies of bodies, hoodies, schools, grades, and media constructions of multi-talented ‘supergirls.’ This analysis highlights the importance of an intersectional approach to academic success alongside an understanding that inequalities, such as sexism, still endure for smart girls. We conclude by emphasizing the power of materiality in girls’ everyday lives to shift understandings of self, school, and smartness, as well as the importance of moving beyond dichotomous and decontextualized accounts of girls’ high achievement that have circulated for over twenty years.

Reflections on geography's daily blessings

Each day, I walk with two small dogs around one large circuit that begins in a car park on Queen's Walk at the southern end of Cornelian Bay on Hobart's western shore. To start, our walk is on smooth sandstone gravel. To our left, which is really west‐ish in orientation, we wander past public toilets, a barbeque area, a restaurant popular with locals and tourists, and an adventure playground. On weekends and before and after school drop‐off and pick‐up times, the playground is packed and rowdy; generally, when I am walking it is deserted. Several metres on, we reach a second carpark adjacent to another undercover barbeque area, and beyond that, bearing north, is the old cemetery.

The career aspirations and expectations of geography doctoral students: establishing academic subjectivities within a shifting landscape

AbstractThe PhD forms a watershed period where candidates' professional identities are formed, and their career aspirations and expectations are developed. Yet little is known about Australian geography doctoral students' career aspirations and expectations. Drawing on findings from a 2016 survey of those students, the paper establishes that while a majority of students aspire to work in academia, many also feel quite pessimistic about their prospects of being able to do so. The paper argues that the uncertainty and anxiety that many Australian geography doctoral students feel about their future careers is the product of a wider cultural shift that is occurring in relation to the purpose of the research doctorate. Geographers need to critically engage with these changes and the academic subjectivities they are producing to ensure that, as a discipline, geography continues to make a positive contribution to the careers of the individuals who undertake these degrees.

Collective Memory-work as Method and Resistance

Four academic mothers share their first foray into collective memory-work while exploring academic mother subjectivities located within tertiary education in New Zealand. Originating in education and gender studies, memory-work is currently an untapped research method in anthropology. The authors invite anthropologists to explore the value of collective memory-work, particularly when all participants seek academic outputs; where power imbalances in the group are minimal; and where trusting relationships are pre-established. Key words: memory-work; collective memory-work; mothers; academic mothers; method; PBRF.

Tracing assessment policy discourses in neoliberalised higher education settings

This article explores assessment policy in two European universities with different political, historical and social backgrounds: the University of Glasgow and Tallinn University. The University of Glasgow is a well-established Russell Group university in the UK; Tallinn University is a relatively new university in post-Soviet Estonia, shaped by very recent neoliberalisation processes. By applying a Foucauldian theorisation and Faircloughian methodology, this article approaches assessment policy as not only relating to institutional contexts but also national and global policy environments. The article argues that the assessment policy in Glasgow relates to globally dominant neoliberal discourses of accountability and excellence. These discourses have turned assessment into a complex technology of government that manages educational processes as well as academic and student subjectivities. While Tallinn University is shaped by neoliberalism at strategic levels, the policy documents in Tallinn still indicate a strong sense of local tradition where regulations have a modest impact on academic freedom and assessors’ disciplinary power over students.