Courtney Rath | University of Oregon (original) (raw)

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by Courtney Rath

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2017

In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry in... more In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry into both the broad given-ness of the norms of the neoliberal academy and our simultaneous compliance with and resistance to these norms. We choose to comply because we are invested in becoming academics; we continue to research and write for conferences and publication and to frame our scholarly work in terms of how it can be used on our CVs. We choose to resist by working collaboratively and towards remaining intelligible (both to ourselves and to those outside the academy) while becoming scholars. Here we put several concepts to work to think about the role of the writing group in our experiences as becoming-scholars, in particular ‘becoming-minoritarian,’ ‘schizoid subjectivities,’ ‘agential assemblage,’ and ‘institutional passing.’ Then, to think about how we (might) live through the process of becoming academic, we turn to the concept of survivance.

As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education’s July 2015 issue and various ... more As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education’s July 2015 issue and various articles that have circulated recently on social media [American Council on Education. 2016. “New report looks at the status of women in higher education.” January 15. http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/New-Report-Looks-at- the-Status-of-Women-in-Higher-Education.aspx; Donald, A. 2016. “Women are too often actively sidelined against their will.” Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/ women-are-too-often-actively-sidelined-against-their-will; Higher Education Network. 2016. “How should we cope with sexism? That’s the wrong question.” The Guardian. April 15. https:// www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/apr/15/ how-should-we-cope-with-sexism-thats-the-wrong-question], the topic of gender in higher education is of concern to many in both academic and non-academic thought-spaces. In this collective biography, we explore entrance into the fraught and contested space of the neoliberal academy by considering our experiences as women graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. We use various digital collaborative tools to adapt the collective biography method to our needs, making the project accessible across distance and time and inside the financial constraints of graduate school. Here we describe the project, excerpt two of the entangled data-stories we produced, and use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space and Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity to help us think through our becoming-academic.

As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education’s July 2015 issue and various ... more As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education’s July 2015 issue and various articles that have circulated recently on social media (American Council on Education, 2016; Donald, 2016; Higher Education Network, 2016), the topic of gender in higher education is of concern to many in both academic and non-academic thought-spaces. In this collective biography, we explore entrance into the fraught and contested space of the neoliberal academy by considering our experiences as women graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. We use various digital collaborative tools to adapt the collective biography method to our needs, making the project accessible across distance and time and inside the financial constraints of graduate school. Here we describe the project, excerpt two of the entangled data stories we produced, and use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space and Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity to help us think through our becoming-academic.

Book Reviews by Courtney Rath

Gender and Education, 2015

Papers by Courtney Rath

Gender and Education, Jun 21, 2017

As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education's July 2015 issue and various ... more As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education's July 2015 issue and various articles that have circulated recently on social media [American Council on Education. 2016. "New report looks at the status of women in higher education." January 15. http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/New-Report-Looks-atthe-Status-of-Women-in-Higher-Education.aspx; Donald, A. 2016. "Women are too often actively sidelined against their will." Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/ women-are-too-often-actively-sidelined-against-their-will; Higher Education Network. 2016. "How should we cope with sexism? That's the wrong question." The Guardian. April 15. https:// www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/apr/15/ how-should-we-cope-with-sexism-thats-the-wrong-question], the topic of gender in higher education is of concern to many in both academic and non-academic thought-spaces. In this collective biography, we explore entrance into the fraught and contested space of the neoliberal academy by considering our experiences as women graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. We use various digital collaborative tools to adapt the collective biography method to our needs, making the project accessible across distance and time and inside the financial constraints of graduate school. Here we describe the project, excerpt two of the entangled data-stories we produced, and use Deleuze and Guattari's concept of smooth and striated space and Braidotti's concept of nomadic subjectivity to help us think through our becoming-academic.

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Jul 25, 2017

In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry in... more In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry into both the broad given-ness of the norms of the neoliberal academy and our simultaneous compliance with and resistance to these norms. We choose to comply because we are invested in becoming academics; we continue to research and write for conferences and publication and to frame our scholarly work in terms of how it can be used on our CVs. We choose to resist by working collaboratively and towards remaining intelligible (both to ourselves and to those outside the academy) while becoming scholars. Here we put several concepts to work to think about the role of the writing group in our experiences as becoming-scholars, in particular 'becoming-minoritarian, ' 'schizoid subjectivities, ' 'agential assemblage, ' and 'institutional passing. ' Then, to think about how we (might) live through the process of becoming academic, we turn to the concept of survivance. No matter how hard any schoolgirl works to achieve the signifiers that can be read as competence, her appropriation is tentative and vulnerable-the subject position of good students is always provisional. She may have no power in relation to her assignment to a low-status category. She may work hard at achieving the right signifiers and yet always she is at risk of running up against the definition of correct practice that she does not know about. (Davies & Gannon, 2006, p. 26) We are schoolgirls who began our doctoral study invested in our subject positions as good students, believing ourselves in possession of the signifiers that can be read as competence. We had all completed other graduate programs successfully and been admitted into a top-ranked College of Education at a research institution; we brought expertise in a variety of fields, diverse work and schooling experiences, and the experience of being successful teachers, advisors, partners, mothers, writers, and thinkers. In this paper, we describe how the processes and practices of knowledge creation in the neoliberal academy (re)produce us as schoolgirls who can only sometimes be read as competent. Our competence is contingent and arbitrary, and how we got here and what we knew before we arrived are knowledges that matter only to us. To survive this becoming incompetent, we find ways to work around and outside academic notions of competence, creating an unsanctioned academic network: a writing group that grew into a Collective Biography research project (Brooks et al., 2017). Though here we will focus on the writing group, we've included several data stories from our Collective Biography work that engage moments of becoming incompetent, either directly or by means of contrast to experiences of competence in educational spaces outside the academy. Often in traditional Collective Biography work, the stories that emerge from the process are composites that reflect collective experience (Davies & Gannon, 2006

Qualitative Inquiry, Jul 12, 2018

In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution's th... more In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution's thesis editor to explore how my ideas and desires for my dissertation intra-acted with and were rendered impossible by the institutional assemblage. My dissertation explores how stories-used in the context of teacher education, where they serve as necessary vehicles for emerging educators to consider classroom practices-operate as apparatuses. After playing with a variety of ways to instigate a failure of verisimilitude, one way the apparatus-ness of stories is made visible, I landed on working diffraction as a narrative device. An early visit to the thesis editor, the institutional representative responsible for enforcing formatting standards, thwarted these formatting choices. This article considers the entangled apparatuses of academia, those that insist on intelligibility and those that resist it, and the ways they work behind the scenes to limit possible knowings and alienate scholars from their own scholarship.

University of Oregon, Aug 18, 2015

This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher... more This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher education, and yet the representations we rely on dangerously oversimplify teaching. My central questions emerge from this dilemma. In telling stories about teaching, how messy can the story be before it becomes unintelligible? Why does messiness matter and what does it produce for teachers-to-be? After examining both canonical accounts of teacher knowledge and emergent research that is productively disrupting the field, I draw on the work of Karen Barad to help me imagine both a new way of telling teaching stories, what I call diffractive storytelling, and a new way of thinking about their use in teacher education. In particular, I take up Barad's concept of apparatus to consider what knowing is made possible by traditional teacher stories, what knowing is foreclosed, and what these possibilities and limitations mean for teacher education. Finally, I turn to other apparatuses at work in teacher education, especially standardized assessments such as edTPA, the new performance-based assessment of teacher readiness being implemented across the country. I argue that attending carefully to the apparatus-ness of the instruments used in teacher preparation allows us to contest the naturalization of narrow conceptions of teaching practice and sustains the paradox of holding to standards while resisting standardization.

Journal of the Canadian Association For Curriculum Studies, Feb 22, 2014

In, Postfeminist Education?, Jessica Ringrose (2013) powerfully illustrates how postfeminist medi... more In, Postfeminist Education?, Jessica Ringrose (2013) powerfully illustrates how postfeminist media discourses have infiltrated Western educational policy and curricula. Ringrose's book contributes significantly to the field of curriculum studies for the ways that she knits postfeminist media exemplars, poststructural and (post) psychosocial theory, and educational policy together to demonstrate the shortcomings in current policies and practices that shape girls' experiences in school. Postfeminist Education? is divided into three sections: the first unpicks three "postfeminist panics" (Ringrose, 2013, p. 4) around the current state of girlhood; the second develops a conceptual and methodological approach to unpacking these panics rooted in psychosocial and Deleuzo-Guatarian theories; and the third draws on empirical data from two UK-based studies to challenge the validity of the postfeminist claims set out therein. These three components persuasively build an understanding of

Feminism & Psychology, 2013

ABSTRACT

Qualitative Inquiry, 2018

In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution’s th... more In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution’s thesis editor to explore how my ideas and desires for my dissertation intra-acted with and were rendered impossible by the institutional assemblage. My dissertation explores how stories—used in the context of teacher education, where they serve as necessary vehicles for emerging educators to consider classroom practices—operate as apparatuses. After playing with a variety of ways to instigate a failure of verisimilitude, one way the apparatus-ness of stories is made visible, I landed on working diffraction as a narrative device. An early visit to the thesis editor, the institutional representative responsible for enforcing formatting standards, thwarted these formatting choices. This article considers the entangled apparatuses of academia, those that insist on intelligibility and those that resist it, and the ways they work behind the scenes to limit possible knowings and alienate scholars...

Qualitative Inquiry, 2018

In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution’s th... more In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution’s thesis editor to explore how my ideas and desires for my dissertation intra-acted with and were rendered impossible by the institutional assemblage. My dissertation explores how stories—used in the context of teacher education, where they serve as necessary vehicles for emerging educators to consider classroom practices—operate as apparatuses. After playing with a variety of ways to instigate a failure of verisimilitude, one way the apparatus-ness of stories is made visible, I landed on working diffraction as a narrative device. An early visit to the thesis editor, the institutional representative responsible for enforcing formatting standards, thwarted these formatting choices. This article considers the entangled apparatuses of academia, those that insist on intelligibility and those that resist it, and the ways they work behind the scenes to limit possible knowings and alienate scholars...

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2017

In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry in... more In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry into both the broad given-ness of the norms of the neoliberal academy and our simultaneous compliance with and resistance to these norms. We choose to comply because we are invested in becoming academics; we continue to research and write for conferences and publication and to frame our scholarly work in terms of how it can be used on our CVs. We choose to resist by working collaboratively and towards remaining intelligible (both to ourselves and to those outside the academy) while becoming scholars. Here we put several concepts to work to think about the role of the writing group in our experiences as becoming-scholars, in particular 'becoming-minoritarian, ' 'schizoid subjectivities, ' 'agential assemblage, ' and 'institutional passing. ' Then, to think about how we (might) live through the process of becoming academic, we turn to the concept of survivance. No matter how hard any schoolgirl works to achieve the signifiers that can be read as competence, her appropriation is tentative and vulnerable-the subject position of good students is always provisional. She may have no power in relation to her assignment to a low-status category. She may work hard at achieving the right signifiers and yet always she is at risk of running up against the definition of correct practice that she does not know about. (Davies & Gannon, 2006, p. 26) We are schoolgirls who began our doctoral study invested in our subject positions as good students, believing ourselves in possession of the signifiers that can be read as competence. We had all completed other graduate programs successfully and been admitted into a top-ranked College of Education at a research institution; we brought expertise in a variety of fields, diverse work and schooling experiences, and the experience of being successful teachers, advisors, partners, mothers, writers, and thinkers. In this paper, we describe how the processes and practices of knowledge creation in the neoliberal academy (re)produce us as schoolgirls who can only sometimes be read as competent. Our competence is contingent and arbitrary, and how we got here and what we knew before we arrived are knowledges that matter only to us. To survive this becoming incompetent, we find ways to work around and outside academic notions of competence, creating an unsanctioned academic network: a writing group that grew into a Collective Biography research project (Brooks et al., 2017). Though here we will focus on the writing group, we've included several data stories from our Collective Biography work that engage moments of becoming incompetent, either directly or by means of contrast to experiences of competence in educational spaces outside the academy. Often in traditional Collective Biography work, the stories that emerge from the process are composites that reflect collective experience (Davies & Gannon, 2006

Gender and Education, 2017

As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education's July 2015 issue and various ... more As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education's July 2015 issue and various articles that have circulated recently on social media [American Council on Education. 2016. "New report looks at the status of women in higher education." January 15. http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/New-Report-Looks-atthe-Status-of-Women-in-Higher-Education.aspx; Donald, A. 2016. "Women are too often actively sidelined against their will." Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/ women-are-too-often-actively-sidelined-against-their-will; Higher Education Network. 2016. "How should we cope with sexism? That's the wrong question." The Guardian. April 15. https:// www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/apr/15/ how-should-we-cope-with-sexism-thats-the-wrong-question], the topic of gender in higher education is of concern to many in both academic and non-academic thought-spaces. In this collective biography, we explore entrance into the fraught and contested space of the neoliberal academy by considering our experiences as women graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. We use various digital collaborative tools to adapt the collective biography method to our needs, making the project accessible across distance and time and inside the financial constraints of graduate school. Here we describe the project, excerpt two of the entangled data-stories we produced, and use Deleuze and Guattari's concept of smooth and striated space and Braidotti's concept of nomadic subjectivity to help us think through our becoming-academic.

Posthumanism and Literacy Education, 2018

This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher... more This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher education, and yet the representations we rely on dangerously oversimplify teaching. My central questions emerge from this dilemma. In telling stories about teaching, how messy can the story be before it becomes unintelligible? Why does messiness matter and what does it produce for teachers-to-be? After examining both canonical accounts of teacher knowledge and emergent research that is productively disrupting the field, I draw on the work of Karen Barad to help me imagine both a new way of telling teaching stories, what I call diffractive storytelling, and a new way of thinking about their use in teacher education. In particular, I take up Barad's concept of apparatus to consider what knowing is made possible by traditional teacher stories, what knowing is foreclosed, and what these possibilities and limitations mean for teacher education. Finally, I turn to other apparatuses at work in teacher education, especially standardized assessments such as edTPA, the new performance-based assessment of teacher readiness being implemented across the country. I argue that attending carefully to the apparatus-ness of the instruments used in teacher preparation allows us to contest the naturalization of narrow conceptions of teaching practice and sustains the paradox of holding to standards while resisting standardization.

This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher... more This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher education, and yet the representations we rely on dangerously oversimplify teaching. My central questions emerge from this dilemma. In telling stories about teaching, how messy can the story be before it becomes unintelligible? Why does messiness matter and what does it produce for teachers-to-be? After examining both canonical accounts of teacher knowledge and emergent research that is productively disrupting the field, I draw on the work of Karen Barad to help me imagine both a new way of telling teaching stories, what I call diffractive storytelling, and a new way of thinking about their use in teacher education. In particular, I take up Barad’s concept of apparatus to consider what knowing is made possible by traditional teacher stories, what knowing is foreclosed, and what these possibilities and limitations mean for teacher education. Finally, I turn to other apparatuses at work in teacher education, especially standardized assessments such as edTPA, the new performance-based assessment of teacher readiness being implemented across the country. I argue that attending carefully to the apparatus-ness of the instruments used in teacher preparation allows us to contest the naturalization of narrow conceptions of teaching practice and sustains the paradox of holding to standards while resisting standardization.

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2017

In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry in... more In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry into both the broad given-ness of the norms of the neoliberal academy and our simultaneous compliance with and resistance to these norms. We choose to comply because we are invested in becoming academics; we continue to research and write for conferences and publication and to frame our scholarly work in terms of how it can be used on our CVs. We choose to resist by working collaboratively and towards remaining intelligible (both to ourselves and to those outside the academy) while becoming scholars. Here we put several concepts to work to think about the role of the writing group in our experiences as becoming-scholars, in particular ‘becoming-minoritarian,’ ‘schizoid subjectivities,’ ‘agential assemblage,’ and ‘institutional passing.’ Then, to think about how we (might) live through the process of becoming academic, we turn to the concept of survivance.

As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education’s July 2015 issue and various ... more As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education’s July 2015 issue and various articles that have circulated recently on social media [American Council on Education. 2016. “New report looks at the status of women in higher education.” January 15. http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/New-Report-Looks-at- the-Status-of-Women-in-Higher-Education.aspx; Donald, A. 2016. “Women are too often actively sidelined against their will.” Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/ women-are-too-often-actively-sidelined-against-their-will; Higher Education Network. 2016. “How should we cope with sexism? That’s the wrong question.” The Guardian. April 15. https:// www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/apr/15/ how-should-we-cope-with-sexism-thats-the-wrong-question], the topic of gender in higher education is of concern to many in both academic and non-academic thought-spaces. In this collective biography, we explore entrance into the fraught and contested space of the neoliberal academy by considering our experiences as women graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. We use various digital collaborative tools to adapt the collective biography method to our needs, making the project accessible across distance and time and inside the financial constraints of graduate school. Here we describe the project, excerpt two of the entangled data-stories we produced, and use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space and Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity to help us think through our becoming-academic.

As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education’s July 2015 issue and various ... more As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education’s July 2015 issue and various articles that have circulated recently on social media (American Council on Education, 2016; Donald, 2016; Higher Education Network, 2016), the topic of gender in higher education is of concern to many in both academic and non-academic thought-spaces. In this collective biography, we explore entrance into the fraught and contested space of the neoliberal academy by considering our experiences as women graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. We use various digital collaborative tools to adapt the collective biography method to our needs, making the project accessible across distance and time and inside the financial constraints of graduate school. Here we describe the project, excerpt two of the entangled data stories we produced, and use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space and Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity to help us think through our becoming-academic.

Gender and Education, Jun 21, 2017

As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education's July 2015 issue and various ... more As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education's July 2015 issue and various articles that have circulated recently on social media [American Council on Education. 2016. "New report looks at the status of women in higher education." January 15. http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/New-Report-Looks-atthe-Status-of-Women-in-Higher-Education.aspx; Donald, A. 2016. "Women are too often actively sidelined against their will." Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/ women-are-too-often-actively-sidelined-against-their-will; Higher Education Network. 2016. "How should we cope with sexism? That's the wrong question." The Guardian. April 15. https:// www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/apr/15/ how-should-we-cope-with-sexism-thats-the-wrong-question], the topic of gender in higher education is of concern to many in both academic and non-academic thought-spaces. In this collective biography, we explore entrance into the fraught and contested space of the neoliberal academy by considering our experiences as women graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. We use various digital collaborative tools to adapt the collective biography method to our needs, making the project accessible across distance and time and inside the financial constraints of graduate school. Here we describe the project, excerpt two of the entangled data-stories we produced, and use Deleuze and Guattari's concept of smooth and striated space and Braidotti's concept of nomadic subjectivity to help us think through our becoming-academic.

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Jul 25, 2017

In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry in... more In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry into both the broad given-ness of the norms of the neoliberal academy and our simultaneous compliance with and resistance to these norms. We choose to comply because we are invested in becoming academics; we continue to research and write for conferences and publication and to frame our scholarly work in terms of how it can be used on our CVs. We choose to resist by working collaboratively and towards remaining intelligible (both to ourselves and to those outside the academy) while becoming scholars. Here we put several concepts to work to think about the role of the writing group in our experiences as becoming-scholars, in particular 'becoming-minoritarian, ' 'schizoid subjectivities, ' 'agential assemblage, ' and 'institutional passing. ' Then, to think about how we (might) live through the process of becoming academic, we turn to the concept of survivance. No matter how hard any schoolgirl works to achieve the signifiers that can be read as competence, her appropriation is tentative and vulnerable-the subject position of good students is always provisional. She may have no power in relation to her assignment to a low-status category. She may work hard at achieving the right signifiers and yet always she is at risk of running up against the definition of correct practice that she does not know about. (Davies & Gannon, 2006, p. 26) We are schoolgirls who began our doctoral study invested in our subject positions as good students, believing ourselves in possession of the signifiers that can be read as competence. We had all completed other graduate programs successfully and been admitted into a top-ranked College of Education at a research institution; we brought expertise in a variety of fields, diverse work and schooling experiences, and the experience of being successful teachers, advisors, partners, mothers, writers, and thinkers. In this paper, we describe how the processes and practices of knowledge creation in the neoliberal academy (re)produce us as schoolgirls who can only sometimes be read as competent. Our competence is contingent and arbitrary, and how we got here and what we knew before we arrived are knowledges that matter only to us. To survive this becoming incompetent, we find ways to work around and outside academic notions of competence, creating an unsanctioned academic network: a writing group that grew into a Collective Biography research project (Brooks et al., 2017). Though here we will focus on the writing group, we've included several data stories from our Collective Biography work that engage moments of becoming incompetent, either directly or by means of contrast to experiences of competence in educational spaces outside the academy. Often in traditional Collective Biography work, the stories that emerge from the process are composites that reflect collective experience (Davies & Gannon, 2006

Qualitative Inquiry, Jul 12, 2018

In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution's th... more In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution's thesis editor to explore how my ideas and desires for my dissertation intra-acted with and were rendered impossible by the institutional assemblage. My dissertation explores how stories-used in the context of teacher education, where they serve as necessary vehicles for emerging educators to consider classroom practices-operate as apparatuses. After playing with a variety of ways to instigate a failure of verisimilitude, one way the apparatus-ness of stories is made visible, I landed on working diffraction as a narrative device. An early visit to the thesis editor, the institutional representative responsible for enforcing formatting standards, thwarted these formatting choices. This article considers the entangled apparatuses of academia, those that insist on intelligibility and those that resist it, and the ways they work behind the scenes to limit possible knowings and alienate scholars from their own scholarship.

University of Oregon, Aug 18, 2015

This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher... more This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher education, and yet the representations we rely on dangerously oversimplify teaching. My central questions emerge from this dilemma. In telling stories about teaching, how messy can the story be before it becomes unintelligible? Why does messiness matter and what does it produce for teachers-to-be? After examining both canonical accounts of teacher knowledge and emergent research that is productively disrupting the field, I draw on the work of Karen Barad to help me imagine both a new way of telling teaching stories, what I call diffractive storytelling, and a new way of thinking about their use in teacher education. In particular, I take up Barad's concept of apparatus to consider what knowing is made possible by traditional teacher stories, what knowing is foreclosed, and what these possibilities and limitations mean for teacher education. Finally, I turn to other apparatuses at work in teacher education, especially standardized assessments such as edTPA, the new performance-based assessment of teacher readiness being implemented across the country. I argue that attending carefully to the apparatus-ness of the instruments used in teacher preparation allows us to contest the naturalization of narrow conceptions of teaching practice and sustains the paradox of holding to standards while resisting standardization.

Journal of the Canadian Association For Curriculum Studies, Feb 22, 2014

In, Postfeminist Education?, Jessica Ringrose (2013) powerfully illustrates how postfeminist medi... more In, Postfeminist Education?, Jessica Ringrose (2013) powerfully illustrates how postfeminist media discourses have infiltrated Western educational policy and curricula. Ringrose's book contributes significantly to the field of curriculum studies for the ways that she knits postfeminist media exemplars, poststructural and (post) psychosocial theory, and educational policy together to demonstrate the shortcomings in current policies and practices that shape girls' experiences in school. Postfeminist Education? is divided into three sections: the first unpicks three "postfeminist panics" (Ringrose, 2013, p. 4) around the current state of girlhood; the second develops a conceptual and methodological approach to unpacking these panics rooted in psychosocial and Deleuzo-Guatarian theories; and the third draws on empirical data from two UK-based studies to challenge the validity of the postfeminist claims set out therein. These three components persuasively build an understanding of

Feminism & Psychology, 2013

ABSTRACT

Qualitative Inquiry, 2018

In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution’s th... more In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution’s thesis editor to explore how my ideas and desires for my dissertation intra-acted with and were rendered impossible by the institutional assemblage. My dissertation explores how stories—used in the context of teacher education, where they serve as necessary vehicles for emerging educators to consider classroom practices—operate as apparatuses. After playing with a variety of ways to instigate a failure of verisimilitude, one way the apparatus-ness of stories is made visible, I landed on working diffraction as a narrative device. An early visit to the thesis editor, the institutional representative responsible for enforcing formatting standards, thwarted these formatting choices. This article considers the entangled apparatuses of academia, those that insist on intelligibility and those that resist it, and the ways they work behind the scenes to limit possible knowings and alienate scholars...

Qualitative Inquiry, 2018

In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution’s th... more In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution’s thesis editor to explore how my ideas and desires for my dissertation intra-acted with and were rendered impossible by the institutional assemblage. My dissertation explores how stories—used in the context of teacher education, where they serve as necessary vehicles for emerging educators to consider classroom practices—operate as apparatuses. After playing with a variety of ways to instigate a failure of verisimilitude, one way the apparatus-ness of stories is made visible, I landed on working diffraction as a narrative device. An early visit to the thesis editor, the institutional representative responsible for enforcing formatting standards, thwarted these formatting choices. This article considers the entangled apparatuses of academia, those that insist on intelligibility and those that resist it, and the ways they work behind the scenes to limit possible knowings and alienate scholars...

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2017

In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry in... more In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry into both the broad given-ness of the norms of the neoliberal academy and our simultaneous compliance with and resistance to these norms. We choose to comply because we are invested in becoming academics; we continue to research and write for conferences and publication and to frame our scholarly work in terms of how it can be used on our CVs. We choose to resist by working collaboratively and towards remaining intelligible (both to ourselves and to those outside the academy) while becoming scholars. Here we put several concepts to work to think about the role of the writing group in our experiences as becoming-scholars, in particular 'becoming-minoritarian, ' 'schizoid subjectivities, ' 'agential assemblage, ' and 'institutional passing. ' Then, to think about how we (might) live through the process of becoming academic, we turn to the concept of survivance. No matter how hard any schoolgirl works to achieve the signifiers that can be read as competence, her appropriation is tentative and vulnerable-the subject position of good students is always provisional. She may have no power in relation to her assignment to a low-status category. She may work hard at achieving the right signifiers and yet always she is at risk of running up against the definition of correct practice that she does not know about. (Davies & Gannon, 2006, p. 26) We are schoolgirls who began our doctoral study invested in our subject positions as good students, believing ourselves in possession of the signifiers that can be read as competence. We had all completed other graduate programs successfully and been admitted into a top-ranked College of Education at a research institution; we brought expertise in a variety of fields, diverse work and schooling experiences, and the experience of being successful teachers, advisors, partners, mothers, writers, and thinkers. In this paper, we describe how the processes and practices of knowledge creation in the neoliberal academy (re)produce us as schoolgirls who can only sometimes be read as competent. Our competence is contingent and arbitrary, and how we got here and what we knew before we arrived are knowledges that matter only to us. To survive this becoming incompetent, we find ways to work around and outside academic notions of competence, creating an unsanctioned academic network: a writing group that grew into a Collective Biography research project (Brooks et al., 2017). Though here we will focus on the writing group, we've included several data stories from our Collective Biography work that engage moments of becoming incompetent, either directly or by means of contrast to experiences of competence in educational spaces outside the academy. Often in traditional Collective Biography work, the stories that emerge from the process are composites that reflect collective experience (Davies & Gannon, 2006

Gender and Education, 2017

As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education's July 2015 issue and various ... more As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education's July 2015 issue and various articles that have circulated recently on social media [American Council on Education. 2016. "New report looks at the status of women in higher education." January 15. http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/New-Report-Looks-atthe-Status-of-Women-in-Higher-Education.aspx; Donald, A. 2016. "Women are too often actively sidelined against their will." Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/ women-are-too-often-actively-sidelined-against-their-will; Higher Education Network. 2016. "How should we cope with sexism? That's the wrong question." The Guardian. April 15. https:// www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/apr/15/ how-should-we-cope-with-sexism-thats-the-wrong-question], the topic of gender in higher education is of concern to many in both academic and non-academic thought-spaces. In this collective biography, we explore entrance into the fraught and contested space of the neoliberal academy by considering our experiences as women graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. We use various digital collaborative tools to adapt the collective biography method to our needs, making the project accessible across distance and time and inside the financial constraints of graduate school. Here we describe the project, excerpt two of the entangled data-stories we produced, and use Deleuze and Guattari's concept of smooth and striated space and Braidotti's concept of nomadic subjectivity to help us think through our becoming-academic.

Posthumanism and Literacy Education, 2018

This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher... more This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher education, and yet the representations we rely on dangerously oversimplify teaching. My central questions emerge from this dilemma. In telling stories about teaching, how messy can the story be before it becomes unintelligible? Why does messiness matter and what does it produce for teachers-to-be? After examining both canonical accounts of teacher knowledge and emergent research that is productively disrupting the field, I draw on the work of Karen Barad to help me imagine both a new way of telling teaching stories, what I call diffractive storytelling, and a new way of thinking about their use in teacher education. In particular, I take up Barad's concept of apparatus to consider what knowing is made possible by traditional teacher stories, what knowing is foreclosed, and what these possibilities and limitations mean for teacher education. Finally, I turn to other apparatuses at work in teacher education, especially standardized assessments such as edTPA, the new performance-based assessment of teacher readiness being implemented across the country. I argue that attending carefully to the apparatus-ness of the instruments used in teacher preparation allows us to contest the naturalization of narrow conceptions of teaching practice and sustains the paradox of holding to standards while resisting standardization.

This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher... more This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher education, and yet the representations we rely on dangerously oversimplify teaching. My central questions emerge from this dilemma. In telling stories about teaching, how messy can the story be before it becomes unintelligible? Why does messiness matter and what does it produce for teachers-to-be? After examining both canonical accounts of teacher knowledge and emergent research that is productively disrupting the field, I draw on the work of Karen Barad to help me imagine both a new way of telling teaching stories, what I call diffractive storytelling, and a new way of thinking about their use in teacher education. In particular, I take up Barad’s concept of apparatus to consider what knowing is made possible by traditional teacher stories, what knowing is foreclosed, and what these possibilities and limitations mean for teacher education. Finally, I turn to other apparatuses at work in teacher education, especially standardized assessments such as edTPA, the new performance-based assessment of teacher readiness being implemented across the country. I argue that attending carefully to the apparatus-ness of the instruments used in teacher preparation allows us to contest the naturalization of narrow conceptions of teaching practice and sustains the paradox of holding to standards while resisting standardization.