It’s a bittersweet symphony, this life: Fragile academic selves (original) (raw)
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Editor's Introduction: Telling Academic Lives - Special Journal Edition
TELLING ACADEMIC LIVES IS A COLLECTION of historical biographies that examine historians and anthropologists, their lives, careers, institutional affiliations, challenges and achievements. In short, it deals with academics as real people. The six historians whose bio- graphical analyses form this special edition are part of a wider Zeit- geist, namely embodied histories and a return to the humane.
It’s a Bittersweet Symphony, this Life: Fragile Academic Selves and Insecure Identities at Work
Organization Studies, 2013
This article demonstrates the importance of studying insecurity in relation to identities at work. Drawing upon empirical research with business school academics in the context of the proliferation of managerialist controls of audit, accountability, monitoring and performativity, we illustrate how insecurities in the form of fragile and insecure academic selves are variously manifested. Emerging from our data were three forms of insecurity—imposters, aspirants and those preoccupied with existential concerns, and we analyse these in the context of psychoanalytic, sociological and philosophical frameworks. In so doing, we make a three-fold contribution to the organization studies literature: first, we develop an understanding of identities whereby they are treated as a topic and not merely a resource for studying something else; second, we demonstrate how insecurity and identity are more nuanced and less monolithic concepts than has sometimes been deployed in the literature; and third...
Careering through Academia: Securing Identities or Engaging Ethical Subjectivities?
This paper reflects upon careering, securing identities and ethical subjectivities in academia in the context of audit, accountability and control surrounding new managerialism in UK Business Schools. Drawing upon empirical research, we illustrate how rather than resisting an ever-proliferating array of governmental technologies of power, academics chase the illusive sense of a secure self through ‘careering’; a frantic and frenetic individualistic strategy designed to moderate the pressures of excessive managerial competitive demands. Emerging from our data was an increased portrayal of academics as subjected to technologies of power and self, simultaneously being objects of an organizational gaze through normalizing judgements, hierarchical observations and examinations. Still this was not a monolithic response, as there were those who expressed considerable disquiet as well as a minority who reported ways to seek out a more embodied engagement with their work. In analyzing the careerism and preoccupation with securing identities that these technologies of visibility and self-discipline produce, we draw on certain philosophical deliberations and especially the later Foucault on ethics and active engagement to explore how academics might refuse the ways they have been constituted as subjects through new managerial regimes.
2019
This paper is focused on understanding how identity work unfolds along the learning trajectory of PhD students. The objective is to find out which processes plays a role in the construction of the “researcher” identity. The paper assumes that academia nowadays is characterised by neoliberal discourses, which impact on PhD students’ identity work. Two main views emerge from literature on PhD students’ experiences: PhD students as needing peculiar forms of support since they are newcomers to the academic profession and shall get socialised to it; or, PhD students as active agents, who purposefully shape their own path and draw on different resources in order to thrive. This paper adheres to the second view to relate it to the debate about the neoliberal turn in academia and, more broadly, to the debate about professional careers in a changing landscape. Data collected in a longitudinal study on the experiences of a small cohort of PhD students in a UK university support the arguments....
Grim tales: Meetings, matterings and moments of silencing and frustration in everyday academic life
International Journal of Educational Research, 2020
Universities are dominated by marketisation, individualisation and competition, forces inimical to individual flourishing and collaborative endeavours. This article presents four stories from a collective biography workshop in which a group of women academics explored everyday moments in their university lives. The stories are grim tales of damage, silencing, frustration and cynicism, whose affects continue to reverberate. The article makes two contributions to higher education research. One, its focus on mundane moments offers insights into embodied dynamics of gender, power and affect within the neoliberal university. Two, it demonstrates how collective biography as a feminist methodology can mobilise increased awareness of shared experiences and, thereby, enable participants to work together to recognise and contest the affective grimness of their workplaces.
Established quantitative and qualitative approaches to researching 'the academic profession' involving, for example, large-scale surveys (e.g. Halsey, 1992) or interview studies (e.g. are still very much with us. The recent international 'Changing Academic Profession' study was a very wide-ranging but essentially broad-brush comparative exercise which has produced (and is still producing) numerous statistical analyses of academic perceptions in different countries and different higher education systems (e.g. Kehm and Teichler, 2012). Yet increasingly over recent years, studies of this kind have had to share space with other, more close-grained research approaches which reflect the changing theoretical resources available to the field(s). Much current research on academic work reflects theoretical and methodological developments that are also evident to varying degrees in the broader sociological fields of knowledge, learning, identity , work and the professions . So, for example, conceptualisations of 'academic identity', 'governmentality', 'trajectory' or 'knowledge work', have emerged in various changing guises as theoretical attention has turned at various times to: discourse; regimes of truth and accountability; community; activity and social practice; static or changing networks of 'the virtual' or 'the sociomaterial'; and so on. How are these changes played out in the everyday practice of research?