Inhabiting Research in the Neoliberal and Eurocentral University: Collaborative Ethnography as a Bet for the Common and Political Subjectivation (original) (raw)

A cartography of the possible: reflections on militant ethnography in and against the edu-factory

AREA, 2017

This paper examines militant research through the lens of several challenges the author faced when experimenting with it as part of their PhD research. It engages with ongoing debates about the role and complexity of militant methodologies within-against-beyond the university. Specifically it suggests that the political economy of the academy is a challenge to militant research through the growing influence of the law of value within increasingly marketised academic contexts. The paper argues that the academic-recuperation-machine has the potential to assimilate what it terms the ‘minor knowledge’ created through militant research within its circuits of institutionalisation and commodification, becoming just another output or tool in the toolbox. Relatedly it suggests these challenges do not simply require a reflection on positionality vis-a-vis academia/activism, but a collective struggle around academic labour in against-beyond the university and how militant researcher might remain ‘in but not of’ the neoliberal university.

Negotiating Unfreedom: An (Auto-) Ethnography of Life at the Forefront of Academic Knowledge Production

Full text free access at: http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/idps/article/view/17450 This article analyzes the negotiated and contingent nature of research access and limitations in a cooperative research project in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia. It argues that even technically and legally 'free' academic research is often subject to influence and restrictions emanating from the politiciza-tion of research at the frontiers of the global political economy of academic knowledge production. The article sheds light on the frontier status of knowledge production in Kyrgyzstan, where recent revolutions and social conflict have created a tense climate amidst authorities' attempts to reassert their epistemic dominance. The analysis shows, first, how state actors' measures to curb foreign research activity affect attempts to do research with national and international (non-governmental) organizations and networks; second, how members of such entities realize research cooperation or hamper it in various ways; and third, how different emotional and psychological factors affect the negotiation of access and the shaping of research cooperation.

VOICES IN ACADEMIA AND BEYOND: AN EXPLORATION OF EUROPEAN RESEARCHERS' NARRATIVES USING A DECOLONISING LENS

Postcolonial Directions in Education , 2024

Grounded in the well-known feminist slogan coined by Carol Hanisch in 1970, "the personal is political," and informed by the postcolonial decolonising perspective, this article underlines the significance of foregrounding authentic lived experiences, challenging purportedly 'neutral' and 'objectivist' positivist assumptions. Featuring strong representation of women researchers and individuals of minority backgrounds among our

“We are fed up …Being research objects!” negotiating identities and solidarities in militant ethnography

Human Affairs, 2021

This article describes experiences of long-term ethnographic fieldwork on disobedience, disloyalty and dissensus among women in public space in selected (post-)Yugoslav cities. I focus on the opportunities and pitfalls of feminist ethnography and methodology in the context of positionality, engagement and solidarity as essential elements of research into activist networks. In order to problematize the emerging field positionalities and solidarities, I examine the "militant ethnography" methodological approach (Jeffrey Juris), which seeks to move beyond the divide between research practice and politically engaged participation. It is about being among and within the activist network and adopting many identities and roles by constantly shifting between reflective solidarity and analysis. In trying to shed light on the critical self-reflective research process of embodied understandings and experiences, I focus on ethnographic practices embedded in transnational "crowded fields" that encompass the dynamics of relationships and dependencies between knowledge producers.

On the Social Relations of Research: A Critical Assessment of Institutional Ethnography

Qualitative Inquiry, 2007

ABSTRACT Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience and examines how textual sequences coordinate consciousness and ruling relations. This article explicates some of the shortcomings of IE, so future institutional ethnographers can work with these. I offer a critical assessment of IE, focusing on its ontology of the social and the issue of truncation, the constitutive hermeneutics of interviewing, and the production of possible subjects in data analysis. The promise of IE is its critique of traditional sociology and introduction of ethnographic practice inquiring beyond nominalism into extra-local social relations that, through texts, govern local action. But IE establishes itself in a binary of emancipation versus regulation, so it is less concerned with its necessary complicity in objectification. IE must continue to be a sociology of possibilities, open to its own contradictions and continual reflexive intervention into itself.

08/06/2021 Collaborative Praxis: Unbinding Neoliberal Tethers of Academia * Feminista Journal

Feminista Journal, 2021

In the course of our conversations in conceptualising this piece, we agreed on three things – a) we adapt to no form of homogeneity, b) we hold space for each other and b) we ponder on various forms of collective and collaborative working. In using each of these terms as our thinking praxis, we have tried to illuminate facets of academia as it displaces us (in the form/identity we inhabit). We open our discussion with the neoliberal conditions that inhibit our agencies in the university. For instance, neoliberalism forces us into an isolationist, individualist conception of labour where structural inequality is made invisible and a politics of care untenable. Similarly, unpacking our positionality illuminates the creation of value and worth through gender as a colonial social construct. “If woman and black are terms for homogeneous, atomic, separable categories”, writes Maria Lugones, “then their intersection shows us the absence of black women rather than their presence”. Worth and value, then, are located in the bodies that are most proximally institutional, if not the institutions themselves.[1] Denial of worth and value, together with isolation, invariably leads us to an urgency to create community and collectives – things that are integral to feminist movements. And in centering these communitarian and collective praxes, we also come in direct existential confrontation with academia itself. To find what resonates to our experiences that are distinctive in themselves, but communicative on a common struggle. In this piece, we hope to rage through these sites of disenfranchisement and other fractures while simultaneously trying to imagine ways in which collaboration centers itself in academia.

Collective writing as survival tool: Mechanisms of reflexivity against neoliberal academia

Emotion, Space and Society, 2024

This paper introduces an innovative method for enhanced researcher reflexivity: the use of synchronous collective writing as a space to collaboratively reflect on experiences of subjectification within the contemporary academy. We explore how, despite its apparent importance to contemporary research, the neoliberalisation of academia leaves little room for meaningful reflexivity. The authors in this paperranging from Master's student to postdoctoral researcherwrote collaboratively in real-time to organically develop a method of collective reflexivity. Through auto-ethnographic vignettes that act as raw data, and a critical analysis of how we came to experience the events showcased in these vignettes, we analyse how our positionalities shape both our subjection to, and perpetuation of, systems of symbolic violence in neoliberal academic institutions. Through this method, we explore experiences of the contemporary university as patriarchal, intensively marketised, and as a space where the prevalence of 'weak' reflexivity has negative impacts on research ethics. We argue that the affect of collaborative writing spaces acts as a resistance against our experiences of loneliness, competition and individualism. We also argue our new approach fosters research that is more responsive to the socio-material conditions to which it attends, and enables a deeper engagement with affect-led methodologies and slow-research.

Juggling Academic Practice and Care: Collaborative Autoethnography within a Basque University Research Group

˜The œqualitative report, 2024

Many university scholars, including the authors of this article, acknowledge that they feel like they are riding an emotional roller coaster with academic success, as well as many project failures. Except for our PhD thesis, many of us complete our research tasks in relatively established research groups. However, little research has examined the potential these groups might have to mitigate feelings of academic isolation. To fill in this gap, we designed two methodological steps. First, we adopted the Woolfian metaphor of a room of our own, where we composed individual vignettes regarding our feelings of isolation. We read each other's texts and then, in a second step, moved to a "living room" to negotiate our emerging ideas, echoing a Collaborative Autoethnography. Two full professors and two early-career researchers reflected on and talked about their feelings of academic isolation, from their personal and professional standpoints. Despite the differences in job stability, the four participants acknowledged having felt isolated and abandoned. We argue that viewing research groups not as a community of practice, but a community of care is a more humane and desirable framework to model university research groups in these current times of exacerbating neoliberalism.