Resistance and invention: becoming academic, remaining other (original) (raw)

2017, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

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