Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood (Routledge Auto/Biography Studies) [1 ed.] 103214680X, 9781032146805

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Routledge Auto/Biography Studies

CAREER NARRATIVES AND ACADEMIC WOMANHOOD IN THE SPACES PROVIDED Edited by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood

Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood is a collection of essays in which life writing scholars theorize their early-career, mid-career, and latecareer experiences with the documents that shape their professional lives as women: the institutional auto/biography of employment letters, curriculum vitae, tenure portfolios, promotion applications, publication and conference bios, academic website profiles, and other self-authored narratives required by institutions to compete for opportunities and resources. The essays explore the privacy laws, peer review, disciplinary standards, digital media, and other standardizing tools, practices and policies that impact women’s self-construction at pivotal junctures at which they promote themselves in the spaces of academic careers. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle is a Professor of English at The College of New Jersey. Her work appears in Life Writing, European Journal of Life Writing, Persona Studies, and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. She was the 2021-22 Fulbright Research Chair of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton Canada. Her book, Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator (2020). Her current project, tentatively titled Life’s Work: Career Narrative as Autobiography in the North American Academy, is a study of functional forms of life writing in academic careers. She serves as Editor in Chief of a/b: Auto/biography Studies.

Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Ricia A. Chansky

Engaging Donna Haraway Lives in the Natureculture Web Edited by Cynthia Huff and Margaretta Jolly Afropean Female Selves Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego Christopher Hogarth Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back Symptoms of Sincerity Charles Reeve Towards a Theory of Life-Writing Genre Blending Marija Krsteva Contemporary Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing Narrating the Male Self Christina Schönberger-Stepien Conrad, Autobiographical Remembering, and the Making of Narrative Identity Xiaoling Yao Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood In the Spaces Provided Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Auto-Biography-Studies/book-series/AUTO

Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood In the Spaces Provided

Edited by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-14680-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-14683-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-24050-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

To the women who wanted to participate in this conversation and were unable, I dedicate this collection.

Contents

List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: The Unlikely Autobiography of Women’s Career Documentation

x xi xvii

1

LISA ORTIZ-VILARELLE

1 Vitae Statistics: The Anti-Autobiographical Imperative of Academic Self-Documentation

19

AIMEE MORRISON

2 Docile Bodies (of Work): Coaxing the Neoliberal Academic via the Online Researcher Profile

36

EMMA MAGUIRE

3 Sign ‘In the Space Provided’: Academic Email Signatures as Sites of Narrative, Branding, and Refusal?

54

MAY FRIEDMAN AND JENNIFER POOLE

4 Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards: Academic Women’s Efforts to Reframe Success ALISON L. BLACK, SANDRA ELSOM, AND VICKI SCHRIEVER

68

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Contents

5 ‘Making Spreadsheets Won’t Get You Tenure’: Autoethnography, Women Administrative Faculty, and the Genres That Make Them (In)Visible

85

CANDIS BOND

6 ‘Not Another ARC Summer’: Grant Applications and Life Narratives of Motherhood

100

KATE DOUGLAS

7 Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a Curriculum Vitae

115

LEENA KÄOSAAR

8 Getting an Academic Life: The Untranslatable, or How to Curate a Polish-Canadian CV

130

EVA C. KARPINSKI

9 Crossing the Lines: Using Personnel File Documents to Negotiate Embodied Space

144

CYNTHIA HUFF

10 How a Lifetime of Academic Administration Gave Me the Freedom to Write a Sisterlocking Academic Memoir: An Interview with Valerie Lee

160

VALERIE LEE WITH JULIA WATSON

11 The Poetic Cover Letter: On Crafting Paradoxical Personas

168

VICKI HALLETT

12 Mothers and Myths: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Account of Navigating Domestic Academic Life

182

VANESSA MARR AND JESS MORIARTY

13 Post-it as Praxis: Counternarrating Non-linearity and Multiplicity in Academic Lives ELIZABETH RODRIGUES AND MARION WOLFE

202

Contents ix

14 Dossiers in Crip Time: Reclaiming a Space for Crazy in the Academy

220

ALLY DAY

15 The Same Self/ie: Blurring Academic, Creative, and Personal Identity through the Taking and Sharing of Self-Portraits

237

MARINA DELLER

16 Spilling Out of the Spaces Provided: How Occupying the Academic Office Becomes an Autobiographical Act

253

LAURA BEARD AND LISA ORTIZ-VILARELLE

Index

267

Figures

2.1 4.1 12.1 13.1 13.2 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4

16.1 16.2

Emma 2018 Sandra Elsom. Rubric in Progress The Mythical Mother Marion’s Post-it wall Liz’s Post-its The Subject Celebrating a Milestone. Posted to LinkedIn The Subject Searching for Connection. Posted to Twitter. “What Zoom sees/what I’m actually wearing” The Subject Crying. Presented as a slide in an official and compulsory PhD presentation The Subject’s Unintended Headshot. Originally shared to Instagram, later embedded in a presentation to a cohort of undergraduate students Interruptions, Slightly Suspect, Hung in the Cracks This Is Not a Classroom

44 74 194 205 210 240 244 246

248 256 258

Contributors

Laura Beard is a Professor at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada where she served as Associate Vice President (Research) for five years. She holds an MA and PhD from The Johns Hopkins University, is a two-time Fulbright Scholar, and currently holds research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for her work on John S. McClintock’s memoir about Deadwood and the Black Hills. Her books include Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women’s Autobiographical Writing in the Americas (University of Virginia Press, 2009) and, with Ricia Chansky, The Divided States: Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). Alison L. Black is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. She uses autoethnography, poetry, and narrative to listen to and understand inner worlds and wider cultural experiences. Ali’s research recognizes the importance of contemplating, responding to, and acknowledging lived lives. Candis Bond is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Writing Excellence at Augusta University. Her research focuses on writing program administration, first-generation academic identity, and higher education leadership. She has published work in journals such as Feminist Teacher, The Writing Center Journal, and WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. Her scholarship has also appeared in several books, including #MeToo and Modernism and Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities: First-Gen PhDs Navigating Institutional Power in Early Careers. Ally Day is Associate Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. Her book, The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir and Crip Positionalities (The Ohio State University Press 2021), addresses the complicated interactions between those living with HIV and AIDS

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Contributors Service providers. She is currently working on her second book project, Gestational Ableism: Disability, Pregnancy and Radical Crip Futures.

Marina Deller is an Adelaide-based writer who earned their Ph.D. at Flinders University of South Australia. Their research concerns grief and trauma life narratives and material storytelling. They write about identity, bodies, grief, and public/private spheres. Marina teaches Creative Writing and English Literature and is affiliated with the Flinders Life Narrative Lab. Kate Douglas is a Professor in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Flinders University (Australia). Her research and teaching interests are in life narrative studies: the ways that people tell their life stories or the stories of others across various literary and cultural mediums. Kate’s research has a strong focus on childhood studies. Her most recent publication is Children and Biography: Reading and Writing Life Stories (Bloomsbury, 2022). Sandra Elsom is a Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Her work focuses on the integration of game-based learning into the higher education curriculum. She is also interested in professional development for wellbeing in academia. May Friedman (she/her) lives and works in Toronto. Much of May’s work explores fat activism and weight stigma in different settings. Drawing from her own experiences as a fat racialized mother, May thinks through themes of instability in relation to appearance, nationhood, race, and beyond. Working with Jen for many years has resulted in a deep commitment to the messiness that is reflected here and throughout their collaborations. Vicki Hallett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. Her work lives at the confluence of postcolonial, feminist, and life-writing studies and she is fascinated by the ways we create ourselves and our places in the world through stories. She is the author of Mistress of the Blue Castle: The Writing Life of Phebe Florence Miller (MUN Books, 2018), and has contributed to journals such as a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, The Journal of Autoethnography, and TOPIA. She is a settler Newfoundlander living in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) and Nitassinan, Nunatsiavut, NunatuKavut (Labrador). Cynthia Huff is English Studies Professor Emerita at Illinois State University. Throughout her career, she has published in the field of life narrative, including on nineteenth-century women’s archival life writing, particularly diaries, as well as in Victorian literature and

Contributors

xiii

culture. She has also published on posthumanism and has most recently co-edited with Margaretta Jolly Engaging Donna Haraway: Lives in the Natureculture Web. Her publications include British Women’s Diaries, Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities, and Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, co-edited with Suzanne Bunkers. In 2017 she delivered a keynote address in Warsaw, Poland on women’s writing in the archives. Leena Käosaar (formerly Kurvet-Käosaar) is a life writing scholar and a mother of three daughters. She works as an Associate Professor of Cultural Theory at the Institute of Cultural Research, University of Tartu in Estonia. She has worked on the tradition of Estonian life writing and post-Soviet life writings, Baltic women’s deportation and Gulag narratives, women’s diaries and family correspondences, the representation of traumatic experience, relationality, dynamics of address, traveling memory and gender as well as creative nonfiction. She has co-edited several books including Negotiations with Modernity (2010) Border Crossings: Essay in Identity and Belonging (2020), as well as several special issues Narrating Migration and Diaspora (Trames, 2019) Folklore, Migration and Diasporas (2020), Folklore (2021). Eva Karpinski is an Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, where she teaches feminist theory, life writing, and translation studies. She has published over 40 articles and book chapters. She is the author of Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation and co-author of Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas and, most recently, Translation, Semiotics, and Feminism: Selected Writings of Barbara Godard (Routledge 2022). She is Associate Editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. Valerie Lee is Academy Professor Emerita of English at The Ohio State University and former vice provost of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and vice president of Outreach and Engagement. She served as department chair for English, Women’s Studies, and African American and African Studies. Her publications include: Sisterlocking Discoarse: Race, Gender, and The Twenty-First-Century Academy, (2021); The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Women’s Literature (2006); Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: DoubleDutched Readings (1996) and journal articles in the fields of feminist literature and theory, African American folklore, and higher education. She co-edited with E. Patrick Johnson the book series, Black Performance and Cultural Criticism (Ohio State UP). A former

xiv

Contributors

president of the Association of Departments of English (ADE), she was the 2019 recipient of the ADE Francis Andrew March Award for outstanding service to the profession. Emma Maguire is a Lecturer in English and Writing at James Cook University. She researches digital media, auto/biography, and gender. Her book Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies was published in 2018 with Palgrave Macmillan. Vanessa Marr is a Principal Lecturer at University of Brighton, Course Leader for BA Design for Digital Media, and the School Lead for Employability. She is a practicing artist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her practice-based research uses embroidery, which she describes as drawing with thread, to weave together practices of autoethnography, drawing, creative writing and craftivism as collaborative arts projects, personal artwork, academic publications, and exhibitions. She is particularly interested in the role of hand-stitch to invoke female narratives the topic of domesticity and women’s lived experience of academia. Jessica Moriarty is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Brighton where she is course leader on the Creative Writing MA and Co-director for the Centre of Arts and Wellbeing. She has published widely on autoethnography, community engagement and pedagogy in writing practice. Her latest book, Walking for Creative Recovery, was published earlier in 2022. Aimée Morrison is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo (Canada). She has published on mommy blogging, viral academic media, the use of humour in social justice hashtag movements, academic accommodations bureaucracies, and romantic comedy. She teaches media studies, new media studies, and academic writing. She co-hosts the All The Things ADHD podcast with Lee Skallerup Bessette and was a co-founder of the long-running academic blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe. She farts around on the internet for a living and appeared in the movie Assholes: A Theory, which John Cleese was also in. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle is a Professor of English at The College of New Jersey. Her work appears in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, European Journal of Life Writing, Life Writing, Persona Studies, The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and The Journal of Hatian Studies. She was the 2021-22 Fulbright Research Chair of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton Canada. Her book, Américanas, Autocracy, and

Contributors

xv

Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator (2020) is published with Routledge Press in its Auto/biography Studies Series. Her current project, tentatively titled Life’s Work: Career Narrative as Autobiography in the North American Academy, is a monograph on functional forms of life writing in academic careers. She serves as Editor in Chief of a/b: Auto/biography Studies. Jennifer Poole (she/her) is a first-generation white settler from England living in T’karonto/Treaty 13. She is also a partner, sibling, bonus parent, auntie, and child of two wetland protectors. She is happiest outside. In her professional life, she is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the recently renamed Toronto Metropolitan University where her work takes up madness, sanism, grief, white supremacy, pedagogy, and mental/health among other foci. She is still in academia because of her relational learning experiences with learners/students and her wondrous co-author on this piece. Elizabeth Rodrigues is Associate Professor and Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian at Grinnell College. Her research focuses on life writing, critical data studies, and comparative approaches to multiethnic US literatures. She is the author of Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early TwentiethCentury U.S. Literatures (University of Michigan Press, Digital Culture Books Series, 2022). Other work has appeared in Biography and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. Vicki Schriever is a Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Her research examines how early childhood teachers manage their changing roles with digital technologies and how parents engage in decision-making with digital technologies. Vicki’s research values and acknowledges lived experiences and autoethnography. Julia Watson is Academy Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies, a former Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, and a core faculty member of Project Narrative at The Ohio State University. She and Sidonie Smith have co-authored Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2010) and Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader, which includes their collaborative and solo essays over a quarter-century (2017, open access). They have co-edited five collections on autobiographical acts and practices, and most recently published essays on twenty-first-century American life narratives of reckoning, archives, and testimony. Watson has published over thirty essays, most recently on autoethnographic narrative, Philippe Lejeune’s oeuvre, and women’s graphic memoirs.

xvi

Contributors

Marion Wolfe is a Lecturer in the Multidisciplinary Writing Program at Case Western Reserve University. She received her PhD from The Ohio State University in the field of Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy. At Ohio State, she taught courses in composition and digital media and served as a Writing Program Administrator for the First-year Writing Program. Prior to coming to Case Western Reserve University, Wolfe was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Kenyon College, where she taught courses in Literature and Writing Center tutoring. Her research has covered a variety of topics including composition pedagogy, writing centers, feminist rhetorics, and the history of women’s rhetoric.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank numerous individuals, communities, and institutions for their support and contributions towards the completion of this project. First and foremost, my greatest thanks go to the contributing authors whose essays exemplify and promote a culture of empowering career selfdeterminism for academic women. These authors dismantle the paradigm of the ideal academic and remake themselves in their own voices by critiquing the discourses and narrative forms that uphold gender bias in academia. I am similarly indebted to the many generous and attentive anonymous readers who provided extensive feedback for the authors whose essays appear in this collection. Without their thoughtful critique and support for the self-expressive forms and methods of autotheory, this volume could not exist. I am grateful to Fulbright Canada for granting me a Research Chair in Arts and Humanities at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton Canada. The Fulbright US Scholar Program gave me the time and space to fellowship with colleagues in Western Canada whose insights made the results of my work on this collection richer and more expansive. I would also like to extend my thanks to The College of New Jersey for the many resources it has provided in support of this project. I am grateful to the Office of Academic Affairs for a sabbatical grant and Support of Scholarly Activity teaching release. I am indebted to Samantha Segreto for countless hours of valuable editorial assistance. Her support and enthusiasm for this project were critical to its final stages. My most heartful appreciation goes to Michelle Ordini, Program Assistant for the English Department, for her tremendous support in more ways than I can count or could ever possibly repay. My sincerest appreciation goes to my many colleagues in the life writing studies community. Thank you to those members of the International Auto/Biography Association who generously provided feedback on the

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Acknowledgments

initial research for this project as presented at IABA conferences hosted in Kingston, Jamaica (2019) – where plans for this collection were first established - and Edmonton, Canada (2021) – where those plans were set in motion. I am also grateful to members of the Executive Committee of the MLA Genre Studies Forum in Life Writing Studies for their support and feedback at the 2020 MLA Convention. I also wish to acknowledge the editors of Life Writing, Dr. Maureen Perkins and Dr. Kylie Cardell, as well as Guest Editor Hywel Dix for publishing the essay that inspired me to gather other women to explore their academic career documents as acts of functional life writing. The tremendous response to the publication of “Academic Career Construction: Personnel Documents as Personal Documents” enriched my research. To Ricia Chansky, Editor of the Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Series, I am grateful for her support of my scholarship. I remember the moment when she first endorsed this project and the location where we promise to return. I am grateful for Eva Karpinski, whose brilliance inspires me and whose energetic pace I cannot begin to match. I thank her for slowing down not only to collect sea glass with me but to continue exchanging it more than a year later. I am deeply thankful for my “Spilling Out of the Spaces Provided” coauthor, Laura Beard and the times and spaces I carry with me always – Elk Island, Stage One, The Rundle, Peter’s, and many others. This is not our first joint project and I know it will not be our last. Finally, I wish to thank my family. My husband, who sits across the room as I write these lines, knows that I love him for many reasons including the fact that he will stay awake and keep me company, when I am working late to meet a deadline. And to my children, I am thankful for filling my life with love. They are the mirror in which I see the best of myself and of the world.

Introduction The Unlikely Autobiography of Women’s Career Documentation Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood: In the Spaces Provided is a compilation of autotheoretical essays in which life writing scholars theorize their experiences with the career narratives that shape their lives as women in the academy: the institutional autobiography required by their scholarly profession. The collection is global in its framework and features essays by women who theorize both the empowering and the disempowering ways in which highly prescriptive forms of self-representation are systematized in academic institutions throughout three continents, in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and Europe. Contributors represent not only a variety of geographic origins but also sub-fields and disciplinary approaches to life writing. Together, they provide a broad spectrum of expert considerations of how life writing theory and practice reframe the highly regulated spaces of academic self-construction across career stages and professional roles in academia. Scholars turn the lenses of life writing theory and methodology inward as self-aware subjects negotiating frameworks for writing and reviewing self-authored academic career documents and perform a range of theoretical moves for exposing and subverting repressive norms in which expressions of personhood – including experiences of gender, ability, sexuality, age, nationhood, race, and class – are inhibited. My intention with this project, the central focus of which is systematic gender oppression in the academy career writing, is both to provide a platform for autotheoretical methodology and to initiate dialogue about change in the way that document assemble their academic lives according to the requirements of their institutions. The core of this goal – autotheory – is a feminist practice that Lauren Fournier characterizes as “a selfconscious way of engaging with theory – as a discourse, frame, or mode of thinking and practice – alongside lived experience and subjective embodiment.”1 This objective builds on foundational work by Sidonie Smith who observes that unmasking is vital to the gendered remaking of personhood. Because if, as Smith notes, “Autobiography is itself one of the forms of selfhood constituting the idea of man,” academic women who DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-1

2 Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle introduce theory into the study of their personal experience are doubly transgressive by their occupation of spaces not created by or for them.2 In keeping with the titular theme of the limited “spaces provided” for career self-construction, these authors interrogate an expansive territory of spaces in which women are routinely denied self-authoring agency: digital spaces, embodied spaces, negotiated, traded, and borrowed spaces, temporal and other ephemeral spaces, liminal spaces, environmental and land-identified spaces (including those ceded and unceded), decolonizing, anti-racist, and anti-sexist spaces, transitive spaces in local and transnational contexts, ritual spaces, and mindfully arranged spaces. In these autotheoretical acts of career documentation, academic women stage insurgent inhabitings of restricted spaces, expand those that are limiting, and call for the creation of new spaces to occupy in their academic careers. Although the inscription of academic subjectivity is an autobiographical act, career documentation is not a genre often examined in life writing studies. Career narratives required for gaining and maintaining resources and opportunities within the academy are among the “unlikely” forms of autobiography that Marlene Kadar discusses in her introduction to Essays in Life Writing. Kadar drives home the point that volunteer life writing, as a form, often draws attention to what she refers to as the “too muchness” of life that forces readers to confront their own biases. As a result, she explains, unlikely documents – those not regularly considered to be autobiographical – tend toward limitation; otherwise, they are dismissed as overwhelming.3 Larry Cochran also regards the compulsory career narrative as an enterprise in which writers are compelled to jettison certain aspects of the life story that they may want and need to tell in favor of articulating and promoting a more neatly packaged academic persona. As Cochran regrets, we must leave out “all that would captivate us in a good autobiography.”4 The resulting narrative, meant to depict an upwardly mobile, linear, cohesive, and consistent career, is marked by caution tape around the personal lives of women, particularly any experiences which depart from the patriarchal norms of the profession and its ideal path to professional success. Voluntary life writing and mandatory career narratives, as they are most often understood, are opposites. Moreover, they are seemingly incompatible genres. Life writing is driven by versions of the story and by forms of expression. Career narratives are driven by standards and mechanisms for documenting tangible outcomes that make all other details part of an extraneous and unnecessary story of academic life. Life writing thrives on the situatedness of the autobiographical “I”. Career narratives cannot because they are predicated on a distinction between the role of scholar and the subjectivity of the individual, requiring a masking of personhood in the functional life writing of the profession. Ultimately, these two forms of self-representation are made to face opposite directions

Introduction

3

and academics are led to believe that these genres cannot trust one another. But this thinking is more harmful than helpful, especially for women academics who stand to benefit from inserting themselves into their work as a means to transform the historically gender-biased terms upon which their disciplines and the profession at large have been built. As Alison Black rightly asserts of academic womanhood, “There is a richness to our individual experiences and stories that must not be reduced. From these can emerge a collective vision that speaks to our individual, emotional and embodied lives – lives which the neoliberal university too oft deems insignificant.”5 In the essays that comprise this collection, academic women turn to autotheory as a way of, what Jessica Moriarty refers to as, “storying oneself” against the grain of dominant narrative forms.6 In the first essay, Aimeé Morrison begins with the assertion that academia is an inherently un-autobiographical enterprise. In “Vitae Statistics: The Anti-Autobiographical Imperative of Academic Self-Documentation,” Morrison establishes a reasonable skepticism about routine requests for varied forms of self-disclosure along the academic career path and calls out the practice as one of the many that do not suit women. She compares the space provided for this documentation to “the unisex shirt in your orientation packet, which is really just a scaled-down version of the shirt cut to flatter men’s bodies.”7 Resisting her own datafication, a neoliberal “gathering and monitoring of metrics for comparison,” Morrison considers the imperative to document outcomes a chore to preserve the autonomy of the university at the expense of the autonomy of the academic who struggle to “understand the quasi-functional character that emerges” from this biomediation.8 Expressing a similar fatigue of documentation that Sara Ahmed cites in her interviews with employees of university units in diversity, equity, and inclusion, Morrison bemoans the endless “mise-en-abyme style, an endless series of further gates” of paperwork and processes of disclosure required to gain access into the normative spaces of an ableist and maledominated academy. As one of Ahmed subjects, “You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing.”9 Further exploring automedial frameworks within which women represent themselves in the neoliberal academy, Emma Maguire’s “Docile Bodies (of Work): Coaxing the Neoliberal Academic via the Online Researcher Profile” takes her own online researcher profile as a case study in “autobiographical coaxing and auto-assemblage” that lead her to see “her work as part of her academic identity rather than a product of her labor.”10 Maguires’ essay considers the obligatory digital presence of academics in the 21st century and the exhausting expectations to straddle platforms, learn their software, and frequently update profiles by which others can come to recognize them. She chronicles her use of the ORP to curate and maintain a high-profile academic doxa recognizable for

4 Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle tangible outcomes, such as publications, grants, and awards that signal prestige. Dependent on the doxa for a place in their field, Maguire points out that, like other academics, she is led to internalize the ORP as a representation of her identity and a performance of what Lauren Berlant terms a “good life,” the unattainable illusion of endless productivity to which all academics are conditioned to aspire.11 She demonstrates the ORP’s promise of recognition through profiles that “have a face on them,”12 and examines the profile photo as a primary component of the extremely structured and limited sections of the OPR. She notes that there is no space for entering the parts of her identity which are most important to her although they do not amount to institutional capital: There is no space to showcase the astounding work my students have produced in my classes or the peer reviews I have worked hard on. No space to share the experiences that have felt most like achievements to me: seeing my work cited in a keynote by a scholar I have immense respect for; emerging from burnout and rediscovering my passion for research; outlasting a manager who almost led me to quit my job; the vitalizing relationships I have built with other researchers; the mentoring I do.13 Maguire finds the formatting of these chartfields and their ordering on the institution’s website to homogenize her career persona as an “austere ordinary” with which academics are left when the cost of the “good life” is uniformity.14 Also taking their own digital biomediation as a case study, Jennifer Poole and May Friedman deliberate over the academic email signature as “calling cards for compliance, competition, and accumulation.”15 Their title, “Sign ‘In the Space Provided’: Academic Email Signatures as Sites of Narrative, Branding and Refusal?” presents itself as a question. In identifying email signatures as an easily overlooked and underestimated form of career selfconstruction, Poole and Friedman dispute the value of their ubiquity and resist them as sites of neoliberal compliance. Through narrating examples of when they, themselves, have composed and adapted their email signatures to include pronouns, land acknowledgments, and other markers of gendered and settler identity, they question whether or not these efforts to make the “pithy and contained format” more purposeful justice-centered can override the entrepreneurial manner in which they bolster an institutional and personal brand.16 In turning attention toward themselves and their “experiences as gendered ‘non-normative’ academics in the settler colonial nation of Canada,” they validate that, as Fournier states, “embodied experience can become another text, framework, or catalyst through which to think through aesthetic, social, cultural, moral, and political issues.”17 For example, Friedman scrutinizes the norm of including self-promoting titles

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and affiliations in the email signature and, instead, considers other potential uses of the form: “Perhaps I would use the space to thank colleagues, to value student learning, and to build connection instead of amplifying my individual accomplishments. (Even as I write this, though, I experience a squirm of discomfort at the thought of yet again dampening my success in an academic world that seeks to diminish my labor as a racialized woman.”18 Poole and Fridman’s essay amplifies the collection’s reconsideration of standards for scholarly success by suggesting that email signatures may offer a space of resistance for queer, first-generation, and racialized academics perform “deliberate and self-aware” forms of selfmaking on a routine basis.19 The work of this collection is inspired, in part, by the prevalence of academic coaching specifically geared for women, such as those by academic career coach, Rena Seltzer’s The Coach’s Guide for Women Professors: Who Want a Successful Career and a Well-Balanced Life (2015) and Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy’s The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure – Without Losing Your Soul (2008). Blogs and podcasts have also gained the attention of academic women seeking a culture of empowering career self-determinism for, such as Agnes Bosanquet’s blog “The Slow Academic.”20 In “Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards: Academic Women’s Efforts to Reframe Success,” Alison L. Black, Sandra Elsom, and Vicki Schriever engage the titular theme of space through what may seem to be the least yielding autobiographical form for women’s career development – the rubric. Outside of its typical use to measure and standardize success through the metrical gaze of scholarly institutions, Black, Elsom, and Shriever recognize the rubric’s potential to create “a space to reflect, to explore new forms of knowledge and generate new critical perspectives” on career life. Reflecting on the rubric as a gatekeeping device metricdriven measures of success in academia, they ask: What Is a Successful Academic Life? [W]ho decides our value? Their answers deconstruct the damaging assumption that overwork is a norm of “strong research” in the corporatized world of academic performance review.21 In an autoethnography of academia as a sexist enterprise, they engage the rubric as genre and practice for reframing their careers in terms of “belonging, being, and becoming.”22 Developed in a co-mentoring circle driven by a culture of trust among “friends, collaborators, colleagues,” these rubrics contain “thoughts and writing about mentoring, womanhood,

6 Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle motherhood, and academic career self-construction.”23 Inspired by a “more hopeful academic culture,” their ethnographic autotheory mental and somatic wellness central to success (__).24 As an autobiographical framework for career goals and outcomes, the rubric creates a space for selfauthored narrative within the more customary institutional metrics and tells a story of women setting their own standards of achievement. The rise in scholarship on the topic of academic women’s lives prompts further attention to intersections of gender discourse, academic selfconstruction, and life writing theory and methodology. As acts of narrative resistance and empowerment against the harmful cultures of gender bias in the academy, titles such as Linda Henderson, Alison Black, and Susanne Garvis’ (Re)birthing the Feminine in Academe: Creating Spaces of Motherhood in Patriarchal Contexts (2020) and Women Activating Agency in Academy and Lived Experiences of Women in Academia (2018), both edited by Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, and more recently, Michelle Ronkley-Pavia, Michelle Neuman, Jane Maqnakil, and Kelly Pickard-Smith’s Academic Women: Voicing Narratives of Gendered Experiences (2023) support the construction of resisting subjectivities in androcentric academic institutions. Presumed Incompetent I: The Intersection of Race and Class for Women in the Academy (2012) and Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power and Resistance of Women in Academia (2020) edited by Yolanda Flores Niemann, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. González, all offer timely examinations of the racist, sexist, and colonial power dynamics that compel women to doubt their competency in the ivory tower. And works such as Sekile Nzinga-Johnson’s Labor Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy (2013), and Andrea O’Reilly’s special issues “Mothering in the Academy” (2003) and “Mothers in the Academe” (2015) from the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering have laid the foundation for studying academic motherhood as a subjectivity and as a practice. Still in need of further exploration in the scholarship of life writing in academia is the role of women in academic administration. In “‘Making Spreadsheets Won’t Get You Tenure’: Autoethnography, Women Administrative Faculty, and the Genres that Make Them (In)Visible,” Candis Bond reflects on the double binds limiting women administrative faculty (WAF) whose career review is often negatively impacted by “role duality.”25 A consequence of institutional structures that put faculty roles in competition with administrative roles for recognition as intellectual leadership, role duality pits the individual goals of the scholar against those of their unit and, for women, often results in prescriptive and self-sacrificial duties as caretakers of their constituencies. Straddling faculty and administrative roles, Bond models the incorporation of rhetorical genre analysis (narrative inquiry of form, function, and purpose) and autoethnographic

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practice (narrative inquiry of selfhood and culture) in her own career review processes. Bond also addresses the “role conflation” she experiences when her individual identity as a faculty member and that of her administrative unit are taken as synonymous.26 This conflation tends toward assumptions that WAF are embodiments of their programs and departments. In this double bind, their pursuits as faculty are diminished by the feminized role of caretaker, and their authority as administrators is diminished by their presumably self-interested pursuits as scholars and instructors. This inequitable dynamic renders certain forms of career performance invisible for WAF and frustrates the process of assembling the documents for their two-pronged annual assessments. Her rhetorical genre analysis of career docs by WAF is led by autotheoretical questions of form, function, and audience pertinent to any narrative analysis: “To what exigency(ies) do I respond? What purpose (s) do I have? What is my ethos? What audience(s) will read these texts and what are their respective expectations and purpose(s) for engaging with my self-representation?”27 Forced compartmentalization of roles is an obstacle faced by academic mothers when documenting labor within the paradigmatic framework of work life balance. According to Australian Researcher Council policies on what constitutes productivity, academic mothers are judged by a formula euphemistically referred to as “constraints relative to opportunity.”28 In “‘Not Another ARC Summer’: Grant Applications and Life Narratives of Motherhood,” Kate Douglas contemplates the manner in which this governing body of academic research funding designates family leave as a career interruption. Noting a lack of flexibility and equity in such assumptions, Douglas confirms the simple and irrefutable truth that maternity leave is not the “year off” it is sometimes assumed to be.29 Douglas’ references to Petra Bueskens and Kim Toffoletti’s essay “Mothers, Scholars, and Feminists Inside and Outside the Australian Academic System,” resonate as she demonstrates their declaration that for, mothers, there is no slash in work/life.30 Their dispute with the terms of the ARC lies in its linear and patriarchal determination that qualifying career outcomes must be “commensurate with the interruption,” in Douglas’ case, a one-year period of maternity leave assumed to be time freed for scholarship. In highly self-reflective moments, Douglas theorizes her time completing the Research Opportunity Performance Evidence (ROPE) statement required by ARC. She proves that there is also no time off in summer when – to the disappointment of their families – mothers succumb to the “cruel optimism”31 Lauren Berlant theorizes and spend precious weeks of school break justifying their qualifications for grant support. Academics, are expected to promote the illusion that the work they do and the lives that they lead are not mutually shaped by one another. This is particularly true for women – especially early career scholars – who

8 Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle disproportionately leave academia before ever reaching the rank of Full Professor32 due, in part, to gender-biased standards of career success. The burdens of the unsayable narratives of the failures and digressions that have helped build their careers can exhaust their mental and emotional health. At one time or another, all academics experience life-defining events, among them, childbirth, adoption, and other expansions of the family; caring for dying parents; raising special needs children; undergoing surgery or extended medical treatment; separation or divorce; being hospitalized or institutionalized. Because these life events disproportionately impact default caretakers, their telling is a matter of greater vulnerability for women, as details may be either completely dismissed as part of a protected class of information, or unduly scrutinized as distractions and liabilities. Similar to Douglas, Leena Käosaar reckons with how and why work undertaken while on maternity leave for universities in Estonia is impossible to fully represent in the Estonian Science Information System [ETIS], the platform through which her institution gathers reports on professional outcomes. In “Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a Curriculum Vitae,” Käosaar identifies the nature of this space as highly imbalanced in its normalization of constant career progress, making it difficult for mothers who take leave for growing a family and other forms of care work to successfully document their career trajectories. She also makes use of Bueskens and Toffoletti’s work challenging motherhood as a career “interruption” and critiques the quantification of academic careers in the “time frames constructed and normalized under neo-liberalism.”33 In standardized timelines, academic mothers’ CVs are often construed as full of gaps that do not meet the neoliberal university’s demand for “high productivity in compressed timeframes.”34 Käossar’s title refers to Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” in which he seeks to limit the gamut of autobiographical narratives taken to extend from “the banality of curriculum vitae” to “pure poetry.” Anything but banal, the ETIS CV is treated as a mechanism of control and surveillance similar to the Soviet anetka, or identity papers required under Joseph Stalin’s rule. When requested by an official, these documents could confirm either favorable or unfavorable social, familial, and political affiliations. Käossar’s uneasy comparison leads her to see the government as an “official co-author” of Estonian’s personal lives as not unlike the influence of ETIS on her life as an academic mothe.35 Compelled by the system to simultaneously self-document and self-censor the record of her maternity leave, Käossar notes that institutional software and academic governance compartmentalize the subjects it measures in a way that recalls methods of totalitarianism used by the Soviet government. Her opening memory about “the sport of thinking,” as her maternal grandmother called it, establishes a cycle of encouraging influence that inspired Käossar’s eventual career as a

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scholar and which she hopes will continue with her own example as an academic mother to three young daughters.36 “Getting an Academic Life: The Untranslatable, or How to Curate a Polish-Canadian CV,” paints a portrait of another mother-scholar whose adaptability and mobility, among many other capabilities, are not adequately captured by her CV. In this essay, Eva Karpinski theorizes the occupation of academic spaces as an immigrant woman in the academy, or more aptly put, the experience of being forced into (or out of) them. Her reference to ‘getting a life’ calls on Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s collection Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography in which life writing scholars turn their focus toward unlikely forms of life narrative including medical records, want ads, and the CV. Making use of Martin Danahay’s concept of “the regime of the C.V.,”37 Karpinski considers the paradox of how this professional chronicle alternately requires “compromise between my own individual agency and the institutional regime of academia” and “‘hide’s [her] accent” by providing a “blanket of uniformity to hide behind” as she restarts her career in a new country.38 In assessing the ‘spaces provided’ for Karpinski when she arrived in Canada, pregnant and struggling to get her “big belly squeezed into the desk”39 and then, once more, from the perspective of more established, mid-career self-reflection “unburdened from the paradoxes of self-translation,” she makes it abundantly clear which spaces she aspired to access and which to reject.40 As Karpinski’s story conveys, the print CV itself is a single, concrete, knowable, self-authored document that matters in ways that the digital CV archives into which data is stored do not. Twenty-first-century tools for managing and producing career narratives are neither as concrete nor wholly knowable when password-applying users can log in and generate any variety of reports characterizing the subject whose life’s work is documented there. When considering how sharing a story like hers contributes to the field of life writing study and to the study of the academic profession, Karpinski suggests that ceasing to wear her CV-like mask is a step toward breaking down “the old, familiar, gendered, and disembodied private-public binarism that fails to account for the whole person”.41 Ideally, the Lejeunian pact between the readers and writers of more recognizable forms of life writing and those of career narratives holds equally; the expectation of truth value in these documents is similar. Authors of career narratives are certainly obligated to tell the truth. While authors of career narratives are obligated to tell the truth, they are also compelled to not tell the whole truth, lest their honesty obliquely call out the scholar’s institution or their colleagues. In Cynthia Huff’s essay “Crossing the Lines: Using Personnel File Documents to Negotiate Embodied Space,” the documentation of truth becomes the advocacy work of the career narrative. Written in early retirement, Huff boldly

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reviews her personnel file to find notations by colleagues that confirm matters of contention in her performance review during a precarious stage of her career. Treading boundaries in her joint appointment as an Assistant Professor in English and Women’s Studies, Huff states that she was confronted with pressures to limit and control her “embodied, lived experience as an Assistant Professor, a feminist, and a young mother trying desperately to find her way in academia”.42 She recounts how she uses the space of personnel review appeal to put her grievances on the record - something that many women dare not do. This is a risk against which we are cautioned and against which we are expected to caution our mentees. Huff’s experience advocating for herself and for her students suggests that the appeal and other channels for registering grievances are vital to documenting not just who women are and what women do in academia, but what happens to them. As Sara Ahmed declares, “We need to remember that a complaint is a record of what happens to a person, as well as what happens in institutions.”43 As Huff elaborates on her joint appointment, it comes into focus as a tool for crossing boundaries, for operating in the interdisciplinary and interdepartmental roles that generations of academic women will continue to occupy. This collection is inspired by women, like Huff, who share their experiences in the spirit of mentorship and solidarity. This includes those who write memoirs that guide future generations around the traps of inequity along the road of academic career development. Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2019), Victoria Reyes’ Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope (2022), and Valerie Lee’s Sisterlocking Discoarse: Race, Gender and the Twenty-first Century Academy (2021) are among those that share models of excellence despite exclusion and marginalization in the profession. The popularity of these memoirs alone is compelling evidence that the time for life writing studies to turn a theoretical lens on career testimony that amplifies traditions of self-identifying within communities that recognize, support, and pass wisdom on to their academic kin is upon us. Academic career documentation is not as it is presumed to be – disconnected from networks of kinship and culture found in memoirs. In “How a Lifetime of Academic Administration Gave Me the Freedom to Write a Sisterlocking Academic Memoir: An Interview with Valerie Lee,” Valerie Lee and Julia Watson discuss the importance of networks for women of color in the academy for whom past and future generations of women are central to their self-knowledge. Claiming the freedom to write her story beyond the institutional bounds of career narrative, Lee resists the “academic bureaucracy” of white-centered institutions that had defined much of her career. Saving it for the memoir, a space that enables the power of “sisterlocking” storytelling, she refuses to give her story to

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the academy and intervenes in the discourse of identity via a dis-coarse of black women’s voices contributing to conversations about shared experiences of beauty and joy as well as microaggressions and “invisibility” in the academy. While some authors portray their experiences with career narratives as either wholly empowering or disempowering, some describe yet-to-bereconciled paradoxes. In “The Poetic Cover Letter: On Crafting Paradoxical Personas,” Vicki Hallet suggests that the tenure cover letter can be used to “pry open the cracks in the existing hegemon of academic spaces.”44 Through an alternative, poetic cover letter, Hallet merges the voices of poetic life writing with those of career application materials by moving between formal and informal forms of address and self-expression in the academic dossier. Invoking this conventional genre as alternately restrictive and full of possibilities, Hallet takes pleasure in negotiating space by performing a genre that seeks to expand – “enlarge, enliven, elasticize” – the terrain within which we map out our academic identities.45 Acknowledg her settler origins helps contextualize the underlying colonial influence on the institutional power structures that overdetermine the tenure and promotion portfolio and its role in determining who academics can be and what they can do in their institutions and in the profession.46 An antidote to the thinking, doing, and being that white male privilege has insisted upon as ’scholarly’ is to create space for the extensive span of talents and modalities in which academic women work and live. Innovative and multimodal scholarship about academic women resist ableist, gender-biased assumptions about the lives and careers of women who are intellectual leaders. In “Mothers and Myths: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Account of Navigating Domestic Academic Life,” Vanessa Marr and Jess Moriarty offer just that. Marr and Moriarty present the empowering possibilities of collaborative autoethnography through “fairy tales as a way of exploring our lives and relationships as women academics who constantly feel pulled between maternal and workbased responsibilities.”47 They illustrate engaging self-portraits as “middling witches” navigating domestic and academic life.48 In methodologically satisfying examinations of the academy as a place where personhood and fellowship have suffered limitation – even weaponization – in the name of “traditional academic work,” Marr and Moriarty challenge learned biases surrounding standard career narration and distrust of experimentation and self-expression. They lament that feminist modes of collaboration are mistrusted in the “white, heteronormative, male, and hierarchical”49 spaces of the academy and seek, instead, to work in “domestic spaces, online spaces and outside spaces” that better suit their domestic lives and shared “spirit of social change, to resist patriarchy.”50 Marr and Moriarty’s imaginative and non-linear storytelling executes

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necessary and powerfully ethical practices of reciprocal listening, witnessing, and other empathy-based forms of recognition of lived experience that invite access to the spaces of academic work. Most striking in this essay is the eschewal of narrow, isolating, and competitive methods of singular and linear writing in favor of those that have “opened up a space of not knowing” in which Marr and Moriarty explore all the possibilities of storying the academic self.51 Through a praxis of multiplicity and non-linearity, Elizabeth Rodrigues and Marion Wolfe allow for a variety of voices and orientations in their self-invention as mothers across the stages of their careers. In “Post-it as Praxis: Counternarrating Non-linearity and Multiplicity in Academic Lives,” Rodrigues and Wolfe read their own Post-it notes as “counternarratives” to the assumed linearity and singularity of career progression Rodrigues and Wolfe, 204.52 In dialogue with one another, Rodriguez and Wolfe map out “a process of self-making as mothering academics” in Post-it walls that draws on Fournier’s concept of autotheoretical citation, “referencing of other people and texts as sources of influence and information.”53 By each reading the assemblage of Post-it notes facing their desks, Rodrigues and Wolfe find a counter-narrative to the linear and individualizing master plot of the academic “hero’s quest.”54 Applying Hannah Meretoja’s concept of counter narration, they explain how their career paths as mothers and scholars are storied on their Post-it walls: Our Post-its, like our life stories, intervene in the master-narrative of academic life at the level of both form and content. Formally, they are fragmentary and mobile, accrued and rearranged as needed, reflecting the lived experience of research as discovery and the distributed attention of relational, caregiving being.55 Unlike other forms of career narrative that tell a comparably less complete story, Post-its mark moments for which there is little time or space for more formal notation. Wolfe notes that “the gaps in our CVs are some of the fullest periods of our lives.”56 Instead, the narrative counter-story created by their Post-its fills these gaps “visually and materially” and mark an “agential shaping of the cognitive and physical spaces” in which they work.57 Often comprised of a story that is never wholly written, the career narrative can be so heavily self-censored of things academics feel compelled not to write, that they leave a sense of incongruency encountered by scholars, such as Ally Day. In her essay, “Dossiers in Crip Time: Reclaiming a Space for Crazy in the Academy,” Day theorizes the documentation of academic life in “crip time.” She writes of the disembodiment that led her to self-edit her early career dossier. By reviewing actual passages from her tenure dossier – including her Statement of Teaching Philosophy and Statement on

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Research and Professional Activity – Day allows readers to witness her navigation of gender discrimination and ableism in her department. Undermined by colleagues and superiors, and especially unsettled over her treatment by students who “so easily drop the Dr. or Professor when addressing their femme professors”58 Day says, “I think about embodiment all the time … I am a queer, disabled white feminist with a lot of student loan debt.”59 She stages a candid, inner dialogue about the need to create space for “crazy” – safe zones for queerness and neurodivergence in the academy. Recounting the anticlimactic feeling of receiving one-sentence feedback after months of effort to gather materials and compose tenure narratives, Day invokes her “crip sensibility” to convey her self-doubt, of feeling “crazy” for being out of sync with institutional processes.60 Day acknowledges the irony of expecting institutional systems to work for her because she is a white woman and posits this thinking as an answer to the body/mind duality forced upon non-normative persons. In the material realities of academic life, self-representation is always vulnerable to being undermined by prevailing mainstream attitudes about gender. For female-presenting queer scholars, this self-representation is fraught with misassumptions of cis-gender identity. As a practice of solidarity with other queer people, the everyday selfie can be a tool for reclaiming agency over the intelligibility of authentic gender – declarations of reciprocal witness and acknowledgment. Nicole Erin Morse reminds us that “Our actual encounters with selfies show that their digitality does not wholly sever them from referential reality” and that their realism have tangible effects on the way queer bodies matter in the world.61 But are selfies a professional enough genre of self-representation for the academe? Literary critic Ilan Stavans dedicates an entire photographic monograph to pronouncing the selfie “a business card for an emotionally attuned world.”62 In full agreement, Marina Deller claims the selfie is a career document “rich with inherent and potential uses, professionally and personally as a life writing scholar and practitioner.”63 In “The Same Self/ie: Blurring Academic, Creative, and Personal Identity through the Taking and Sharing of Self-portraits,” Deller reads a suite of their own professional selfies as a “visual, embodied way to mark achievements and notable moments” in their career.64 Through these images, Deller chronicles the pressures to maintain a social media presence and cultivate a brand early in their career. They critique the mixed messages about establishing and claiming spaces in online academic communities. While aiming to feel recognizable as their “every day, social self”65 Deller expresses ambivalence about appearing at once “approachable” and “authoritative.”66 Despite the vulnerabilities of oversharing in the public fora her mentors warned against, like LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter, Deller posits the milestone selfie as a successful form for blurring distinctions between their personal and professional persons.

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While insisting on our readiness to engage with what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson identify in numerous publications as a “moving target” of the self at the center of life writing and its scholarship, Deller also insists that there is no selfie without a self.67 Finally, in the last essay, “Spilling Out of the Spaces Provided: How Occupying the Academic Office Becomes an Autobiographical Act,” Laura Beard and I take the collection from more ontological and conceptual considerations of articulating academic selfhood and space to the more concrete particulars of occupying office space. In theorizing who we are in our workspaces, we investigate the objects we keep there – beyond ordinary desks, lamps, bookshelves, and chairs – and how they form the autotopographies in which we work. These objects, constituting what Jennifer Gonzalez calls a “companion in life experience” that “take the form of autobiographical objects,” have significance in the larger social networks to which we belong. Our essay demonstrates how these objects tell of how our own work as life writing scholars “often has us spilling out of the boundaries of standard sites and genres.”68 When pondering the significance of the treasured items displayed on the desk in her home office, Beard reviews them and their significance in the broad cultural and genealogical contexts that characterize her life and her current projects. On my desk at home now, where I worked throughout most of the COVID-19 period, I keep more personal items—favorite photos of my child in kindergarten, a photo with my mother and sister, a small ceramic croft house that is reminiscent of the one my ancestors would have occupied in northern Scotland, and some rocks and fossils collected on camping trips. These are literal and figurative touchstones, worry stones to play with during challenging conversations, colorful photos that ground me when stress levels rise.69 In this essay, I, too, reflect on how the contents of my office signal facets of my identity as a first-generation scholar. Forging what Candis Bond calls “a new, composite identity,” forged in both my working-class roots and my professional here and now, I survey many types of offices and other, less institutional spaces in which I work, that have been inaccessible to several generations of working mothers in my family.70 When fully explored and employed in autotheoretical critique, career self-construction is capable of deconstructing the paternalism and authoritarianism that prevents the academy from being accessible to women. Many women do not feel free to engage in this work. At the start of this project when there was only a call for papers, some suggested that career spaces are not spaces for self-expressivity or self-advocacy and cautioned that very few contributors would agree to combine them. They registered a preference for

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a ‘clean cut’ version of career documentation over an unnecessarily selfexpressive muddling of genres and purposes. Wishing to uphold the systematic boundaries between personal and institutional life writing, they declared that ‘everything has its place.’ I also was advised that it was unwise to expect those whose identification with the term woman – especially women of color and, those whose identification as women, holds space for their nonbinary and transgender selfhood – could feel ‘safe’ doing this this kind of work. They weren’t entirely wrong. The original roster of essays included 6 additional women of color across three continents and a spectrum of gender identifications who were unable to follow through on their initial intention to contribute essays. In addition to the ongoing losses and fatigue of the COVID-19 pandemic, several of these women were inundated with additional care work, excessive service responsibilities, and other unseen labors of academic life. Some feared the stigma of not doing ‘real research’ and institutional retaliation for speaking their truth. Others were overwhelmed by the thought of reliving painful trauma in recalling and recounting certain experiences. I dedicate this volume to them. Reading career documents as autobiography creates the conditions for changing the way we write and review career narratives and their selfexpressive power for asserting agency and self-advocacy in the careers of academic women. The following body of varied and inventive life writing practices spurs readers to reexamine women’s career narratives through the lens of life writing theory and guide them to imagine career documentation differently. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Fournier, 7. Smith, 50. Kadar, 4. Cochrane, 78. Black, 25. Moriarty, 108. Morrison, 32. Morrison, 24. Ahmed, Belonging, 117. Maguire, 37;48. Berlant, 22. Maguire, 43. Maguire, 48. Ibid. Poole and Friedman, 57. Poole and Friedman, 54:57. Fournier 32. Poole and Friedman, 61. Poole and Friedman, 54.

16 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle Bosanquet, Agnes, “Storytelling,” The Slow Academic, March 1, 2020. Bloack, Elsom, and Schriever, 69;70;78. Black, Elsom, and Schriever, 68. Black, Elsom, and Schriever, 28. Black, Elsom, Schriever, 68. Bond, 88. Bond, 88. Bond, 88. Bueskens and Toffoletti, 18. Ibid., 19. nBueskens and Toffoletti, 18. Berlant, 1. The AAUP 2015 Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work states that “[A]mong full professors, only 26 percent are women, and 74 percent are men” (339). Ibid., 18. Black, 24. Käosaar, 116. Käosaar, 115. Danahay, 345. Karpinski, 137. Karpinski, 133. Karpinski, 137. Karpinski, 135. Huff, 144. Ahmed, Complaint, 38. Hallet, 169. Hallet, 168. Ebony Coletu (384) and Hywel Dix (4) suggest that recognizing career writing as life writing creates the conditions for greater transparency over who gains access to opportunity in the academic and why. Marr and Moriarty, 183. Marr and Moriarty, 184. Moriarty, 2014. Marr and Moriarty, 183. Marr and Moriarty, 190. Rodrigues and Wolfe, 204. Fournier, 135. Rodrigues and Wolfe, 207. Rodrigues and Wolfe, 215. Rodrigues and Wolfe, 215. Rodrigues and Wolfe, 204. Day, 225. Day, 224. Day, 222. Morse, 14–15. Stavans, 4. 239. Deller, 243. Deller, 241. Deller, 241.

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Smith and Watson, Life Writing. Beard and Ortiz-Vilarelle, 254. Beard and Ortiz-Vilarelle, 256. Bond, 93.

Works Cited AAUP Policy Documents and Reports. Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work (11th Ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. Ahmed, Sara. Complaint. Durham: Duke UP, 2021. Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Black, Alison. “Responding to Longings for Slow Scholarship: Writing Ourselves into Being.” Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir, edited by Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 23–34. Bond, Candis. “’I Have Measured out My Life with Coffee Spoons’: On Time and Motherhood as a First-Generation PhD.” Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities, vol. 2, edited by Jaye Sablan and Jane Van Galen, Leiden: Brill, 2020, pp. 89–94. Bosanquet, Agnes. The Slow Academic, March 1, 2020 https://theslowacademic. com/2020/03/01/storytelling/. Accessed 1 May 2023.“Storytelling,” Bueskens, Petra and Kim Toffoletti. “Mothers, Scholars, and Feminists: Inside and Outside the Australian System.” Lived Experiences of Women in Academia, edited by Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 13–22. Cochran, Larry R. “Narrative as a Paradigm for Career Research.” Methodological Approaches to the Study of Career, edited by Richard A. Young and William Borgen, New York: Praeger, 1990, pp. 71–86. Coletu, Ebony. “Introduction: Biographic Mediation.” Biography, vol. 42, no. 3, 2019, pp. 465–85. Cooper, Brittney. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. Hampshire: Picador, 2019. Danahay, Martin A. “Professional Subjects. Prepackaging the Academic C.V.” Getting a Life. Everyday Uses of Autobiography, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996, pp. 351–68. Dix, Hywel. “Introduction.” Career Construction Theory and Life Writing: Narrative and Autobiographical Thinking across the Professions, edited by Hywel Dix, New Work: Routledge, 2021, pp. 1–7. Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. Cambridge: MIT, 2022. Gonzalez, Jennifer. “Autotopographies.” Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies, edited by Gabriel Brahm, Boulder: Westview, 1995, pp. 133–50.

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Henderson, Linda, Alison Black, and Susanne Garvis, eds. (Re)birthing the Feminine in Academe: Creating Spaces of Motherhood in Patriarchal Contexts. London: Palgrave, 2020. Kadar, Marlene. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. Lee, Valerie. Sisterlocking Discoarse: Race, Gender and the Twenty-first Century Academy. Albany: SUNY UP, 2021. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Maisuria, Alpesh and Svenja Helmes. Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University, New York: Routledge, 2020. Moriarty, Jess, ed. Autoethnographies from the Neoliberal Academy: Rewilding, Writing and Resistance in Higher Education, New York: Routledge, 2020. Morse, Nicole Erin. Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in SelfRepresentational Art. Durham: Duke UP, 2022. O’Reilly Andrea. “Mothering in the Academy.” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, vol. 5, no. 2, 2003. O’Reilly Andrea. “Mothers in the Academe.” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, vol. 6, no. 2 , 2015. Niemann, Yolanda Flores, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. González, eds. Presumed Incompetent I: The Intersection of Race and Class for Women in the Academy. Logan: Utah State UP, 2012. Niemann, Yolanda Flores, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. González, eds. Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power and Resistance of Women in Academia. Logan: Utah State UP, 2020. Nzinga-Johnson, Sekile. Labor Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Toronto: Demeter, 2013. Reyes, Victoria. Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope. Redwood City: Stanford UP, 2022. Rockquemore, Kerry Ann and Tracey Laszloffy. The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure – Without Losing Your. Boulder: Soul Lynne Reinner, 2008. Ronkley-Pavia, Michelle, Michelle Neuman, Jane Maqnakil, and Kelly PickardSmith. Academic Women: Voicing Narratives of Gendered Experiences. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. Seltzer, Rena. The Coach’s Guide for Women Professors: Who Want a Successful Career and a Well Balanced Life. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2015. Smith, Sidonie. Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Life Writing in the Long Run. A Smith and Watson Autobiography Reader. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing Services, 2017. Stavans, Elan. I “Heart” My Selfie: Essays by Elan Stavans. Durham: Duke UP, 2017.

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Vitae Statistics The Anti-Autobiographical Imperative of Academic Self-Documentation Aimee Morrison

Sensing/Wrongs In May of 2021, an email informed me that I was receiving an Outstanding Performance Award for the 2019–2020 faculty assessment period. Almost immediately, a deep wave of nausea washed over me, a current that settled into my body as a sort of wrenching undertow that knocked the horizon off-kilter and threatened at the same time to pull me under. Dry heaving gave way to wrenching sobs. I shut myself away from my family for the evening, fighting the urge to vomit, as well as the urge to cry. I could not eat. I could not think. This was surprising to me. At my institution, the University of Waterloo, a research-intensive, comprehensive institution in Ontario, Canada, Faculty Performance Reviews (FPR) are a biennial ritual that determines a numerical “merit score” for each individual faculty member that is the multiplier of some amount of money designated as a “Selective Increment Unit,” which, along with a negotiated scale increase, comprises our annual pay raises. Some fraction of faculty who receive the highest merit review rankings are further compared to one another, so that a smaller fraction can be designated as that year’s “Outstanding Performers.”1 On top of the salary increment already calculated from the merit score in the first round, an Outstanding Performance Award adds a further $4000 to base salary.2 The award is highly remunerative. The names of awardees appear in a list in some internal announcements, and on the outwardfacing university home page, and mention is made of any faculty awardees at departmental meetings. So, the award is also rich in opportunities for status growth and display.3 Even at the time, I could feel how contrarian my response was, how wrong, how bratty. Why? After a day or so of inchoate misery,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-2

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distraction, insomnia, and bursts of crying, my reaction clarified itself: I was enraged. In the assessment period 2019–2020, my mom’s ovarian cancer became terminal and killed her; my work-travel schedule was unexpectedly doubled by a very unexpected fellowship win that arrived the same day as news that I had won a substantial research grant for a completely different project, producing an unmanageably stuffed work calendar; I suffered a series of major health crises, from shingles to depression; Covid-19 lockdowns trapped my family inside our house in ways we found extremely hard to adjust to; my very close friend from graduate school died; my godmother died; my grandfather died; my uncle died; my kid suffered immensely from the shift to online school; I absolutely flailed in the attempt to transform all my teaching to fully online, fully asynchronous, and yet my classes were somehow all oversubscribed; I absolutely failed to get any work done on my granted project; my fellowship turned out to be a mental-health-destroying nightmare. To say that I was surprised to have my putative “excellence” marked out for special recognition is to vastly understate it. To say that this “recognition” caused me to consider whether I could continue an academic career is to get a little closer to my reaction. In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed suggests that “[f]eminism often begins with intensity: you are aroused by what you come up against.” The intensity and arousal begin as sensations, as feelings that seem out of proportion, nonsensical, or at least unexpected. “A sensation is often understood by what it is not,” Ahmed writes: “a sensation is not an organized or intentional response to something.”4 When we give these sensations space and attention, their meaning can make itself known. It is here that the feminist killjoy begins her work. It is here that I begin my work. Two truths emerged as I allowed my sensations to organize themselves: first, winning a prestigious and remunerative academic award made me feel unseen, unheard, disrespected, and misunderstood; second, in some not insubstantial way, I had done this “injury” to myself since I authored all the submitted paperwork by which I was assessed for the award. The revulsion the Outstanding Performance Award produced in me, then, was rooted in vocational (self-)alienation and a kind of self-hatred. How did this happen? I set about finding out, and this essay is the result. Here, I will argue: the university as an institution is fundamentally unautobiographical, even as it routinely and structurally compels formal selfdisclosures and self-narration that constitute a kind of academic selfbiography that reshapes each of us in the image of the institution: the kind of academic the forms want us to be, even if that is not who we are, and not who we want to be. Some of us become, through these biographic mediations, strangers to ourselves: an untenable state.

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AutoBiographic Mediation Ebony Coletu proposes the term “biographic mediation” to describe “any structured request for personal information that facilitates institutional decision-making about who gets what and why.”5 For Coletu, the exponential proliferation in the number and granularity of compulsory standardized forms of self-disclosure “demonstrate[s] the growing utility of biographic mediation for a variety of institutional operations, each invested in altering or depicting the trajectory of a life to justify the distribution of resources, diagnose social problems, or develop new markets.”6 That is to say: biographic mediation is a form of functional life writing oriented not to the goals of the autobiographical subject but rather to the goals of the institution soliciting the disclosure. It is about you, in that the content of the form is your biography, but also not about you, in that the form serves someone else’s purposes, not your own. Demands for biographic mediation are part of a much broader process of the corporatization of the university, itself a part of accelerating neoliberal pushes towards speed, technocracy, and demands that shrinking numbers of employees accomplish ever more tasks with fewer resources. Academic self-documentation for career advancement is an instance of biographic mediation that individualizes these market logics, silently and structurally reframing academic excellence as a matter of “more” and “faster” and “more prestigious,” and always in competitive relation to others, in situations of scarcity. Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber detail both this process and its impacts on the daily lives of faculty members in their book The Slow Professor: “Productivity is about getting a number of tasks done in a set unit of time; efficiency is about getting tasks done quickly; and competition, in part, is about marketing your achievements before someone else beats you to it.”7 Such a framing of what constitutes excellent academic work is wholly at odds with how most of us understand and undertake academic work, and how we understand ourselves relating to our fields, our colleagues, and our own ideas. Lauren Berlant offers the most resonant description of academic work I have ever read: I had always thought the point was that we do our work collaboratively, in discussion and across publics; that we are always in the process of playing catch-up with what we’ve read, heard, and discovered ourselves saying [… .] We get to slow down around the objects/ questions, gathering things up recursively and tracking their impact.8 Certainly, Berlant is making a case against bureaucratic speedup or the adoption of productivity metrics that focus on efficiency. But she is also

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acknowledging and making room for the affective dimension that this kind of academic work necessarily involves: true engagement in research and teaching with and among colleagues structurally requires that “we find ways to hold at bay whatever kinds of anxiety or envy arise from taking the risk of having ideas in front of each other.”9 The biographic mediations of academic career documentation cannot account for this kind of recursive, careful, collaborative work; they elide the affective and creative dimensions, the element of surprise, and the courage necessary to think something new. Being/Academic Joëlle Fanghanel argues that “[a]cademic roles […] are constructed and inhabited through navigating the tensions between structures, the communities in which practice takes place, and academics’ own positions towards structures.”10 When a “role” becomes “inhabited,” it becomes part of an identity: understanding of role structures to understanding of self. When I say: “I am an academic,” I express two distinct meanings simultaneously. I am an academic in the same way that I am a feminist and a pianist: which is to say, being an academic is an orientation, an interest, a set of skills, part of the core of my personal identity, achieved by dint of effort and study undertaken freely, and something about me that others should know if they want to know my values and character, to know me. It is part of my autobiographical narrative. But, also, I am an academic in the same way that my sister is a Director of Human Resources and my next-door neighbor is a Public Health Nurse: “academic faculty member” is my job. I am a university employee paid to perform discrete, skilled tasks in fulfillment of the university’s teaching, research, and service obligations. In an ideal world, these two meanings are congruent: I do meaningful work that expresses my skills and values, I do what I love and I am wellpaid for it, and my work is integrated into larger academic projects for the public good.11 In the real world, they often diverge, sometimes dramatically: my main accomplishment in the 2020 assessment period was simply getting through it, barely, awash in emails in which the university spoke of “unprecedented conditions,” asked for “continued flexibility,” and urged faculty to exercise compassion and understanding for self and others, acknowledging the heroic nature of our labors and the crisis conditions demanding it. What a surprise, then, that the university also insisted on making all faculty submit to a massively time-consuming merit review process in the middle of a global pandemic, ranking us against one another on how far we exceeded expectations for research, teaching, and service excellence. All so that the most accomplished among us could be elevated for their exceptional research productivity, and the rest of us, presumably, could be motivated by their example to try harder next year.

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For Stephen Collins, the bureaucratic university is in thrall to a “fallacy of accountability”; this error is rooted in “the belief that the process of reporting on an activity in the approved form provides some guarantee that something worthwhile has been properly done.”12 The biographic mediations compelled by mandatory, competitive institutional genres such as the merit review narrative both produce this idea of what it is worthwhile to do and document whether it has been done well: they show us what an “outstanding” performer should accomplish, and measure us against that standard. It produces a benchmark, a norm. For Sara Ahmed, “[a] norm is […] a way of living, a way of connecting with others over or around something. We cannot ‘not’ live in relation to norms.”13 The norms expressed in the merit review process – competitive comparison of the attainment of external markers of accomplishment as numbers and prestige of publications, grants, and awards – are clearly absurd and outrageous in the middle of a global pandemic. It is difficult to imagine anyone who could sit down to the task of totting up all the conferences, publications, student course evaluations, and committees helmed and feel anything other than a pervasive sense of dread and failure. But this is simply an extreme expression of what is always true: such exercises in career documentation seek to shape academic self-biography into narrow and constraining story arcs that suit bureaucratic speed-up and hyper“productivity” more than the messier and more human realities of research, teaching, and service. Somehow, in filling out all the required forms, I managed to put myself in the “most accomplished” category, rather than the “rest of us” category, which is what broke me, I think. Because here is something you need to know: I was so morally disgusted by the entire exercise of being required to put a mid-pandemic merit review package together at all that I turned it into a performance art project, sublimating my feelings of shame and helplessness and despair into a masterwork of exquisitely documented braggadocious self-satire. I engaged in a deliberate kind of narrative dissociation, rewriting my own experiences in the bloodless and ambitious academic voice prized in the genre. I have never felt so profoundly alienated from my academic role, so profoundly shaken in my academic identity: the cut-glass perfection and volume of the materials I submitted were a cry for help. I got a gold star instead. Congratulations on my significant achievement, I guess. Career/ing Addressing her audience of “academic imperfectionists” in her podcast of that name, the philosopher and coach Rebecca Roach reminds us: “Your

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CV is to you as a celebrity’s Instagram posts are to their real lives.”14 Operationalizing and mastering this disjuncture is part of the mindset and competencies designated by the term “professionalism”: when participation in merit review processes is mandatory, it is pragmatic to develop a detached fluency in the genre of self-biography required, to understand the quasi-fictional character that emerges from its requirements, focusing on countable accomplishments, steadily and efficiently produced. This works both ways: who among us has not heard the counsel, in moments of selfdoubt and insecurity, to bolster our spirits by reviewing our own CVs, to see there the evidence of our own value? We are our own best hype squads, or we learn to be: it is an open secret that most professional letters of reference between faculty members are substantially or sometimes entirely ghostwritten by their putative subjects.15 Indeed, over the length of my own career, I have learned to adopt a kind of self-protective blitheness and shamelessness in producing my annual reports. Truly, the tone is detached, mercenary: the review report is written in the second person, or rather, ghostwritten in the second person, so that I am the one writing sentences like this: “You were invited by two of our municipal libraries to participate in public talks series, first by conducting an onstage one-hour interview with New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Traister, and second by participating on an online panel about conflict resolution on social media.” About the fellowship I won, I listed the pertinent details, with the total financial commitment prominently announced, and then added an editorial flourish: “Congratulations on this significant achievement.” Of my knowledge mobilization work, I asserted, “We applaud your commitment to taking your scholarly expertise into the real world; that you are consulted so frequently by both local and national journalists indicates the skill you bring to such work.” I heaped ventriloquized, effusive praise on myself, daring those in whose voice I was writing to excise it, and in that way actually needing to engage in the act of “assessment” this process nominally represented. No one did. What is most shocking to me now, as I reread the self-authored “institutional assessment” of my own work, is the extent to which I simply mastered this genre of biographic mediation, expertly wielding a knife-sharp, incisive, declarative style and unerring instinct for self-promotion that takes “Outstanding” as a foregone conclusion. What my merit review documents ultimately show is my enactment and documentation of the kind of “academic excellence” solicited and rewarded by the biographic mediation of the merit review process, despite myself: raging against the idea of “outstanding performer,” all I managed to do was pass as one. This insight made me very unhappy.

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It made me unhappy, as well, to realize the privilege manifest in the ease with which I could put on the disguise, how tenure, external awards, public visibility, and expert fluency in the jargon of academic selfpromotion smoothed my path: not everyone can so easily be mistaken for The Right Kind of Academic, not everyone is safely enough situated that they can throw a textual tantrum and win the game. Some academic subjects fit more smoothly into projected roles and career arcs, and succeed – they face the right way, they head toward the correct future, sure and confident. Others fail to fit at all and exit or are exited from academic employment. Yet others – myself included – remain inside the ivory tower while feeling as if we are still outsiders, ensnared in identity paradoxes that produce failure and success simultaneously, with a resulting profound autobiographical dislocation.16 The Outstanding Performance Award upset me so much because it made clear to me that my autobiographical understanding was completely and unavoidably at odds with the selfbiography I produced for and through the merit review process and paperwork. Or, more plainly, my academic self-identity conflicted profoundly with what the institution values from my performance of my academic role. In a paroxysm of cynicism and despair, I wrote my own review documents as a sort of parody of compliance that lost its parodic force as it moved through the process, emerging, finally, as just compliance. This is the danger of biographic mediation: even as you actively rebel against it, its very forms and strictures rewrite you in its own image. More dangerously: we risk transforming ourselves into the person the document orients us toward being, allowing career documentation to direct rather than reflect our work and self-understanding. Standard/Issue The corporatization of the university, the transfer of values from the private sector capitalism into higher education, is accompanied by massive bureaucratization: this we can plainly view in what critical university studies researcher William Deresiewicz calls “administrative elephantiasis,” the exponential growth in new administrative staff roles and positions in universities, at rates that far outpace growth in student or faculty complements.17 In The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber argues that bureaucracy – a regime of forms, policies, and regulations, of documentation and verification – produces new ways of knowing in the structured and structuring ways it collects and organizes social and biographical information. Bureaucracy is particularly modern epistemology, a way of knowing that displaces other ways of knowing, that rearranges what counts as knowledge and circumscribes how this knowledge can be

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put to use. Graeber thus likens bureaucracy-as-epistemology to a form of Foucauldian biopower, where “all forms of knowledge become forms of power, shaping our minds and bodies through largely administrative means.”18 Bureaucracy, that is, is a form of discipline, surveillance, and control. Sarah Ahmed, too, sees the shaping force of norms as expressed through policy and paperwork: “power works as a mode of directionality, a way of orienting bodies in particular ways, so they are facing a certain way, heading toward a future that is given a face.”19 Ahmed’s metaphoric formulation here is deliberate: an abstract understanding of power becomes real, becomes realized, as it is enacted by and through individual subjects, directing their actions and understanding toward a particular kind of future. The restrictive genres of academic self-documentation not only compel us to edit the details of our personal lives out of our vitae, but also condition our understanding of who can be an academic subject, and what constitutes academic work so that we reshape our goals and behaviors to conform to this ideal. Ahmed later further concretizes this relationship: “A norm is something that can be inhabited. I think of a norm as rather like a room or a dwelling: as giving residence to bodies.”20 When the dwelling in question is the ivory tower, we must continually and repeatedly, through the biographic mediation of the myriad forms of career self-documentation, make the case to remain: third-year review, tenure review, and merit review for those privileged to occupy the tenure track; teaching evaluations, last-minute teaching contracts, and a demonstration of uncomplaining overwork for those off it. When you realize you do not fit the standard that people insist on applying to you, you may feel like a fraud, a fake, and an imposter; sometimes you feel this way even when you do fit the standard but feel the standard does not fit you. This may be even more true when you become conscious that the lack of fit is structural and irresolvable, not a matter of working harder but of being a different person. Philosopher Kathryn Hawley describes “imposter attitudes” as rooted not in individual failures of competence or in competence, but in the paradox of contradictory evidence as to your status and merit, as in being congratulated for winning an award, for example, but then having it suggested that you won it because of new diversity initiatives rather than in the usual purely meritocratic way.21 Imposter attitudes spring from comparison, in absolute, or in relative terms: failure to meet a clear standard, or failure to do better than others. Thus, Hawley suggests, “we should also be open to the possibility that many talented people who have imposter attitudes are justified in having those imposter attitudes.”22 Hawley is quick to point out that imposter attitudes can be justified by the available evidence, and yet still be inaccurate, and argues “inaccurate [but justified] imposter attitudes can easily be generated by working in a hostile social environment: sufferers cannot change this single-handedly.”23

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For Ahmed, failure “to inhabit a norm (or not quite inhabit a norm) is often an experience of being thrown,” and for academic workers, this can feel like literally being thrown out, tossed away, and ejected. Little wonder why we contort ourselves to fit, to conform to requirements.24 Graeber notes the lopsided affective work this involves, namely the employment of what he terms “sympathetic imagination,” an act of narrative projection in which the less-powerful subjects learn to inhabit the perspective of the dominant in order to secure by persuasion resources that can be withheld by fiat.25 “Structural inequality,” he argues, “creates highly lopsided structures of the imagination” in which those at the bottom identify imaginatively with those at the top, who expend no such reciprocal effort in return.26 Thus, when the forms compel us to tell our life stories in the spaces and formats provided, we see the gaps and excesses as not so much our failure to fit as identity failure; a failure to be what others have desired, a subject position which, through imaginative identification, we have come to see as desirable, too. What We All Did for Love For their 1988 study of women “deflected” from academic careers, Nadya Aisenberg and Mona Harrison conducted more than 60 interviews with academic women of all ranks and job categories, finding surprising consonance among their stories: a destabilizing sense of the mismatch between academic identity, academic work, and academic careers. Interviewees’ self-understanding as autobiographical subjects, in many cases, derives from the opportunities that academic study provides for intellectual growth and self-discovery, an experience they describe as transformational: the forge of a new identity that exceeds standard codes of domestic femininity, a catapult to upward class and social mobility. Interviewees describe an affective identification with academic work that, according to Aisenberg and Harrison’s analysis, impairs their career chances because “it obscures [their] perception of the external requirements of the profession.”27 Focusing on excelling at academic work they find important and meaningful rather than learning the behaviors and priorities required to succeed as an ambitious academic worker rising through the ranks, “generates a confusion of worlds; a constant skirmishing […] between professional practicalities and intellectual engagement.”28 That is, the women maintained a certain naïveté about the practicalities of the academy as a workplace, behaving like amateurs, rather than professionals. Idiomatically, these words are used as functional antonyms. Indeed, the word “amateur” in English carries two related meanings, each defined as the absence of some quality that is associated with the word “professional”: an amateur is one who does a task without payment, or

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does so without skill. Underneath this, though, is another distinction: the word “amateur” is borrowed from Romance languages. For me, this is the crux: the women interviewed by Aisenberg and Harrison love their work, and it is their unwillingness to relinquish this love that bars them from accession to the status of professional, because it marks them as emotional, and therefore irrational, unserious, naive, and childish. And yet the contemporary university, Miya Tokumitsu asserts, exemplifies the operationalization of the millennial career mantra “Do what you love” in order to obscure its exploitation of its own workforce. She too, then, is very skeptical of the place of love in academic work: “Nothing makes exploitation go down easier than convincing workers that they are doing what they love.”29 In this same vein, Sarah Jaffe’s recent book Work Won’t Love You Back, devotes an entire chapter to higher education, exploiting the idealism and affective investment of would-be academics. What Jaffe and Tokumitsu, alike, describe is the danger of conflating the feelings of fulfilment we get from accomplishing scholarly tasks like writing and reading and teaching with the contractual relationship between worker and employer. The affective attachment drawing academic aspirants toward the profession is incredibly powerful: I certainly recognize this attachment in myself, and you may recognize it in yourself, too, or in the graduate admissions essays that overwhelmingly begin with some version of “I have always loved to read.” The danger, of course, is that “[b]ecause academic research should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts, if they are considered at all.”30 The love, both Tokumitsu and Jaffe argue, is all one-sided; the employment relationship is largely abusive. That I love to read and write should not blind me to the casualization and adjunctification of academic work, to the ever-increasing class sizes, to the demands for ever-increasing amounts of high-prestige research somehow to be self-funded and fit into the blank spaces not filled up with teaching or grading or meetings. “Few other professions,” she writes, “fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output.”31 Imposter, or Killjoy? The feminist killjoy is often unhappy, Ahmed argues, as a result of necessarily inhabiting the space between professed (institutional) values and the daily practices that routinely contradict these values. The killjoy thus becomes the unwilling protagonist of an “anxious narrative of self-doubt […], or a narrative of rage against a world that promises happiness by elevating some things as good.”32 As Ahmed mildly suggests, “We might become strangers in such moments,” self-alienated.33 Like the word “professional” – and for that matter, the word “academic” – “amateur” is

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both a noun that names a person performing a task or role, as well as an adjective that describes the objects produced. It is, then, an identity as well as a practice. But “career” describes duration, a period of time that is usually substantial. It is usually understood teleologically: careers have a beginning, middle, and end. A career can be storied, checkered, cut short, exemplary, or interrupted. The word derives from the Old French for racecourse or road, which borrowed from the Latin for “wheeled carriage”: a career goes somewhere, fast. And sometimes in an uncontrolled manner: in its verb form, “career” means to move rapidly and out-ofcontrol. Feminist interventions in this space, over several decades, have sought to wedge open the locked gates of academe to allow women entry at all: women students, women faculty, and women authors on reading lists. These were bitter battles, hard fought and hard won: the very first “allowable inclusions” feminists fought for and won were ourselves, through the front gate, full stop. Over time, it has become clearer that prying open the front gates revealed, mise-en-abyme style, an endless series of further gates. The university as an institution can be understood as consisting almost entirely of gates – gates controlling access to research funding, tenure and promotion, honors and awards, discretionary pay increases, etc. – that over and over again, female academics find themselves locked out at disproportionate rates compared to their male colleagues. These gates are made up of paperwork and processes, of forms and committees and policies, that, ultimately, still bar entry to everyone except an idealized, prototypical academic subject/protagonist that many women cannot, will not, or do not want to be. One of the surprises Aisenberg and Harrison found in their interviews was that women who secured tenure and promotion felt just as disaffected and alienated, just as much on the outside of the in-group of professional academics, as the women who, in the researchers’ words, were “deflected” from much-desired academic careers. This stemmed in part from the irreconcilable dissonance arising from inhabiting and enacting the two distinct and incompatible senses of “being an academic,” producing distress and what Aisenberg and Harrison describe as a “profound conflict concerning their own identities.”34 In short, securing an academic career seemed to involve turning away from the values, joys, and intellectual and affective attachment that drew them toward that career in the first place. The sensations that led me into this research, though, come from somewhere similar: it is not so much that the biographic mediation of career documentation for my annual review failed to allow me to account for “special circumstances,” “allowable inclusions,” or “career interruptions” where my private life interfered with my vocational one: it did, in fact, leave space for me to list the personal tragedies that befell me over the

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assessment period, and any time away from my duties that resulted. It was, rather, the dissonance between what I consider to be the markers of my professionalism and excellence, and the careerist structuring of the extrinsic motivations and proxy measures my institution measures me against. What I was most proud of during that period was my full commitment to not making my students’ lives more needlessly awful than they were, the way I managed to support a few graduate students with research-assistance money from my grant, and how I devoted my research to the most important knowledge mobilization work I could do: a lot of media interviews on social media, technology tools, and the pandemic, and a lot of highly shared Twitter threads on digital pedagogy in times of crisis. What the merit review paperwork asked for and rewarded were not those things; they rewarded, instead and in essence, the fact that a national funder gave me a big prize, and that a national foundation gave me a big and prestigious prize. I won the Outstanding Performance Award, as far as I can tell, because I made it look important by adding prizes to its institutional award shelf. You become a feminist killjoy “[w]hen you are alienated by virtue of how you are affected. A feminist killjoy is an affect alien. We are not made happy by the right things.”35 It is not that the forms sever our vital signs from our vitae, it is that they constrain even the authoring of a “functional career narrative” into a single type of competitive careerism, erasing the pro-social, personal, idealist motivations that drew many excellent women scholars to become professional academics. The life of the mind takes place in social and institutional structures that are highly competitive, producing jockeying for relative status among those we otherwise describe as our peers. As Berlant succinctly expresses it: “The logic of the critical pecking order is that, if we seem to be in one, we are both borrowing its authorizing glory and, at the same time, appearing diminished relative to the glory we have borrowed to inflate ourselves.”36 Even our own sense of self is diminished, she notes, as participation in this system can make you feel like a “paper doll in a string of identical cutouts.”37 To fit the space provided, we were counseled to be more strategic in our research to maximize funding streams and publication costs. To make our teaching more scalable and efficient to “free up” more time for competitive research activities. To accept only high-status service assignments as a means of building connections to power while minimizing the difficult work of collegial governance. For many of us, even this advice feels like a betrayal of our identification with and as academics. The careerist thing to do would be to understand the gap between what it says it does and what it actually does: pocket our large raises, cynically craft our documentation to produce the “celebrity’s Instagram photo”

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that Rebecca Roach warns us about. That is pragmatic: money pays the bills and prestige opens doors of opportunity. I am an idealist, though. I wish to narrow the distance between the values we express, institutionally, and those we actually enact. There is something degrading to the integrity and meaning of academic work in all this trumped-up puffery of relative excellence, where we are devoted more to one-upping each other than we are to the humbling work of teaching and learning, carefully, together. Competition bruises the soul, and if cynicism is the armor required to keep your heart safe, that cynicism also takes the heart out of our daily work in the profession and poisons our intrinsic motivations and intellectual growth alike. The solution is not amateurism, nor an accountability-free post-tenure life. It is, rather, a more capacious and generous sense of professionalism, which Berlant suggests: [L]iving amidst the uneven rhythms and non-identity of institutional, broadly social, and always affective norms, fantasies, and economies demands a professionalism – or just ethics – that enables us to recognize what’s impersonal, what’s systemic, and what’s mediated, about both our anxieties and the openings we are trying to create.38 Berlant, Ahmed, Aisenberg, and Harrison each make space in their interrogation and articulation of what it means to work in the academy for the full range of intellectual, psychic, and emotional dimensions that constitute their own (and their research subjects’) whole-hearted commitment to the larger academic project: the love, the sensations, the fantasies, the anxieties, the norms, and the intensities and resonances these produce within us. What I want, I guess, is that scholarly conversation we are all meant to be participating in. For Berlant, “the context of professionalism – for those of us who have jobs where we are licensed to gather it all up to test and take the ideas beyond what is predictable – provides important breathing space.”39 I do not think anyone assessing me over 18 years at this institution has ever read a single word of my scholarship in determining the value of my research. I know that no one has ever visited my classroom to assess my teaching. Berlant reminds us of our own absolute and relative privilege to be in employment so much less stupid and short-termist and managerialist than most others, and notices that our resistance to a clearer understanding and ownership of the complex relation between professionalism, careerism, and the “life of the mind” leads us to conflate careerism with professionalism and to reject both, producing a failure to engage structures of academic power and status. What I inadvertently discovered is that winning in ways that are not congruent with my own values and beliefs still feels like losing.

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The space provided is never going to fit, no matter how much it is expanded. The space provided is the “unisex” shirt in your orientation package, which is really just a scaled-down version of the shirt cut to flatter men’s bodies, that does not fit and only serves to highlight that your body is different – too tight across the boobs, droopy over the shoulders, bunched up above the hips – and that it is wrong and awkward and nonconforming, and so are you. “Becoming a killjoy,” suggests Ahmed, “can feel, sometimes, like making your life harder than it needs to be,” and you may be admonished for this, reminded that “[y]ou might be included if only you just stop talking about exclusions,”40 if you accept the terms of “outstanding performance” as they have been set by others, squeezing the too-muchness and too-littleness of your own performance into “allowable inclusions,” “special circumstances,” and “career interruptions.” We do not want to be the exception. We want a new rule. My own paradoxical reaction to winning an Outstanding Performance Award is simply one more in an expanding set of narratives of academic self-alienation. “The ethical and the professional meet in the nervous system in raw-making and destabilizing ways,” Berlant writes.41 But many of us – women, certainly, but also academics marginalized by virtue of their race, class, or disability status – seem to be destabilized and made raw in much the same ways, affect aliens who do not see a navigable road forward for ourselves in the provided narratives of successful career arcs, who cannot extend our imaginative identifications so far as to want to the be protagonist of that story. The end.42 Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

FAUW, “Annual Performance Reviews”. FAUW, “Faculty Salaries”. University of Waterloo, “Daily Bulletin”. Ahmed, Living, 22. Coletu, 384. Ibid., 384. Bosanquet, 8. Berlant, 132. Ibid. qtd. in Berg and Seeber, 10. Tokumitsu. Ibid., 5. Ahmed, Living, 43. Roach. This is such a well-worn practice that it is the subject of a scene in the television series “Lucky Hank,” based on Richard Russo’s academic novel Straight Man: Hank Devereux and his tenure-track-position seeking former advisee exchange banter about the reference letter she will write for herself and he will sign.

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16 There is a whole publishing genre of outsider academic works that describe this mis-fit: Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider is a classic, and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick, and Britney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage are notable recent works. 17 qtd. in Berg and Seeber, 5. 18 Graeber, 55. 19 Ahmed, Living, 43. 20 Ibid., 115. 21 Hawley, 211. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 219–20. 24 Ahmed, Living, 115. 25 Graeber, 72. 26 Ibid. 27 Aisenberg and Harrison, 30. 28 Ibid., 31. 29 Tokumitsu, n.p. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ahmed, Living, 57. 33 Ibid. 34 Aisenberg and Harrison, 8. 35 Ahmed, Living 57; emphasis added. 36 Berlant, 132. 37 Ibid. 38 Berlant, 135 39 Berlant, 132. 40 Ahmed, Living, 235. 41 Berlant, 136. 42 I will record this essay on my next merit review report, grant application, fellowship package: the fact of its existence matters so much more to the positive reputation and faculty metrics of my institution than its substance could possibly harm my assessed excellence. Because I am nearly 100% certain that no one who is assessing me for anything is going to read it. Like Kenyon Wilson, the professor who hid the secret location of a 50 dollar bill in the text of his syllabus (CBC Radio), I will make a bet on peer review: if you’re reading this chapter because it was listed on my CV and you are assessing my scholarship, send me an email and we can write a paper on the scholarly conversation, peer review, and human connection. I love you already.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke UP, 2017. Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Aisenberg, Nadya, and Mona Harrington. Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. Berg, Maggie, and Barbara Karolina Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2016. Berlant, Lauren. “Affect Is the New Trauma.” The Minnesota Review, vol. 2009, no. 71–72, May 2009, pp. 131–136. 10.1215/00265667-2009-71-72-131.

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CBC Radio. “This Prof Hid $50 in a Locker to See If His Students Read His Syllabus. Nobody Found It.” CBC, 13 December 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/ radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-the-monday-edition-1.6284012/this-prof-hid50-in-a-locker-to-see-if-his-students-read-his-syllabus-nobody-found-it-1. 6284015. Accessed 2 April 2023. Coletu, Ebony. “Introduction: Biographic Mediation.” Biography, vol. 42, no. 3, 2019, pp. 465–485. Cottom, Tressie McMillan. Thick: And Other Essays. New York: The New Press, 2019. English Language and Literature. “PhD English.” University of Waterloo, https:// uwaterloo.ca/english/programs-grad/phd-english. Accessed 2 April 2023. Faculty Association University of Waterloo. “Annual Performance Reviews.” University of Waterloo, https://uwaterloo.ca/faculty-association/informationfaculty/faculty-guide-working-waterloo/annual-performance-reviews. Accessed 31 March 2023. Faculty Association University of Waterloo. “Faculty Salaries at Waterloo.” University of Waterloo, https://uwaterloo.ca/faculty-association/faculty-guide/ faculty-salaries-waterloo. Accessed 31 March 2023. Faculty Association University of Waterloo. “The Twelve Days of Performance Review.” The FAUW Blog, 18 December 2019, https://fauw.blog/2019/12/18/ the-twelve-days-of-performance-review/. Accessed 31 March 2023. Faculty of Arts. Arts Activity Report. University of Waterloo, 2018. Zotero, https://uwaterloo.ca/arts-faculty-staff-resources/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/arts-activity-report-2017-2018-2_0.pdf. Accessed 2 April 2023. Faculty of Arts. Department Addenda to Faculty Performance Evaluation Guidelines, 2020. University of Waterloo, October 2020, https://uwaterloo.ca/ arts-faculty-staff-resources/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/department_ addenda_to_faculty_performace_evaluation_guidelines_2020.pdf. Accessed 2 April 2023. Faculty of Arts. Faculty Performance Evaluation Guidelines, 2022. University of Waterloo, May 2022, https://uwaterloo.ca/arts-faculty-staff-resources/sites/ default/files/uploads/documents/fpr-guidelines_arts_approved-afc-may-2022_ final.pdf. Accessed 2 April 2023. Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2015. Hawley, Katherine, “What Is Impostor Syndrome?” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, vol. 93, no. 1, June 2019, pp. 203–226. 10.1093/ arisup/akz003. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (4th ed). Albany: SUNY, 2015. Muhs, Gabriella Guttierez y, et al., eds.Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. Denver: UP of Colorado, 2012. Roach, Rebecca. “#11: Why You Have Impostor Syndrome, and What to Do about It: Remembering Katherine Hawley.” The Academic Imperfectionist, 14 May 2021, https://www.academicimperfectionist.com/podcast/11. Accessed 31 March 2023.

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Tokumitsu, Miya. “In the Name of Love.” Slate, 16 January 2014, https://slate. com/technology/2014/01/do-what-you-love-love-what-you-do-an-omnipresentmantra-thats-bad-for-work-and-workers.html. Accessed 31 March 2023. University of Waterloo. “Daily Bulletin.” Daily Bulletin, 3 June 2021, https:// uwaterloo.ca/daily-bulletin/2021-06-04. Accessed 31 March 2023. University of Waterloo. “Memorandum of Agreement.” Secretariat, 17 January 2023, https://uwaterloo.ca/secretariat/memorandum-agreement-uw-fauw. Accessed 31 March 2023.

2

Docile Bodies (of Work) Coaxing the Neoliberal Academic via the Online Researcher Profile Emma Maguire

It is January 2018 when I start my job as a full-time, continuing aca­ demic at a university on the other side of the country. During my first week, I am told to make an appointment with a research librarian to set up my online profile. I have commenced this job alongside another young scholar – this is also her first ongoing appointment – and we meet with the librarian together. As millennial academics who came of age during the “digital revolution,” we are no strangers to the genre of the online profile. We were among the first generation to create Facebook profiles, which drew on the practices we had learned from creating and editing our Myspace identities, which, in turn, were informed by our knowledge of the Web 1.0 media of our childhood: chat forums, online journals, and personal websites. But this Online Researcher Profile (ORP), housed as it is within the hallowed digital halls of an official institutional website, feels a lot more exclusive than any of that. Anyone can create a Facebook profile, but only staff members of an academic institution are granted ORPs. This profile would represent a different side of me, a professional side, that – having graduated with a PhD only a little over eighteen months earlier – is newly coming into being in 2018. At the start of my career, I did not feel settled into academia in the same way I do now, almost five years later. I was eager to stake my claim on an identity I didn’t yet feel I embodied. During the process of cocreating my academic profile with the librarian – which I will return to in more detail – I felt as though I was assembling a façade to hide behind. My publications, institutional affiliation, and new title could stand in for me and attest to my legitimacy as a scholar, while behind this façade I felt insecure and inadequate. When imposter syndrome strikes, I had been advised by other academics to “fake it ‘til you make it.” My ORP was one space that facilitated this identity faking/staking. Returning to my ORP now is an unexpectedly anxious task, and I have been drawn, in my process of analysis, to attend to the affective resonances that accompany this form. I am interested in what the DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-3

Docile Bodies (of Work) 37 pressures and pleasures this form of life narrative might reveal about academic identities. I am also concerned here with automedial1 practices that the ORP promotes, and how its prescriptive structure combines with the commoditization of the academic (through branding practices) to produce docile subjects – subjects disciplined through biopower to understand themselves in ways that serve systems and networks of power.2 In this essay, I draw on post-structural theory to understand some of the ways power, identity, and labor interact to shape the con­ cept of the “self” in the contemporary neoliberal academy. I use Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism to understand the attachments and affects engaged when academics mediate professional identities in this often hostile environment. I take my own ORP as a case study, drawing on life narrative scholarship on autobiographical coaxing and autoassemblage to illustrate how this autobiographical form produces and reflects academic subjectivity. I narrate some of my experiences creating and maintaining my ORP for the purpose of illuminating the practical, material, and affective elements of self-mediation in this form. And I examine these experiences through the theoretical lens I have described above, in the mode of autotheory. Some of these reflections are personal, and as such offer rich data to incorporate into my analysis. Here, “embodied experience can become another text, framework, or catalyst through which to think through aesthetic, social, cultural, moral, and political issues.”3 I use “firsthand experience as a person living in the world as the ground for developing and honing theoretical arguments and theses”4 about neoliberal academic subjectivity and how autobio­ graphical practices are at play in shaping academics’ professional lives and identities, as well as their relations to institutions. I ask: what kind of subject does my Online Researcher Profile construct? What anxieties and attachments cluster around it? What parts of my professional identity and “academic life story” are left out of or obscured by my ORP?5 Does my ORP truly represent me as an academic? If not, what is its purpose? And what do my feelings and thoughts about my ORP reveal about the tensions of subjectivity in the neoliberal academy? I address these questions through an autotheoretical approach that applies my expertise as a digital life narrative scholar to my own autobio­ graphical practice. But I will begin with the crucial context for this analysis of power, identity, and form: the neoliberal university. The Neoliberal University When I talk about the neoliberal university, I am referring to the way in which market logics and capitalist ideologies pervade contemporary universities.6 This pervasion impacts almost every aspect of university

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life, but I am interested here in how neoliberal culture shapes the identities and selves that are forged in this social environment. Neoliberalism places universities within the context of a global knowledge economy, and this has, in recent times, shifted the emphasis of the value of higher education away from its social function as a “public good”7 and towards a model of privatization wherein academic work is capitalized and knowledge is a commodity.8 This dynamic is characterized by Kim Barbour and David P. Marshall as a “prestige economy” which, significantly, “universities both perform and produce through their aca­ demics.”9 Marketable academic personas function here as commodities, and universities have an economic interest in coercing academics to per­ form identities in ways this economy values. The academic identity most useful to the neoliberal university is an entrepreneurial or “enterprising” academic,10 who has re-invented herself as a “unit of resource”.11 She “take[s] responsibility for working hard, faster, and better as part of [her] sense of personal worth,” understands her value in terms of her “perfor­ mative worth,”12 and is willing to compete13 for jobs, grants, publica­ tions, and opportunities. The corporatization of the academy has changed the nature and the conditions of work life inside these institutions, and performing the kinds of academic identity required is having disastrous effects on academics. There is increased competition for jobs, “worsening conditions of em­ ployment,” and a generally “precarious existence,”14 especially for early career academics and doctoral students who suffer from more precarity and financial stress.15 Academics report depression, anxiety, and wor­ sening mental and physical health.16 The environment of the neoliberal university is especially hostile to women and minorities. Javier MulaFlacón et al.17 explain that although neoliberalism as an ideology is sup­ posedly gender-neutral, it exacerbates an existing male-dominated culture in academia through values of “competitiveness, freedom, and individu­ alization” which “foster processes of self-blame in response to failure,” thus obscuring the power inequalities inherent in the system. Importantly, Mula-Flacón et al. acknowledge that women often report feeling silenced and marginalized18 within the neoliberal and masculinized19 culture of the academy. The culture described by Mula-Flacón et al. disproportionately negatively impacts women in the form of structural disadvantages, internal and external barriers, and increased “feelings and emotions linked to fear, stress, and insecurity.”20 This is a reminder that capitalism creates inequality, and it also works to obscure that fact through technologies of discipline and discourses of identity that compel us to discipline ourselves to perform our identity and our jobs in ways that suit the system even when they cause us to suffer.

Docile Bodies (of Work) 39 Cruel (Academic) Optimism: Identity and the Doxa of the Academic I suggest that the culture of the academy can be seen as producing a kind of doxa around the classification of the academic that bonds us to insti­ tutions, despite the ways we suffer within them.21 Academia is not just a job for many of us but in fact, constitutes a set of values and ideas to which we become attached and from which we derive our identity. Here, identity is produced through habitus which might be productively con­ sidered in relation to the kinds of autobiographies produced within the academy.22 Part of this doxa includes the understanding that the aca­ demic’s value is measured by the commodities they produce. Such com­ modities include tangible materials like publications and lectures, but also symbolic commodities like prestige and esteem. An academic identity is thus powerfully entwined with what we produce through our labor. I am struck by how Bourdieu’s description of the doxa of wifedom and mar­ riage mirrors my experience of academia as a young woman: The political function of classifications is never more likely to pass unnoticed than in […] social formations, in which the prevailing classificatory system encounters no rival or antagonistic principle. As we have seen in the case of domestic conflicts to which marriages often give rise, social categories disadvantaged by the symbolic order, such as women and the young, cannot but recognize the legitimacy of the dominant classification in the very fact that their only chance of neutralizing those of its effects most contrary to their own interests lies in submitting to them in order to make use of them.23 Bourdieu draws attention to how power disguises itself through doxa and compels subjects to submit to its effects, even when they are contrary to subjects’ interests. Although I have encountered ideas that have the potential to challenge my belief in my own identity as constructed powerfully by the principle that I am an Academic, the belief remains unshaken and is a core structure that shapes my social identity and behaviors. During the final year of my PhD candidature, I suffered an anxiety overload, and my body broke down. I started seeing a psychologist to cope with work stress. She introduced me, helpfully, to the idea that work is only one of my values and, to keep myself psychologically well, I needed to allocate time and energy to the other parts of life I find meaning in: family, creative outlets, and friendships. Looking back, I see this as a moment of potential chal­ lenge to academic doxa. However, it failed to shake the identity founda­ tion I was building around my attachment to academia. This episode of

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mental overload was a symptom of conflict between me and my workload, analogous to Bourdieu’s “domestic conflicts” arising from the institution of marriage. I was overworked. But, like Bourdieu’s women and children, my best chance of neutralizing the effects of the system most contrary to my own interests (for example, a “publish or perish” ethos, and a belief that my value and identity are measured by the commodities I produce) was to submit to them in order to make use of them: I did the work, I got the PhD, I got the job. I have since remained attached to academia and locked in conflict with my workload. I am suggesting that, within the heterogenous cultures of academia, there is something I am calling the doxa of the Academic.24 The Academic (as capitalized in this essay) is an identity figure constructed by the “mythico-ritual system” of academic doxa – much like the figure of the “man” or the “woman” constructed in patriarchal cultures.25 Like gender archetypes, the Academic exists as a normalized myth that is mis­ recognized as a product of the “natural world,” to use Bourdieu’s26 words. Or in Lauren Berlant’s terms, this figure might represent the aca­ demic “good life,”27 which I describe more fully below. This figure em­ bodies what we desire when we aspire to become academics. Like the man or woman, though, the Academic is a fantasy, a shifting entity that is ultimately unobtainable: like masculinity or femininity, we never “become” our gender but rather are always in the act of becoming. An academic identity is performative in the Butlerian sense, constructed contextually through repetitive performances. This formulation of pro­ fessional identity serves the needs of the neoliberal university, which requires academics to constantly “perform” at work, and it monitors and polices such performance through discipline.28 One of these performances is the autobiographical form of the Online Researcher Profile, and I will examine my own uncanny relation with my ORP later in the essay to draw out this performance. Further, I suggest the Academic is mobilized by universities to foster and preserve “cruelly optimistic” attachments to the academy. Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism describes the affective relation between a subject and an object to which they are optimistically attached, but which is detrimental to them. Berlant simplifies this description in the opening line of her eponymously titled book: “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”29 Drawing further on Berlant, an attachment to academia is optimistic when a subject is drawn to return to the scene of desire (academia) where the desired object (an academic identity or any of its related accoutrements: promotion, esteem, tenure, publication) “hovers in its potentialities”30 and gives rise to the expectation that “this time, nearness to this thing will help you […] to become different in just the

Docile Bodies (of Work) 41 right way”31 such that it will bring about the subject’s arrival at the fantasy to which they are attached. But the optimism is cruel “when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation” for which a subject strives.32 And furthermore, the pleasures of remaining attached become “sustaining” to the extent that the subject “finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.”33 It is telling that I am not, by any means, the first scholar to use Berlant to think about academic life.34 The concept of cruel optimism might help to explain why so many academics remain on the job despite suffering because of it. Some ex­ amples of academic suffering that I have witnessed include: the material disadvantage experienced by casually employed sessional academics; the despair and anger that often emerges during the period of navigating the job market after graduating with a PhD; the grief of seeing one’s discipline devalued and commoditized;35 rage at the unfairness and intractability of structural inequalities in race, class, gender, and ability that pervade the academy; the cognitive dissonance and isolation that results from mana­ gerial manipulation and gaslighting; anxiety and depression stimulated by work stress; overwhelm when faced with the needs of students and the meagre resources with which we are expected to meet them; imposter syndrome contributing to feelings of inadequacy; the fatigue and depres­ sion that comes with burnout; and regret at the irretrievable time with partners, children, family, and friends sacrificed for the job. There are also pleasures and rewards, but here I am focusing on the cruelty of an opti­ mistic attachment to illuminate what is at stake for those academics who exist within the doxa of academia – and, in turn, how the identity pro­ duction and construction revealed by an autobiographical form like the ORP can tell us about doxic belief. Berlant explains that part of the cruelty of these kinds of attachments is that although they produce suffering – or some other kind of disadvantage – in the subject, the subject is so decisively wedded to them that losing the object of the attachment would be crucially destabilizing to the point of being unbearable. Berlant writes: What’s cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.36

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The prospect of “leaving academia” will be familiar to most academics. Scholars have written books on how to do it,37 academic journals have published articles on it,38 bloggers have blogged about it under such titles as “How to Plan Your Escape,”39 and Facebook groups have sprung up to facilitate its discussion.40 It has even spawned a genre of writing, “Quit Lit,” in which academics describe their reasons for quitting the academy.41 The idea of losing one’s place in academia is, for me and for other aca­ demics, to lose both one’s own identity and something external but beloved. I have more than once heard the term “heartbreaking” used to describe the prospect of quitting the academy (indeed, I have used it myself). Relatedly, I have also heard academics describe their job as a “labor of love,” all of which brings me back to Berlant and her focus on affective attachments and how they bond us to objects of desire that may be bad for us. The attachment of academics to the Academic identity is intense and affective. Berlant’s book focuses on fantasies of the “good life,” which she describes as conventional “moral-intimate-economic” fantasies people become attached to about “how they and the world ‘add up to something’ [and] what happens when those fantasies begin to fray – depression, dis­ sociation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism, or an incoherent mash.”42 If I were to describe a fantasy of the academic “good life,” it might include things like tenure track/permanence, lots of time to think about my research and slowly produce high-quality publications about subjects that are meaningful to me, the esteem of my respected colleagues, claiming the prestige of the university institution, traveling to conferences, taking sabbaticals, being promoted based on recognition of the quality of my work, and encountering classrooms of well-prepared and highly mo­ tivated and articulate students who hold me in high opinion. Perhaps other fantasies of the academic “good life” include prizes and awards, or tweed jackets and beards, or well-funded laboratories. But I have noticed these fantasies beginning to fray across a university sector frequently described as “in crisis.” The fact that despite widespread fraying and pervasive discourse around leaving many of us remain deeply attached to academia and to our academic identities points to the power of the doxa of the Academic. This cruelly optimistic attachment is both fostered by and traceable in the identity documents and practices produced in universities, like the ORP. My Online Researcher Profile The Online Researcher Profile (ORP) is an auto-biographical form wherein academics and researchers are presented to the public as members of a particular institution. Housed within university websites, ORPs

Docile Bodies (of Work) 43 include information such as publications, research interests, bio, achievements and awards, contact details, links to external profiles such as Twitter and ORCID, grants and research projects, the subjects they teach, and the higher degree research projects they are supervising. They include space for a photograph of the academic. This form is relatively stable, note Barbour and Marshall, with the “processes of presentation” barely shifting since the turn of the millennium. Scholars have examined several aspects of academics’ online identities43 but the institutional Online Researcher Profile remains relatively unexamined in terms of the identity practices it reveals, and which con­ stitute it. I want to turn now to my experiences of constructing and maintaining my own ORP. In the process of setting up my profile, the librarian assigned to assist my new colleague and I helps us through the steps of creating the online profile, which involves creating and linking additional profiles that feed information into the university’s system and onto our pages. We create an ORCID iD, obtaining the number that will now be attached to everything we publish, and we import publications into our ORCID record.44 We create a Google Scholar profile (making sure to identify our newly acquired institutional affiliation) and let Google’s sophisticated algorithms identify and harvest the bibliographic details for our publications. We then plug our Google Scholar and ORCID data into our university’s profile system, along with links to our Twitter account, Academia.edu profile, Scopus author page, ResearcherID page, Facebook profile, and external homepage. These links, taking the shape of pictorial icons, show up in a “Connect with me” sidebar on the right hand of our page, along with some automatically populated information from our staff member data: email address, office phone number, office number, and campus location. Creating and linking these various sites of our online presence takes a lot of time. The librarian shows us the various tabs that make up the bulk of the content on the profiles: About, Honors, Publications, Current Funding, Supervision, Data, and Collaboration. We can only edit two of these tabs – About and Honors. The rest are auto-populated by other systems. But even these are pre-structured. The editable content is not a blank web page, like on the editing space of my WordPress site, but rather a fillable form with text boxes we are to insert specific content into: a biography, teaching and research interests, experience, awards, and memberships. Finally, she asks if I have a current professional photograph to upload. My colleague does, and she uploads a sophisticated black-and-white headshot. I tell the librarian that I don’t, so she suggests we take one right now. She says how important it is that the profiles have a face on them, and that ideally it should be as current as possible. I stand in front of the purple wall in the library and am captured smiling. The librarian says it is a lovely

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Figure 2.1 Emma 2018.

photo, and that I look very approachable. When I look at it, my hair is not as tidy as I would like it to be, but the collared dress I am wearing suggests professionalism, and so I agree to upload it. When I go home that night, exhausted after a day of meetings, inductions, and wrangling complex new systems, I open my profile and have a look (Figure 2.1). I see my awards and achievements, my list of research interests, and my biography explaining that my first academic book is forthcoming this year. I look at the empty Publications tab and I am anxious to complete the verification process so that the space does not remain blank. Ultimately, it looks like the institutional profiles of every other academic I have ever looked up online. This is not dissatisfying. In contrast, it feels like I am part of a club. I am amazed by how different I appear here compared to how I feel, even though I am now slumped before my television at home with my laptop, wearing the same collared dress. I have moved 2,500 kilometers across the country on my own, my house is a mess of half-

Docile Bodies (of Work) 45 unpacked cardboard boxes and the detritus that attends it. I feel utterly out of my depth in a new place and with a workload like a tidal wave that I do not yet know how I will manage. But I am so excited for my future. I have “made it.” And my online researcher page is the proof. The photograph of me in the collared dress remains my profile picture until early 2022, when I agree to write this essay about ORPs and take my own as a case study. I realize that I might include screenshots of my profile and I feel uneasy about the possibility of 2018 Dr. Maguire being pre­ served in print. Looking back at this version of myself is disorientating. While the other parts of my profile have been updated as my productivity results in more publications and a broadening research profile (most of which I do not update because they are updated by the algorithms and interlinked systems I have mentioned), the photo remains static, preserving 2018 me with her anticipation, as well as her expectations for an exciting academic future and her obliviousness to how close the life she has care­ fully built is to falling apart. This sense of unease comes from the dislocation I feel when looking at my profile and the person it seems to represent. I do not recognize her, even though she is ostensibly me. It is an uncanny experience. It also comes from a dissonance between past and present that is not detectable on my profile. Looking at my ORP, it is as if the events of the intervening years never happened. When I originally pitched the idea for this piece it was in response to a request to participate on a conference panel, and it was 2019. I was proud of my ORP, of the legitimacy it lent me (which was still novel in the second year of my job), and of my research track record for my stage of career. I felt I had published a good amount, and I had an exciting new project on sexualities and digital life narrative that I felt sure would be fruitful in terms of research outcomes, even though I was struggling to get it off the ground, overwhelmed as I was by writing new lectures each week (which I did for the first two years of the job), managing my teaching load, and having newly accepted an administrative role. But my professional life was about to change dramatically. There was the pandemic, of course, which affected my productivity in the typical ways that are now uninteresting to talk about: the conference I was supposed to present at was postponed for two years; teaching moved entirely online in the space of a week, blowing out workloads for months; and the stress and fatigue that accompanied lockdowns, restrictions, working from home, and the global uncertainty. But during that time, I also went through a divorce, underwent an interstate move to work remotely (which I did for two years), suffered a psychological break stemming from long-held trauma, and, most pressingly for this essay, reached burnout and lost my passion for academia. The result was a gap in my publishing track record that I do not know how to account for or acknowledge. This gap is visible in the publications tab of my ORP,

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but the story behind it – which I regard as crucial to my academic identity – is not. Coming back to this piece in early 2022, and to the photo of me taken in 2018, was disorientating. I looked at the page and no longer felt that it represented me at all. Barely any of my identity, professional or otherwise, was visible to me. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle points out that such academic career documents “tell us less about one’s ‘life’ and more about one’s role at the institution,” however, she also points out, “careers and lives are not mutually ex­ clusive.”45 I would go even further and say that – especially in some professions – life, self, and work are deeply entangled. I felt that this profile represented an immature version of my professional self, one that although ostensibly ready to critique the ‘grind culture,’ publish-or-perish mentality, and work-life imbalance that attends academic work, had also internalized this culture and was on the way to burnout because of it. I began thinking about my anxiety around my track record gap, and the dislocation of returning to my researcher profile, as a crucial jumping off jumping-off point for this essay. What I have found is a deeper under­ standing of the masking effect of the docile academic subject coaxed via the ORP. I have come to realize that this form of life narrative works to erase and obscure a professional identity that lies behind the front-facing identity document. Some of the most important qualities, experiences, and scenes of self-inscription that offer us meaningful understandings of our academic selves and our place in the academy are erased, hidden, or not accounted for by the researcher profile because they are not useful identity capital.46 The ORP’s purpose is not to make us intelligible to ourselves in ways we feel are true and support us to thrive in any way beyond our utility to the institution as a commodity tradeable in the economies of knowledge and esteem. As I have mentioned, these economies do not really care for our wellbeing and, in fact, often impel us to act in ways that are harmful to us. In my own ORP, there is a sub-section to the right that lists academics “Like Me,” en­ couraging me (and other viewers of the site) to compare staff against one another. This kind of comparison might produce imposter syndrome, or competition, both of which serve the academy but are harmful to our wellbeing. The elements of the profile that are created by algorithms – the word cluster, labeled “My research areas,” the pinned world map on the “Collaborators” tab, the Altmetric scores beside some of my publications – sit eerily on my page. I did not consent to having these elements represent me, and their presence is beyond my control, even though they construct my persona here. Even the details I did contribute (my bio, a list of research interests, my education) are not what I would elect to stand in for me, di­ vorced as they are from context, and appearing in keywords or as sum­ maries of achievements, divested from the rest of the life in which they are embedded as experiences rather than symbols.

Docile Bodies (of Work) 47 Reflecting on why I have been so obedient in constructing my ORP, I point to my familiarity with the autobiographical genre of the CV, and similarly, the social media profile. Learning these forms of inscription led me to lean on them (as the profile template implicitly suggests I should) in creating my ORP. Where there is a blank space, I should fill it with the appropriate information. It is also a result of my desire to be recognized as an academic but not offered alternative ways to inscribe that identity and become officially legible. I have been disciplined to inscribe my identity here in ways that can be mobilized in the service of a university’s corporate brand. I want to turn now to how this disciplining effect is obscured by the design and media facets of the ORP. Body of Work The ORP’s method of narrating an identity is to collect and assemble the key useful identity elements of the academic and present this decontextualized collection as the presence of the academic. Autoassemblage is described by Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti as a text created through a process of “selection and appropriation of content across several modes brought together into a constellation for the purpose of self-representation,” where “the disparate array of texts and references function as the individual’s online ‘presence.’”47 That the auto-assemblage “text” is described by Whitlock and Poletti as made up of other texts is important for considering the fragmentation that occurs in the researcher profile within this neoliberal context. Reflected in Whitlock and Poletti’s conception of the term is an idea of agency and creative intention in the curation/appropriation of multi-texts. The author is understood to have made decisions about which texts she will include to represent her in such an array. But the researcher profile is, perhaps unsurprisingly, much more coercive as a form of auto-assemblage than a self-published zine, or even a Facebook profile. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson draw on Ken Plummer’s work to formulate the theory of coaxers, coaches, and coercers in life narra­ tives.48 Smith and Watson describe these entities as persons, institutions and cultural forces that persuade or require people to perform autobi­ ographical acts.49 Texts created in response to coaxing reveal the ways identities are actively shaped by entities beyond the subject. In the case of the researcher profile, the researcher is forced into a collaboration with such coaxers: algorithms, university marketing departments, and software and programming languages, many of whose creative contri­ butions remain out of view for both the researcher herself and audiences of the resulting auto-assemblage. The broader culture of the institution, too, coaxes. The researcher profile, then, is an exceptionally coerced

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form of auto-assemblage that removes from the researcher a significant amount of control over her digital representation. While there are opportunities for agency within the template’s structures, coercing en­ tities powerfully shape the kinds of selves likely to emerge in this form of autobiography. Conceptualizing the limits of creative agency within similar sites of coaxed digital self-representation, Aimée Morrison, influenced by Jakob Nielsen, suggests Donald Norman’s theory of ‘affordances’ and ‘con­ straints’ in the design of objects can help to illuminate the way digital platforms both encourage or facilitate (via affordances) and limit (via constraints) practices of self-representation.50 In the ORP, the affor­ dance of an area to place a photograph encourages the researcher to see and represent herself as she is seen by others so she may be recognized as herself by students in the corridor, for example. This same affordance coaxes the academic to offer her face as a point of human connection to facilitate consumers’ engagement with the university’s brand. Another affordance is the Publications tab, which coaxes the academic to see her work as part of her academic identity rather than a product of her labor. Labor disguised as identity performance becomes obscured. Publications are, in an important way, representative of the research process. However, a focus on the “output” of research extracts only the elements of labor that are valued by the university, casting off as scraps the larger part of research activity: the skills, passions, affects, kinds of labor, and processes that go into doing research. Importantly, these “outputs” are linked directly to the knowledge economy as a commodity that attracts capital. A research track record summarized by only its outputs (and, relatedly, its quantified ‘impact’) does not connect to my identity as a researcher. The prefillable sections of the profile are limitations. There is no space here to share elements of my identity that are not useful as capital. There is no space to showcase the astounding work my students have produced in my classes or the peer reviews I have worked hard on. No space to share the experiences that have felt most like achievements to me: seeing my work cited in a keynote by a scholar I have immense respect for; emerging from burnout and rediscovering my passion for research; outlasting a manager who almost led me to quit my job; the vitalizing relationships I have built with other researchers; the mentoring I do. These are the elements of my scholarly identity I feel most proud of, and which feel most central to my professional self. But it is difficult to ‘brand’ or quantify these identity traits in the service of commodifica­ tion. I have come to think about the self-branding the ORP coaxes as disciplining in the Foucauldian sense, and, following from this, to think about the ORP as a technology of discipline. In her book Stories of the

Docile Bodies (of Work) 49 Self, Anna Poletti argues that media are “agential forces” that materialize discursive regimes around not only the value of a life, but what it means to have one.51 Poletti explains that “assigning significance to lived experience is a process shaped by regimes of value” and that “significance itself is materialized through media forms and the kinds of reading encounters they enable, suggest or foreclose.”52 The ORP is a powerfully disciplining vehicle for ideas about academic identities, forms of attachment, and behavior that serves to, in Foucault’s words, “impose upon [academics] a relation of docility-utility.”53 Applying Foucault’s conception of the docile body led me to wonder where the ‘body’ was in my formulation of the disciplining ORP, which is a digital text and contains no physical ‘body.’ The disciplining forces and affects I have been examining apply not so much to academics’ bodies but rather to the ‘body’ of work we produce: the fruits of our labor detached from the process of laboring and made to stand in for our identity. Can we then look at the ORP as one technology of discipline that acts upon the identity of the academic to produce a docile body of work that serves the needs of the corporate university and the knowledge ‘economy’ it trades in? Can we look at this site as a docile digital body, a kind of dressage through which the academic becomes intelligible to themselves and others, and useful?54 Doing so leads us to see the ORP as a form of self-presentation that does not necessarily represent us. Rather, making our labor into our identity performs a capitalist act of self-erasure. Acknowledging the ways in which this autobiographical form is defi­ cient and, in fact, incapable of constructing an academic self that might better serve our needs helps us to deny its power to shape our sense of our identities. It also encourages us to find other spaces in the academy that can make us intelligible to ourselves and others in ways that support our flourishing. And in finding those spaces, fight for an academic “good life” that is good for us.55 Conclusion The Online Researcher Profile is a disciplining form of auto-biography. It polices the narration of selfhood within the academy and constructs a partial self in which the products of labor valued by the institution stand in for an academic identity. Self-inscription within the academy en­ courages external validation rather than internal, creating malleable neoliberal subjects whose investment in their life’s work can be driven by the needs of the institution rather than the needs of the individual, their family, or the communities of which they are part.

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Throughout the process of writing and researching this piece, I have been asking myself, in this world of façades, performance, and economy, where do I feel seen – where am I intelligible – in my academic life? Increasingly, it is in the community of life writing scholars of which I have been fortunate enough to become part that I feel most myself. I do not feel the need to engage in identity faking and staking. I feel I am seen for more than only my worth as a commodity, tradeable for other capital in the knowledge economy. I feel seen for the elements of my scholarly identity that are closer to how I perceive my professional value: my ideas, instincts, energy, generosity, kindness, ethics, and the respect and appreciation I show for my colleagues. For my ability to encourage and inspire, my intellectual and emotional engagement as a listener, a conversant, a mentor, and a community member. And as a flourishing expert in this field that I care so much about, and find so much joy and intellectual satis­ faction in. This space was not provided by my institution or the knowledge economy, but by scholars who seek meaningful intellectual communities. And it is spaces like these where we can learn to revalue our work and our professional identities. Notes 1 Automediality refers to the interrelatedness of the products and processes of self-mediation. See Kennedy and Maguire. 2 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 3 Fournier, 32. 4 Ibid. 5 Gil-Juárez. 6 For more in-depth discussion of the neoliberal academy see Ball, Lipton, Maisuria and Helmes, and Moriarty. 7 Maisuria and Helmes, 15; Naidoo, 250. 8 Lipton, 3. 9 Barbour and Marshall, 1. 10 McWilliam 1999 cited in Ball, “Performativity”, 19. 11 Shore and Wright 1999 cited in Ball, “Performativity”, 18. 12 Ball, “The Making of”, 16. 13 Maisuria and Helmes, 25–6. 14 Ibid., iii. 15 Ibid., 41–3. 16 Ibid., 27–9, 38–40. 17 Mula-Flacón et al., 552. 18 Ibid., 556. 19 Ibid., 552. 20 Ibid., 557. 21 Doxa is described by Bourdieu as those beliefs about the world that are so powerfully positioned within a culture that they are misrecognized as undisputed truth and accepted as self-evident, and thus shape social behaviour accordingly. Doxa gives rise to, but is distinguished from, beliefs that might be

Docile Bodies (of Work) 51

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

contested and deviated from (heterodoxy), or affirmed and adhered to (orthodoxy). See Bourdieu, Outline 159–169 for a fuller discussion of these concepts. For a more detailed discussion of academic habitus see Bourdieu, Homo Academicus and, more recently, Di Leo. Bourdieu, Outline, 164–5, my emphasis. I capitalize Academic to indicate when I am referring to the figure produced by the ‘mythico-ritual system’ which produces doxa within the academy. Bourdieu, Outline, 165. Ibid., 164. Berlant, 22; Helms et al., 3–4. Foucault. Berlant, 1. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 2. Ibid. Ibid. See Bone; Lipton; and Thouaille. Kuttainen. Berlant, 24. Caterine. Gewin; Novotney. Dupont. See Novotney. Maisuria and Helmes, 28. Berlant, 2. See for example Duffy and Pooley; Franke; Hammarfelt et al.; Jordan; Leavy; Luźon; Thelwall and Kousha. ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, and is described on its website as a global, not-for-profit organization that works “to support the creation of a permanent, clear, and unambiguous record of research and scholarly communication by enabling reliable attribution of authors and contributors” (ORCID). Ortiz-Vilarelle, 47. In my use of the word “inscription” I am drawing on Anna Poletti’s use of it in Stories of the Self to attend to the practices and processes of what she calls biomedia – the inscription of life in ways that make us legible to others. Whitlock and Poletti, xv. Smith and Watson, 64. Ibid. Morrison, 117–18. Poletti, 171. Ibid. Foucault, 136. Poletti, 137. This phrasing is borrowed from Lauren Berlant who writes, about post-GFC austerity measures, “Without accommodating the affective demands for adjustment to the austere ordinary with which they’re being confronted, people need to think about what kinds of “good life” might better be associated with flourishing, and fight that battle (with fantasy, politically) too” (Helms et al., 2010, 3).

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Works Cited Ball, Stephen J. “Performativity, Commodification and Commitment: An I-Spy Guide to the Neoliberal University.” British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 60, no. 1, 2012, pp. 17–28. Barbour, Kim and David Marshall. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona Through the World Wide Web.” First Monday, vol. 17, no. 9, 2012. 10.5210/ fm.v0i0.3969. Accessed 19 July 2022. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011. Bone, Kate Daisy. “Cruel Optimism and Precarious Employment: The Crisis Ordinariness of Academic Work.” Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 174, 2021, pp. 275–290. Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Translated by Peter Collier. Stanford UP, 1988. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge University Press, 1977. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990. Caterine, Christopher L. Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide. Princeton UP, 2020. Duffy, Brooke Erin and Jefferson D. Pooley. “‘Facebook for Academics’: The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic on Academia.edu.” Social Media + Society, vol. 3, no. 1, 2017, p. 9. Accessed 16 October 2022. Dupont, Madeleine. “Leaving Academia: How to Plan Your Escape.” Degrees of Freedom, 21 August 2021. https://www.dofcareers.com/blog/leaving-academiahow-to-plan-your-escape. Accessed 21 October 2022. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Penguin, 1977. Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. MIT Press, 2021. Franke, Helena. “The Academic Web Profile as a Genre of ‘Self-Making’.” Online Information Review, vol. 43, no. 5, 2019, pp. 760–774. 10.1108/OIR-12-20170347. Accessed 19 September 2022. Gewin, Virginia. “Has the ‘Great Resignation’ Hit Academia?” Nature, vol. 606, no. 7912, 2022, pp. 211–213. 10.1038/d41586-022-01512-6. Accessed 11 October 2022. Gil-Juárez, Adriana. “A Tale of Two Subjectivities: An Academic Life Story.” Personal Essays in Social Science, Special Issue of Social Sciences, vol. 8, no. 1, 2019, p. 267. Hammarfelt, Björn et al. “Quantified Academic Selves: The Gamification of Research through Social Networking Services.” Information Research: An Electronic Journal, vol. 21, no. 2, 2016. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1104376. Accessed 13 September 2022. Helms, Gesa, Marina Vishmidt, and Lauren Berlant. “Affect and the Politics of Austerity: An Interview Exchange with Lauren Berlant.” Variant, vol. 39/40, 2010, pp. 3–6. Jordan, Katy. “Imagined Audiences, Acceptable Identity Fragments and Merging the Personal and Professional: How Academic Online Identity Is Expressed

Docile Bodies (of Work) 53 through Different Social Media Platforms.” Learning, Media and Technology, vol. 45, no. 2, 2020. 10.1080/17439884.2020.1707222. Accessed 19 July 2022. Kennedy, Ümit and Emma Maguire. “Introduction.” M/C, vol. 21, no. 2, 2018. 10.5204/mcj.1395. Accessed 24 February 2023. Kuttainen, Victoria. “Writing and Reflecting on Contemporary Grief Memoir: Grief as Paradigm.” Reading and Writing Australian Literature, Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference, 29 June–2 July 2020, Virtual, James Cook University, Conference Presentation. Leavy, Patricia. Popularizing Scholarly Research: The Academic Landscape, Representation, and Professional Identity in the 21st Century. Oxford UP, 2021. Lipton, Briony. Academic Women in Neoliberal Times. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Luźon, María-José. “Constructing Academic Identities Online: Identity Performance in Research Group Blogs Written by Multilingual Scholars.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes, vol. 33, pp. 24–39. 10.1016/j.jeap. 2018.01.004. Accessed 11 October 2022. Maisuria, Alpesh and Svenja Helmes. Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University. Routledge, 2019. Morrison, Aimée. “Facebook and Coaxed Affordances.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, University of Wisconsin Press, 2014, pp. 112–131. Novotney, Amy. “Leaving Academia.” American Psychological Association, vol. 53, no. 2, 2022, p. 75. ORCID. “About ORCID.” ORCID. https://info.orcid.org/what-is-orcid/. Accessed 21 October 2022. Poletti, Anna. Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book. New York University Press, 2020. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Thelwall, Mike and Kayvan Kousha. “Academia.edu: Social Network or Academic Network?” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, vol. 65, no. 4, 2014. 10.1002/asi.23038. Accessed 19 July 2022. Thouaille, Marie-Alix. “Is Pursuing an Academic Career a Form of ’Cruel Optimism’?” LSE Impact Blog, 1 March 2018. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ impactofsocialsciences/2018/03/01/is-pursuing-an-academic-career-a-form-ofcruel-optimism/. Accessed 28 October 2022. Whitlock, Gillian and Anna Poletti. “Self-Regarding Art.” Biography, vol. 31, no. 1, 2008, pp. v–xxii.

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Sign ‘In the Space Provided’ Academic Email Signatures as Sites of Narrative, Branding, and Refusal? May Friedman and Jennifer Poole

It is short. It is often overlooked, and it can be loaded with meaning, narrative, and branding. It is the academic email signature: the words meant to explain who the writer is, where they are positioned, and what power they hold. More recently, it has included words that situate gender and acknowledge treaty and territory, as well as links to approved institutional messages. The academic email signature is thus a busy site of distilled identity-making and constructed storying and performance, but could it also be a site of refusal and ‘good autobiography’? In this piece, we turn our attention to what these ‘functional narratives’ do, what they include, and what they leave out. Drawing on our own biographies and institutional experiences as gendered ‘non-normative’ academics in the settler colonial nation of Canada, we speak to what we fear to include and how signatures change over time. We speak to the discursive and institutional rules of inclusion. We also share our signature fantasies and imagine what a signature could be and do socially, politically, and narratively. Perhaps especially for those of us who are uneasy academics, academic email signatures are a paradigmatic form of self-construction in academic career survival. In a pithy and contained format, signatures exist as a form of life writing that allows for celebration (promotions!), resignation (academic service!), critical questioning (social and geographic locations), grief (inclusion of institutions named after problematic individuals), and the situation of a mythic individual self within a larger academic performance. While there are set expectations and criteria, signatures are equally defined by confusion and contradiction: for every email that we have received with specific instructions on what we should include, we have received another detailing the opposite. As a result, they are an exercise in self-making, albeit generally at an unconscious level. For this chapter, we found ourselves wondering what would happen if we exposed the unconscious wrangling with which we devise our signatures and allowed them to exist as a deliberate and self-aware performance. Doing so would allow us to consider the email signature as a form of life writing which provides a “playground for DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-4

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new relationships both within and without the text.”1 Going even further, we consider whether our signatures could function as autotheories, expanding toward “‘life thinking,’ as differentiated from more established histories of ‘life writing.’”2 With this in mind, we therefore turn toward a determination of the ways that our signatures (and our pronouns, titles, locations, etc.) function as a form of gendered identity formation. We begin by situating ourselves, framing our own autobiographies in relation to the project at hand: May: I am a first-generation brown (Arab/Jewish) settler working as an academic in Toronto, Canada. My child self could never have conceived of my current life. The conventions of academia were completely foreign to me – I had never met a professor until I began my undergraduate degree, and as such, many of the nuances of academic culture were confusing and heightened my feeling of being an imposter. As a racialized woman blending academia with parenting, my overwhelming feeling has been that I am getting away with something; that the university is not a space for me. As a result, I feel both proud and shy about my signature. I remember the moment I finally added an academic title under my name as a source of such enormous pride, but the vulnerabilities have multiplied – fears about doing it wrong, of somehow offending, of providing too much information (self-indulgent!), or not enough (inadequate!). As I have gained promotions, my terror has amplified. I never could have imagined that this seemingly simple sign-off would be a site of such anxiety. Jen: I am a first-generation white settler from England living and working in T’karonto (Toronto). I am also an accidental academic. Doing a PhD was something that I was just going to try for a year or so, and then go back to working for a community peer support organization. Despite my love of words and ideas, I was not a particularly avid reader. I lament (ed) the exclusivity of academic language. I did not relish a life steeped in funding proposals and research and had been sorely maddened by multiple life and academic events. It was all very tentative, but then I had my first experience of teaching at a local university. Perhaps, I might do THAT, I thought to myself, and THAT seemed to provide the impetus for completing a thesis that became a book and a tenure-track job. As is standard for pre-tenure faculty in Canada, I became an assistant professor with a bio, a web page, and an institutional signature that mentioned nothing about the maddenings, the ambivalence, or the whys that had brought me to the role. Having begun our personal origin stories, we now consider the ways the practice of these email signatures is situated within a broader theory and politic. We consider the implications of signatures as a form of autoetheoretical life writing, as well as a site of identity formation. Finally, we anticipate some of the ways that signatures may exemplify tropes of

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neoliberal autonomy, working in aid of structures that seek to maintain our individual accomplishments and titles instead of our collective responsibilities. Finding Ourselves in/as Scholarship Our academic identities are meant to be linear and contained: in the manner of “first comes love, then comes marriage …,” we are meant to follow graduate school with post-docs, smoothly rising through the ranks of academic appointments until we reach the golden cloud tops of Emeritus-Land. Of course, in the same way that our non-academic lives have resisted the apocryphal trajectories imposed upon them, our academic lives have been marred by setbacks, aided by leapfrogging, dogged by unrecognized service, and otherwise have functioned more in spaces of chaos than order. The secret truth, of course, is that it is the chaos that brought us to, and keeps us in, these spaces. Our true identities, academic and otherwise, are splayed Jackson Pollack-like across our screens, bleeding into our private spaces, melding messy emotions with cold scholarly outputs. (This has only been more obvious during the COVID pandemic, during which our so-called private lives were held back from our public space by the thinnest margins, if at all.) If signatures are a form of identity formation, then we aim to resist the type of tepid masculinist capital-B Biography and instead lean into memoir, autobiography, and tropes that consider the ways that “… all identity is relational, and that the definition of autobiography, and its history as well, must be stretched to reflect the kinds of self-writing in which relational identity is characteristically displayed.”3 We aim instead to delve deep into the belly of autotheory, to consider: How does autotheory get from I to you to we? How does a style seemingly coextensive with the self regularly, perhaps even constitutively, reveal the relationalities and positionalities that condition and transform how and as what the self speaks? Autotheory catalyzes voice, demands hearing, reconstitutes the self through self-expression, and in that very act calls for the world to change through recognition. Autotheory never speaks just in/as a singular I, or in one recognizable genre of the sort that says “I am” or “I am not.” Sam-I-am would tell us to open our mouths wider, to take in something even if it’s not what we already know, and to follow the crumbs of the compositional grammar (I/you/we) through which autotheory engages the world.4 We aim to understand ourselves through our signatures, the many different selves from which we are comprised, the infinite refractions of

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our correspondents, and the broader contexts to which we contribute and by which we are shaped. To do so is, to quote Marlene Kadar, to finally learn to “read ‘better.’ ‘Reading better’ may be reading for contradiction, not against it.”5 We also aim to resist the signature as a site of neoliberal compliance. Neoliberalism began as an economic response to inflation in the 1980s but has become an ideology that has reshaped governance, health, social services, and the university.6 It is an individualizing approach that positions us not in relation to each other as humans, but as self-made ‘identity corporations’ or brands. As noted by Giroux, “neoliberal citizens are encouraged to see themselves as self-interested actors who are responsible to be economically accountable, efficient, and transparent.7 In neoliberal institutions such as the university, “the preferred subjectivity is for employees to become entrepreneurial, competitive, and self-governing individuals … The principal legitimate goal for those employees is continuous improvement.”8 Signatures thus become important sites for display and calling cards for compliance, competition, and accumulation. Signatures with many institutional accolades and titles epitomize the ‘entrepreneurial self’,9 bolstering personal and institutional brands. They demonstrate the accumulation of social and educational capital that may, as Bourdieu reminds us, be exchanged for financial or other forms of remuneration. They may also act as important sites of discipline to others who are ‘lagging behind’ or failing to accumulate, improve, or ‘move up’ through the ranks.10 Both of us understand well how an expressly competitive and self-interested academic signature can also be a kind of microdiscipline – a reprimand to those who do not achieve/comply/brand themselves accordingly. We know how it feels to be on the receiving end of that messaging, both subtle and direct. Indeed, feelings of inadequacy and loneliness are common in the neoliberal institution. University “actors become human capital or economized beings, incited to outperform their competitors. The result is increased isolation and insecurity.”11 That insecurity might fuel even more competition. It might also lead to resistance. But What Do Our Signatures Actually Say?: The Personal While we aim for radical reflexivity, we must be honest about the ways that, until now, we have not consciously conceived of our signatures as a site of gendered identity and performance. Here, we trace the trajectories of our own evolving signatures and consider what this genealogy might imply in regard to our various identities and experiences. May: My earliest memory of email signatures was a feeling of profound shyness, and perhaps this has characterized my experience to this day.

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I came of age as email emerged as a communication technology, getting my first address as I graduated high school. I saw other young people putting their fledgling activities beneath their names, but I felt selfconscious about doing so (and didn’t believe I had anything to highlight in my generic part-time jobs and hobbies). Entering graduate school, I saw others increasingly profiling their academic progress, but I still resisted having a signature of my own. My reluctance was vindicated when I realized that the specifics so clear to other PhD students – the differences, for example, between student and candidate – were foreign to me. I knew I would get it wrong and so I opted out, even as I waded further and further into the academic seas. My avoidance of a signature came to a close when I began my tenure-track job and proudly (and with no small amount of terror) listed myself as Assistant Professor. I remember scanning back into my email to see what others had done, to make sure I was not erring. All the potential extras seemed daunting – a quotation could be inspiring or incendiary – even something as anodyne as stating my preference (“I will generally reply within 24 hours”) seemed like a minefield to avoid. As a result, I have consistently kept my signature as spare as possible. As I have moved through the academic ranks, my signature has changed. Achieving tenure and promotion has been exhilarating but there has been a pang about when to change my signature, ensuring up-to-date information without being too showy about my accomplishments. There is no question that my standing as a first-generation, racialized female academic plays strongly into my reluctance to share my achievements. I have had the feeling of having slid by from the moment I began to dwell in academic spaces. Anything that naturalizes my standing heightens my imposter syndrome and draws attention in ways that make me feel profoundly uncomfortable and unsafe. To this end, as my rank has increased, I find myself increasingly deleting my signature before sending any emails which do not absolutely require it, so that I am not inadvertently grandstanding or otherwise taking up too much space. Jen: Thinking about this piece, I went to my archives, sifting through emails I sent around the time I began my tenure track position (or assistant professor role in the Canadian system). In each and every one of them, and for months afterward, there was no email signature at all – just my first name at the end, written as Jen or Jennifer. Two years later, I started using a more formal signature, noting my position as Assistant Professor, my mailing address, and my phone number. I do not recall ever being told to do this, nor do I recall the moment when I added that signature, but I do remember wanting to know how others were signing off. Mostly, I remember wanting to fit in. Mine had been a solo hire, the first tied to a new graduate program and bereft of companion colleagues starting at the same time. Two weeks after I began the job, my beloved partner died

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suddenly, turning my world upside down and making holding onto the job both more important and entirely unimportant. What I wanted to write in those first years after my name was, “be gentle please, I cannot breathe” or “I am doing what I can.” But I did not write those words. Mostly, I wrote nothing in the years that followed, compounded by the experience of tenure track surveillance that amplified feelings of ‘not being enough.’ Even when the tenured moment did arrive and I could have a signature that included Associate Professor, the feeling soup of ‘not enoughness’ and fitting-in-ness, of this as both important and not, was and is still there. Of course, while our signatures largely operate as pieces of writing about our specific lives, there are other lives ensnared and implicated: the people whose names are on our buildings, and the streets in our addresses; the only recently discarded name of our institution – all bear traces of other colonial lives, other half-remembered stories. Other details emerge, our identities in dialogue with other systems and structures. It is to these contexts and channels that we now turn. What Else Do Our Signatures Say?: The Political The land: The context that taps12 at us most now is the land, and by land we mean the land on which this/our university employer is built, the land that is unceded and unsurrendered by First Nations. Officially, this is Treaty 13 land, a treaty held by the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the site of the Toronto ‘purchase.’ It is also the ancestral land of other First Nations, bound together by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt covenant that, hundreds of years ago, made clear how these Nations were to share the land and its gifts and take care of it/them collectively. After the Truth and Reconciliation report was released in 2015 and the 94 calls to action were shared, many academic email signatures in Canada started to include short references to these and other lands, as well as to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. These land acknowledgments are many things for many people. At their best, they may signal a kind of land consciousness13 and an invitation to reckon with and learn about settler colonialism. They may also serve as a ‘race to innocence’ – as Tuck and Yang so well detailed – as well as a performance, a complicity, and a new form of settler entrepreneurialism. For a neoliberal institution, there is social and political capital to extract from such a statement. In this way, a brief signature land acknowledgment may benefit the non-Indigenous academic far more than the Indigenous Nations they reference. We sit in this unease, considering whether a singular signature can ever enact decoloniality and disrupt “the very structures of knowledge production and subject formation established and maintained by colonial modernity and its ongoing institutional instantiations.”14

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And so, they are commonplace in academic Canada – but they are fraught. Over the last few years, I (Jen) have sometimes attempted a short land engagement15 in my signature, noting how I am personally engaged with land and land back for Indigenous peoples. I have also included in my signature links to policy reports by the Indigenous-led Yellowhead Institute for Research and Education (yellowheadinstitute.org) and their thoughtful statements about why many at our university used X University in place of Ryerson prior to our long-awaited name change.16 Most of the time, however, I have not included these land-conscious additions to my signature, frustrated by their brevity and disheartened by the specter of performativity. I also worry about how a brief and potentially hollow land acknowledgment may benefit both the university and my own ‘brand.’ A similar type of unease can be seen in the evolving acknowledgment of gender identity performance in signature spaces. Pronouns: In the roughly 10–15 years since we began narrating our lives through our signatures, a variety of changes have taken place. One notable addition has been the inclusion of our pronouns after our names. As justice-minded people, we welcome this inclusion as it allows us to offer (and reciprocally receive) information on how to engage thoughtfully with others. The move toward the inclusion of pronouns has led to a lot of vitriol, but has also taken up the power of naming, of the potent impact of choosing how to be addressed. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds us, the power to take and keep names is essential to liberation; likewise, adding our own pronouns signals to others that we take the accurate engagement with self-understanding as valuable. Providing pronouns engages us in a network of care.17 At the same time that we laud the move toward the inclusion of pronouns, we realize that, as with our acknowledgment of the land, the choice to include pronouns may veer toward performance and away from substance. We consider all the deeply gendered implications of the spaces that we inhabit and the deeply ingrained patriarchy of the institution. What would we put in our signatures if we were genuinely aiming to dissect the nuances of the spaces in which we work and live? What words would genuinely convey the binary impacts of the institution, or the ways that female-identified academics get siloed into caregiving labor while substantive leadership positions are overwhelmingly held by men? What would need to change in order to acknowledge the violence faced by those outside of this binary logic? These musings are front-of-mind as we consider the piece of our signatures that is perhaps the most expected and most fraught – our academic titles. Titles: Of all the pieces of information in our signature, perhaps the one that garners the most attention is our titles. Within the academic lexicon where we work, moving from student to post-doc to Assistant, then

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Associate, and then unmediated Professor is meant to function as linear progress. Of course, the signature does not acknowledge the pain of the job hunt, the tears on the way to tenure, or the anxiety that accompanies so-called “progress.” The whole system doesn’t acknowledge other knowledges, other systems of knowing. Instead, the system of ranking largely functions as a proxy for pure quantitative measurements: do you have enough publications and grants? Our titles say nothing of the hours spent mentoring students, of the triumph of an amazing conversation, or the heartfelt joy of a meaningful community connection. Like our academic lives, our titles strip us bare and denude the most meaningful parts of our jobs. Outside of the strict hierarchy of Assistant-Associate-Full, there are other titles, equally puzzling in their meanings inside and beyond the academy. As students, we assumed that Directors and Deans held highly prestigious positions – as faculty members we now see the arm-twisting and horse-trading that can lead to these types of “promotions.” Further, we see the highly gendered dimensions of academic labor and the ways that specific titles are high on prestige and low on labor while others – often the titles that have been in our signatures over the years – hide deeply important connections with students but may also forestall traditional modes of progress while extinguishing any hope of work-life balance. We query what titles we would pick if we genuinely wanted to honor the parts of our work lives that give us hope, that, in the words of minimalist designer Marie Kondo, “spark joy”?18 May Some of my discomfort stems from my experiences as an academic with a large family. Ironically, however, many parts of my evolving signature have highlighted the maternal/familial elements of my job. In particular, Jen and I have taken on the role of Graduate Program Director both singly and jointly over the last several years, a job that requires a high degree of caring labor and emotional engagement. Putting this title in my signature has been both overwhelming and restorative – a way of reconciling my multiplicity but also a relinquishing of control that is quite challenging, especially while also raising young children! Referrals: Similarly, we wonder about another notable addition to many recent signatures – the supportive referral. In the 15 years I (Jen) have been working in the university milieu, there have always been students in distress. I have often been in distress myself. Because of the focus of my scholarship and teaching (madness, grief, sanism), I have kept a list of warm(er) referrals close by. This list includes the names of people and organizations I trust to provide free support in a timely manner. These may be emotional support, physical or resource support, housing support, and so on. During the COVID pandemic, everything intensified and the requests for support and referral from students were coming thick and fast.

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I saw that others were already listing referrals in their signatures, perhaps as a way to mitigate the volume of requests. I decided to do that too, and added, just below my name, a list of 5 free sources of immediate support. I know they were used by students reaching out to me at midnight or on weekends. I know some students may not have accessed them otherwise. As their main point of virtual contact with the university during the COVID pandemic, my signature became a channel, a conduit, and a referral. And what was this? I have since wondered if it was life writing itself into my role, or another form of neoliberalism, re-branding me as a knower-helper. Was I (again) sliding into an additional gendered care role that would benefit the university? Was it another way for May and I to resist the trope of the uncaring, unconnected educator or was it something in between that I do not, as of today, have the words to comprehend?19 What Do We Wish Our Signatures Could Be?: Finding a Space for Our Minds and Hearts Thus far, we have described the landscape within which we live and work. It is impossible to examine our signatures as sites of life writing, however, without exploring radical alternatives, some of which emerge as we simmer with emergent autotheoretical work. As we undertake this exercise, we find ourselves grasping at what is missing, considering what would nourish us. We asked ourselves: What would we write if we were outside of academic and social conventions, free to do whatever we want? How would we represent what actually matters to us? May: I think what bothers me most about my current signature is the extent to which it feels synthetic, inauthentic. The hard work, the anxiety, and passionate labor that have culminated in my current standing are all excised. The mess is missing. A true signature would allow me to situate myself more completely, to consider all the pieces that are left out. For example: perhaps I would locate myself as a first-generation racialized learner, available for support and mentorship to others who share this experience. Perhaps I would claim the knowledge that I have acquired over the years, but also place value on the human connections I have built, leaning hard into spaces that favor community over individual achievement. I am not even sure how such a thing could be written from a singular email account, but perhaps I would use the space to thank colleagues, value student learning, and build connections instead of amplifying my individual accomplishments. (Even as I write this, though, I experience a squirm of discomfort at the thought of yet again dampening my success in an academic world that seeks to diminish my labor as a racialized woman …) While I continue to grapple with what I would want to write, what I do know is this: what I value is not what is shared by my title or my signature as it exists at present.

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I want to expose the apparent paradoxes. There are so many ways that I feel like I do not belong, that I look and live outside academic expectations. For example, my entire academic journey has existed alongside my experiences as a mother. I began my doctorate with a baby and my fourth child was born shortly after I received tenure. My experience of academia is threaded through with my experiences of caregiving, but the primacy of this part of my life is not evident in my public persona. When I was promoted to full professor, the aspect about which I felt proudest was my ability to achieve this title alongside pretty intensive mothering, especially given that only a quarter of full professors in Canada are female-identified people (Statistics Canada). To convey my full self, perhaps my signature would need to include a picture of my fat brown body surrounded by my family. Perhaps my parents would need to be in that picture, naming the ways that my accomplishments are built on their care and working-class immigrant labor. Maybe my signature, to be authentic, would need to acknowledge why I disappear from 3–4 every day for school pickup without coyly dancing around the nuances of my actual life, and would make visible the gap in my week where I visit my parents to provide support. Part of my joy in academic work is precisely the flexibility that it has offered as I have grown my family, but I tire of the sneakiness, the pretense that I either do not have a family or that my family does not consume too much of my time and attention.20 A sincere signature would have to allow for this particular acknowledgment, one that I know is experienced by other academic caregivers. Would my sense of unbelonging have been altered if I had seen a signature such as the one I have dreamed up here? What worlds would change if we allowed this to be a space in which we were truly seen, in which we admitted what matters? Jen: And what could a sincere signature include for me? I love the idea May shares around including images of family and about notes on temporalities. As May expresses, those might be caregiving or parenting temporalities that make clear when and why one can/not respond to email. For me, they might include notes about crip, maddened, or anticapitalist temporalities. I have recently been delighted to read that some of my like-minded colleagues have included statements in their signatures that signal time generosity, noting people may have different work/ life rhythms. Other colleagues note in their signatures that they may not respond right away or, indeed, for days! That feels exceptionally bold, but it also signals the privilege that a tenured professor like me has to make such a statement. How would it land with someone outside of tenure, whose job/income depends on immediate response and on colonial timeliness?21 I have also been struck by the use of quotes in signatures and how they are tiny windows into more fulsome biographies, narratives, and worldviews.

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Then there are those now including links in their signatures, links not to their own publications (as required in some academic institutions) but to events and organizations they support. These too are windows into thoughtaction-worlds beyond the limitations of title and degree. They are also conduits and channels for what Yao-Ti Li names as ‘digital togetherness,’ a kind of digital relationality that affords storytelling and resists isolation. My signature fantasies have included all of these possibilities as well as memes, lyrics, poems, and art. They have also included questions such as “And how are you, dear reader?”, questions that signal connection over competition because I truly want everyone to make it. Like May, my signature fantasies revolve around the multiplicities of who we are. I imagine constantly changing signatures, with weekly lyrics, private and public roles, and reveals. These fantasies mess with academic capitalism.22 They interrupt dehumanization and extraction. They speak to the myriad of truths about who we are in this work. Where Do We Go from Here? Jen: Thinking about this question, about digital togetherness,23 and an ending for this piece, I kept coming back to the differences between how I have learned to introduce myself in a good and anti-colonial way in person and in my current academic signature. Having completed the Decolonizing Education Certificate in circle at the Centre for Indigegogy,24 I have come to undersptand that in circle, a good introduction takes time. It takes up the questions: who are you, where do you come from and what is your intention here? It goes back to go forward. It starts with the land, with whom we are as human beings first before speaking to what we do. Like the bio I included for this piece, it speaks to treaty, to relationships, and to responsibilities both personal and professional. It is not brief; it is not reductive and will not fit ‘in the space provided’. It also changes the nature of communication, including emails. If included in my signature (perhaps in full, or perhaps as a link?), each and every email would be altered, in a good way, by such a good introduction. The tone would matter, and the carefulness of each word would matter because I was offering these words in relation with the reader. As I imagine doing this, I start to feel an easing of tensions, a clarity of how to proceed, and more surety of where I go from here. If I can transform the signature into a good introduction, it would not be an afterthought, but a forethought. That feels altogether better than how I have signed off thus far. Additionally, I have been wondering about what it would be like to write each other’s signatures, as a kind of activist love letter.25 For May, I would write that “She is wonder, joy, brilliance, care, and curiosity. She is glue, web, transmitter, and creator. She is energy, zing, movement, and the

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kind of love that smells like freshly baked bread. She is counsellor, truthteller, gut-checker and life extender. She plants, she tends, she grows and she is vital to life. If you are lucky enough to receive anything from her, including an email, then consider yourself elevated!” I have a feeling that May’s humility and efficiency might prevent this kind of signature, but just writing it here, I feel I have added to the relational-biography that is this wondrous human. I might have also invited readers of this piece to do the same, to add to what others allow their signature identities to be and say, and to inject love into the barren spaces at the end of the email. May: I think about my circle of beloveds, the people who reach out to me and ask “but how are you really?” I wish my signature could ask this question, could convey that I wish to be here to see others fully. I squirm again, however, at the slight fear of how much more of life would be consumed by caring in this scenario – but I also crave the reciprocity that could emerge from such an arrangement. I learned to care this way from knowing Jen. If I were to write Jen’s signature authentically, I would need to use art and song to convey the enormity of her heart. I would let others know that Jen is not perfect, and that her willingness to sit with imperfection is an invitation to all others to reflect and hold accountability for any places where they, like all humans, fall short. I would want to reveal Jen’s wit and charm, and her capacity for excruciating vulnerability, the sharpest tool in her overflowing toolbox. And then I would return to art and song, because to describe this person with mere words – colonial words – cannot begin to do justice. By way of a tentative conclusion, perhaps this is the call to action we make with this offering. It is a call to reconsider the signature, to resist the signature, and to revel in and reveal the workings of the signature. It might also be to infuse that signature with identities, multiplicities, contexts, caring relations, responsibilities, and truths, and to consider the effects of such words in relation with others. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Kadar, 152. Brostoff and Fournier, 500. Eakin, 44. Cooppan, 585. Kadar, xi. Baines and McBride. Giroux, qtd. in Barnoff et al., 7. Ball and Morrish, qtd. in Barnoff et al., 8. Peters. Shahjahan.

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May Friedman and Jennifer Poole Barnoff et al., 8. Absolon. Ibid. Brostoff and Fornier, 493. Dias. As of April 2022, Ryerson University is now known as Toronto Metropolitan University. Woodly et al. Kondo. Friedman and Poole. Chandler. Shahjahan. Shahjahan. Li. @IndigegogyWLU. Ware.

Works Cited Absolon, Kathy. “Reconnection to Creation: A Spirit of Decolonizing.” Spirituality and Social Justice: Spirit in the Political Quest for a Just World, edited by Norma Jean Proffitt and Cyndy Baskin, Toronto: Canadian Scholars, 2019, pp. 43–64. Baines, Donna and Stephen McBride, eds. Orchestrating Austerity: Impacts and Resistance. Halifax: Fernwood Books, 2014. Barnoff, Lisa, Ken Moffatt, Sarah Todd, and Melanie Panitch. “Academic Leadership in the Context of Neoliberalism: The Practice of Social Work Directors.” Canadian Social Work Review/Revue Canadienne de Service Social, vol. 34, no. 1, 2017, pp. 5–21. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital (1986).” Cultural Theory: An Anthology, edited by Imre Szeman and Timothy Kaposy, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 81–93. Brostoff, Alex and Lauren Fournier. “Introduction: Autotheory ASAP! Academia, Decoloniality and ‘I’.” ASAP/Journal, vol. 6, no. 3, 2021, pp. 489–502. Chandler, Mielle. “Emancipated Subjectivities and the Subjugation of Mothering Practices.” Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, edited by Andrea O’Reilly, Toronto: Demeter, 2007, pp. 529–541. Cooppan, Vilashini. “Skin, Kin, Kind, I/you/we: Autotheory’s Compositional Grammar.” ASAP/Journal, vol. 6, no. 3, 2021, pp. 583–605. Dias, Giselle. “Teachings from Spruce: The Nature of Prisons.”Odagahodhes: Reflecting on Our Journeys, edited by Gae Ho Hwako Norma Jacobs and Timothy B. Leduc, Montreal: McGill-Queens, 2022, pp. 218–234. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Friedman, May and Jennifer Poole. “Drawing Close: Critical Nurturing as Pedagogical Practice.” Teaching as Scholarship, edited by Jacqui Gingras, Pamela Robinson, Janice Waddell and Linda D. Cooper, Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier UP, 2016, pp. 89–106.

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Kadar, Marlene. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. Kadar, Marlene. Reading Life Writing: An Anthology. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1993. Kadar, Marlene, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault and Susanna Egan, eds. Tracing the Autobiographical. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2005. Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Berkeley: Ten Speed, 2014. Li, Yao-Ti. “Digital Togetherness as Everyday Resistance: The Use of New Media in Addressing Work Exploitation in Rural Areas.” New Media & Society, February 2022. Peters, Michael. “Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Foucauldian Perspective.” The Journal of Educational Enquiry, vol. 2, no. 2, 2001, pp. 58–71. Shahjahan, Riyad A. “Being ‘Lazy’ and Slowing Down: Toward Decolonizing Time, Our Body, and Pedagogy.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 47, no. 5, 2015, pp. 488–501. Smith, Linda Tuhuwai. “Research through Imperial Eyes.” Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 49–65. Statistics Canada. Table 3 7–10-0077-01. “Number and median age of full-time teaching staff at Canadian universities, by highest earned degree, staff functions, rank, gender.” 01 January 2023. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv. action?pid=3710007701. Accessed 22 May 2023. Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939.” The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, vol. 1, Montreal: McGill-Queens, 2015. Tuck, Eve and Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–40. Woodly, Deva, Rachel H. Brown, Mara Marin, Shatema Threadcraft, Christopher Paul Harris, Jasmine Syedullah, and Miriam Ticktin. “The Politics of Care.” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 20, 2021, pp. 890–925. Ware, Syrus Marcus. “The Black Radical: Fungibility, Activism, and Portraiture in These Times.” Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis, edited by Eliza Steinbock, Bram Ieven and Marijke de Valck, New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 158–168.

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Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards Academic Women’s Efforts to Reframe Success Alison L. Black, Sandra Elsom, and Vicki Schriever

We are three academic women: friends, collaborators, colleagues. For three years, we have been deliberately cultivating “a time of friendship.”1 through a co-mentoring relationship where we spend time being together, thinking together, and writing together. Our relationship is trusting, authentic, and worthy of the time and effort required to sustain it.2 We have drawn inspiration from authors who write of a kinder, more hopeful academic culture and examined what “slow scholarship”3 and playing the “infinite game”4 might look like for us. Notions of belonging, being, and becoming have been central to our conversations and imaginings, and essential to our thoughts and writing about mentoring, womanhood, motherhood, and academic career self-construction.5 We are at different places in our academic careers: early-career (Sandie – doctoral student mid-PhD), mid-career (Vicki – post-PhD four years), and late-career (Ali – post-PhD 22 years). Collectively, we have 49 years in the academy. However, the likelihood of any of us progressing beyond Level C/ Senior Lecturer is slim given the statistics revealing that Australian university leaders are nearly three times more likely to be a man than a woman – with “86% more men than women at associate professor and professor levels D and E.”6 It is also important to note the institutional culture of our workplace, where our discipline area is not valued and no one in our department has been promoted beyond Level C in over a decade. Qualitative research, including autoethnography and life-writing, is dismissively described by our senior managers as ‘not strong research.’ Performative expectations at our university have intensified. In the last five years, structural change has been constant. Negotiating the ever-changing expectations, policies, frameworks, and standards amidst restructures and pandemics has been exhausting. Academics in our institution communicate feeling exploited, disillusioned, oppressed, cynical, undervalued, and pessimistic about their academic futures. Pressures to ‘do more with less’ have increased across academia with DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-5

Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards 69 the corporatization and competition of higher education. Over the last year, more than 40,000 academic colleagues have lost their jobs in Australian universities. Horrifically, it has been revealed that alongside these national job losses, many Australian universities made surplus profits in the hundred millions – ours included. And so it is, that in this precarious environment, we have been a ‘triad of trust;’ a safe, supportive co-mentoring circle. This physical and emotional support and place of professional trust, “a safety umbrella under which we can operate with strategic acts of defiance,” helps us remember we belong, we make important contributions, and we are not alone.7 We “actively reach out” and share inspiration, ideas, and resources even though the “busy (bullshit) work required of academics makes it difficult to find that time.”8 We plan and enact life-giving collaborative projects, and we listen and bear witness to our individual and collective stories. Our commitment to mutual support has been fueled by a desire for a “different way of being in academia.”9 Practically, this means we connect fortnightly, often corresponding outside of our scheduled meeting times. We discuss the impact of our institution’s highly regulated and corporatized messages and expectations on our daily experience. We feel the impacts in terms of our wellbeing, our sense of self, our sense of safety, and our career concerns. Around us swirls continuous change. Amidst this change-weariness, we resist the repressive norms which review our work and deem it/us worthy/ unworthy. Idealistically, we want to make a difference. We want to build a workplace for ourselves, and for others,10 that enables us to have a family life, be healthy, and “balance imbalances.”11 We recognize the danger of “investing wholeheartedly” in our academic work, because “academic love is inherently one-sided.”12 And so, with this essay we are trying to think beyond the institution’s performance-driven metrics and refuse exploitative frames of reference. We are playing with possibilities, acknowledging personal realities and lives, and determining our own criteria for a meaningful, sustainable, and successful academic life. What Is a Successful Academic Life? There is (too) much research about the devastating impact of neoliberal structures on academics.13 Gill and Donaghue describe this impact as a “deep crisis,” and a “psychosocial and somatic catastrophe” in the lives of academic staff.14 With its comparison, surveillance, and audit culture – made visible in university performance standards, unrealistic promotion expectations, and corporatized messages about required outputs – the contemporary university relies on academics to be absurdly productive. The pandemic has exacerbated academics’ experiences of overwork, burnout, chronic stress, exhaustion, depression, pessimism, and illness.15 In public forums, brave colleagues have shared their sense of feeling

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stretched to points of breaking. We, too, have felt this stress, for we work in a culture that expects us to prioritize our work over our wellbeing. So, who decides our value? Pope-Ruark suggests “when we depend on external validation, we see competition at every corner.”16 To have a greater sense of who we are and who we want to be, exploration of “new” definitions of “excellence and success” based on “purpose” and how we “make meaning” of our life and work are needed.17 Our meeting and writing together reminds us that if we are to play “the long game” and manage the barrage of “finite games, we need to work in ways that nourish us, that support our ability to imagine other possibilities for being an academic – possibilities where we are engaged, well, optimistic, and present.”18 We recognize that adding calls for personal intentionality or activation of personal agency to an “otherwise untouched system” is highly problematic, and potentially “silencing and paralyzing.”19 However, our collaborative and active reframing and naming of what successful academic lives might look like, sound like, or feel like in our lives is helping us pay attention. Redefining Success: Tapping into Personal Definitions and Desires We are inspired by other activist women. Inspirational blogger, Loleen Berhdahl, pens a blog called Academia Made Easier. Her ideas, and specifically her April 2022 post “How to create a plan for success that allows flexibility,” sparked this essay. In this post, Loleen encourages academics to create a personalized success continuum that reflects their own lived realities and considers personal wellness in definitions of success. Engaging with her ideas, we reflected on the pressures we feel about productivity and the normalization of burnout.20 The neoliberal university plays with us in such a way that despite the volume of tasks we do accomplish, we often find ourselves feeling inadequate because the tasks never end. To avoid binary concepts like winners and losers, success or failure, Loleen encourages readers to consider success “holistically” and “on a scale.”21 She defines over-activity as worse than inactivity and her continuum of “not good, good, better, best, worst” communicates “productivity and effort are great until the point where they aren’t,” and the academic “falls off a burnout cliff.”22 ‘Success rubrics’ seem like a strange tool with which to witness our lives and work. The neoliberal university gives so much “agency to documents.”23 Our lived experiences and so much of our academic work are reduced to creating inventories, collecting data and evidence, and creating and evaluating documentation. Creating our own rubrics is aspirational, incomplete, and dangerous. There is a risk we, too, will fixate on what we do, rather than who we are. Our academic personas are “shaped by a culture of outcomes” by “what an academic does,” not “who an academic is.”24

Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards 71 Creating our own success benchmarks has been an imperfect process of reflection and attention. We share here our efforts to reframe success, think holistically about our lives and work, and get specific about what is important to us. This playful and experimental exercise has offered an opportunity to notice and critique the (external and internalized) “neoliberal voice” which tells us to “do more and be more,” and listen instead to “quieter, kinder, more humane voices,”25 and our personal values. Writing our rubrics has become a form of life writing, seeing our careers as stories, imagining new ways of being, describing these ways of being, and taking opportunities to live them more deliberately.26 Our writing is offering a space to reflect, explore new forms of knowledge, and generate new critical perspectives, providing us with a mechanism for intentionality, “resistance, advocacy, testimony, and healing.”27 Rather than just succumbing to the negative effects of production and ‘efforting,’ we are actively engaged in constructing our own career narratives and identifying the strategies and environments that best enable the narratives we desire.28 A Rubric-Writing Methodology Academics will be familiar with using rubrics to clarify expectations of a task. Our process is also one of clarification. Loleen recharacterizes rubrics as a writing tool, a way to capture ideas and desires.29 In writing criteria, we are identifying what is most important for our lives and work. Our rubric writing methodology is a way of paying attention to what nourishes us and to the activities that support our replenishment. Thinking and writing provide opportunities to author our lives and work more deliberately. Our processes of writing are nurturing. Meeting together to engage in purposeful dialogue always leaves us feeling more connected – like we are a triad of co-conspirators determining “to adopt different approaches to pedagogy and research” so we can “feel nourished and replenished.”30 Autoethnography, a common genre for life writing scholars, is a methodology that helps us “restore ourselves and our work.”31 From this place of vulnerability, inclusion, and support, we are tuning in to ways to “endure and prevail” in the academy, and feel more “positive about our role.”32 Developing our rubrics has been complicated and paradoxical. It has had back-and-forth, push-and-pull-like qualities as we have tried to identify personal values and goals and set boundaries to manage real-life complexities. It has been a challenge to avoid recreating more outputdriven foci, to avoid critical or repressive self-assessments, and to be comfortable with the idealistic dissatisfaction and frustration that can accompany the realities and everydayness of living and working in academia. We understand Sims’s fear, that long-term “exposure to neoliberal managerial thinking” can “change the person,” and like her, we wonder if

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we can remain in higher education without being changed.33 Our own rubric expectations are messy, despite our underlying desire to remain true to ourselves and to our values. Even so, our rubric creating-thinking-writing-living process is inward and private, a (sometimes playful) way to review and (hopefully) undo entrenched neoliberal visions of success and check our self-authored views of career success. Our rubric writing is a way to imagine and reclaim our identities as humans (not just academics) and refocus our daily efforts in ways that feel life-giving. This is a process that connects us to who we are, where we are, where we want to go, and who we want to be. It is connecting us with what we care about; with our why. It is also a relational methodology, where “sharing experiences is an important basis for solidarity.”34 In sharing our self-authored rubrics and our weekly reflections, we often find ourselves communicating vulnerably, revealing our humanness, our quiet desires and hopes, our setbacks and disappointments. Sandie’s Story Sandie came to academia in a midlife career change. Despite her workercentered views about the nature of the employment relationship (she rarely works evenings or weekends), she found that academic work resisted constraint. The workload is nebulous, fascinating, and dynamic. A doctoral student and a relatively new academic, Sandie wanted to develop efficient practices that would allow her to pursue stimulating endeavors without working 60–80 hours a week. Sandie expected the rubric creation process to be straightforward. She wanted to design a rubric that would prioritize her doctoral work and health and wellbeing. She identified desirable behaviors: work-related (academic writing and reading); and non-work related (pleasure/leisure reading, and exercise), and attempted to create time-based goals and descriptors for each one. She commenced enthusiastically on Monday, and by Wednesday had hit her first hurdle: I was working in NVIVO, and it was going well, so I kept going for three hours instead of taking an hour to read. This would be fine, since I need to get the analysis done, but it means I didn’t do any reading. This made me feel guilty, even though I was productive. Shame was not a desired outcome for our rubric writing exercise! At the end of the week, Sandie judged herself and determined she had earned a FAIL grade on her initial rubric. This caused her to reconsider her own expectations, the rubric tool, and notions of ‘failure.’ Serendipitously, for her leisure reading, Sandie read a book about habits. She recognized that she was trying to convert avoided behaviors into habits. She considered counting good habits she regularly enacted.

Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards 73 Ultimately, she decided she: … didn’t want to start congratulating myself for good work I’ve already been doing. The point of this rubric is to extend myself. Also, I’d like the rubric to be like a marking rubric, because if I don’t think this is a good way to assess my achievement of personal goals, then why assess students in this way? Sandie, Ali, and Vicki talked through the challenges the rubric creation was highlighting, and how performance, productivity, high expectations, and external definitions of excellence muddied our own determinations of ‘good’ work. Achievement-oriented goals were not intended to induce guilt and frustration! Our goals needed to be connected to personal and professional growth, discovery, lifelong learning goals, and our own personal sense of what we wanted to be doing, and how we wanted to be living. Sandie discarded her attachment to a traditional rubric and simplified the next version by focusing on time on task. Inspired by Vicki, Sandie articulated a specific goal: • To turn positive and productive work and leisure behaviors into habits that replace unhealthy habits like reading excessive social media or news. This simplified rubric helped Sandie focus on what she had identified as most important to her. However, it still felt unsatisfying: 8 August: I bought stickers to reward myself for particularly good work. 15 August: I award myself a sticker for ALL work. Ali pointed out that Sandie’s goals (and reward system) were uncomfortably like what the neoliberal academy asks of us, and from which we are trying to escape. In response, Sandie considered the congruence of her rubric with her personal values. She identified that her rubric helped her to be accountable to herself, and to feel a sense of safety and security. She wanted to connect to practices that enriched her life and gave her a sense of purpose. Progressing her PhD, whilst a neoliberal imperative, was a goal she wanted for herself, too. Still a work in progress, Sandie’s current rubric now looks like a board game. Completing the game involves 36 actions comprising six valued habits. No task is prioritized over another. To minimize ‘busy-work,’ like answering emails, one activity is an ‘email sprint.’ This playful strategy involves spending 7.5 minutes clearing as many emails as she can (Figure 4.1).

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Figure 4.1 Sandra Elsom. Rubric in Progress.

Sandie’s holistic work/life rubric tracks and validates her efforts. In the academy, recognition and reward are infrequent. But Sandie’s worth is not determined by her scholarly productivity or the number of awards she attains. Thinking deeply about what truly matters to her, more than neoliberal evaluation of outputs, is an important focus of reflection for Sandie going forward. Vicki’s Story While open to Loleen’s invitation to determine our own success criteria, Vicki initially found the process of writing a rubric difficult. She struggled to articulate what she valued. Was this to be a rubric that identified goals, aspirations, and a projected view of an idealized self? Or was it to be a document that acknowledged her current reality with all its flaws and failings? I started by identifying a key theme and overarching premise – intentionality. I listed my thoughts about intentionality as: • Being intentional with my time and priorities • Having my priorities serve me and my family, friends, hopes, goals, aspirations, career, and life

Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards 75 • Identifying my goals, and then with intention, seeking, living, and attaining them • Morning pages; Not emails; Creative writing; Research writing. The list of potential areas to represent within her rubric felt deep and wide, as there were so many areas, personally and professionally, that Vicki felt could be enhanced through more focused intention. She selected five areas of focus. These areas: social media; emails; planning, scheduling, and organizing; reading; and writing, were areas of desired change. Applying Loleen’s suggested continua of “not good, good, better, best, and worst” deepened Vicki’s awareness of the self-development she wanted to foster: Visualizing, reflecting, and asking myself, honestly and critically ‘what does this practice look and feel like?’ through each stage of the continuum was thought-provoking. The most confronting aspect was determining my starting point and marking on the rubric where I was currently positioned on each of my criterion. Three areas – social media, emails, and reading were assessed and located in the Worst column, and two areas – ‘plannering’, scheduling and organizing, and writing were self-assessed as being Not Good. The outcome of my self-assessment was disappointment. Too much social media scrolling, and endless checking of emails drains my time. Too little reading, writing and plannering leaves me feeling unfulfilled. I need to reduce the practices that do not serve my life (both in my home and workplace), and to reinvigorate, re-establish, and emphasize those practices that do benefit, serve, and add value. Vicki Schriever – Starting Point Self-Assessment Criterion

Assessed starting point

Descriptor

Social Media

Worst

Constantly picking up my phone at work and at home and allowing myself to be repeatedly distracted from what I am meant/want to be doing. Retreating from living my own life, by spending time watching other people live their lives. (Continued)

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Criterion

Assessed starting point

Descriptor

Emails

Worst

Planning, Organizing, and Scheduling

Not Good

Reading

Worst

Writing

Not Good

Constantly checking emails. Maintaining a habit of checking emails at night, early in the morning, and over the weekend. Allowing emails to dictate my priorities and actions for the day. Forgetting about emails and not responding or taking necessary actions. Not using my planner. Not checking my planner. Not writing down dates for events. Double booking, forgetting things. Not writing ‘to-do’ lists and trying to keep everything in my head. Never picking up a book or journal article. Never reading for relaxation, or learning. Losing the ability to concentrate and read a book or journal article. Having no desire to read. Only writing emails and PP slides to achieve what is required for administration and teaching purposes.

Following her self-assessment, Vicki was motivated to make progress across the rubric continuum, flip the narrative, and move out of the Not Good and Worst columns she had assessed herself as operating in. In search of better ways of working (yet mindful of the tension she felt around the neoliberal discourse of ‘continuous improvement’) she engaged in actions to support her own thriving. This included implementing social media-free days, leaving her phone in another room, accessing emails only on a work computer during an allocated time and then logging off. These simple actions decreased distraction and increased Vicki’s presence. Embedding the use of a planner and notebook into daily use was positive, as current/future commitments could be seen and acknowledged, and what had occurred could be captured and recorded. Overall, her organization and awareness of daily choices were enhanced. Reading for pleasure became an intentional act. A once abandoned book was picked up and read, then another. Packing

Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards 77 a book instead of scrolling on her phone enabled Vicki to redevelop an identity as a reader. Scholarly writing was supported by the focused reflective tasks associated with writing this essay alongside Sandie and Ali. These changes though simple and small, were steps in the right direction. Over the period of a few weeks, I felt more positive, hopeful, and calm. It wasn’t a magical fix-all, but there was more of what was good for me occurring and there was less of what did not serve me well. When meeting with Ali and Sandie, I confidently and happily spoke of the constructive impact this rubric writing and living process was having in my home and work life. But then … the lived realities and workload of semester consumed me … As the teaching semester progressed and workload demands intensified, Vicki’s capacity to progress and engage in her desired practices diminished. The volume and pressure of work became overwhelming. Her mantra became: ‘just get through this semester, just get this task completed,’ and ‘once this activity is completed, then there will be time/space/ margin for reading, writing, plannering.’ At the end of a long day, Vicki had no capacity for more than mindless scrolling, and the inclination to check emails at all hours of the day was back in full force, as there was always someone or something requiring her input. Vicki was still able to find joy in her teaching as supporting and guiding students in their learning journey was meaningful; however, making progress in her rubric categories of Best (or even Good or Better) was rendered unachievable. The work demands of the semester were constant and extreme. Together we reflected further on Vicki’s (a mid-career academic, certainly no novice) personalization of her experiences. How much of this was “the consequence of [her individual] choices”35 and how much was the “outcome of systemic disadvantage”?36 The always-on culture of emails and social media encourages our hypervigilance! We constantly engage with email to manage and stay on top of the ‘busy-work’ of unreasonable and exploitative workloads.37 We succumb to the myth that working extra hard and long today will reduce tomorrow’s pressures. Working all the time is part of “the accepted social imaginary” and “neoliberal ideology” regardless of career stage, and it is difficult to “maintain a sense of self-efficacy” and remain in a position of agency.38 We turned to Gill’s ear, that long-term “exposure to neoliberal managerial thinking” can “change the person,” and like her, we wonder if we can remain in higher education without being changed.39 How might we engage critically with “the multiple moments” where we feel like our experiences of work are out of control, and our

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responses to the work are suboptimal? Why do we keep identifying that these feelings and behaviors areas are our fault, due to our lack of intentional focus – instead of connecting these feelings “with neoliberal practices of power” in the university?40 Ali’s Story Ali wanted to write a guiding statement about what success meant to her. In late-career, Ali reflected on her possible legacy. She contemplated experiences of joy, kindness, presence, and ways of reducing stress. She created a long list of dot points but struggled to form criteria. She asked herself: What am I all about? Where in my work do I feel most whole? Where in my work do I feel most divided? More lists. More dot points. Ali found herself writing too many statements, with some too vague to measure, and others too specific to be meaningful. She found turning heartfelt musings and longings into rubric standards incredibly difficult (she was not a fan of rubrics!). Ali engaged in many unsatisfactory rubricmaking attempts. I have found it challenging to settle on the criteria. I am not happy with my efforts. The whole purpose is to reject the academic performance standards framework and the narrow measures of ‘success’ and to be explicit about what matters to me. Rubrics expect me to include numbers and measures – how many hours for sleep or exercise. But I want to reject this kind of measuring! This isn’t the way I want to ‘count’ my work and my life. I want a values-driven rubric where I am not measuring whether I am ‘good enough,’ ‘doing enough,’ or ‘achieving enough.’ I want to articulate that the infinite game is the one I want to play. I don’t want to set myself a whole lot of finite games or measures. To remain in academia, I need to have a sense of purpose and meaning. During regular meetups, Ali found listening to Sandie and Vicki’s actioning of their priorities inspirational. As the weeks passed, she found herself engaged in sympathetic participation in the areas they were working on, noticing her own phone-scrolling and email-checking behaviors, how often she was engaging in reading for leisure, optimizing her planner use, and avoiding emails outside of work hours. After listening to Sandie and Vicki talk about the power of working intentionally with small goals and steps, Ali tried again. This time she started to make some headway/heartway. Ali used her rubric to focus on nourishment. Criteria centered on five connected areas of self-care and wellbeing maintenance/ protection, inviting her to notice, track, and act where needed:

Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards 79 • Time management (with a difference): Creating lazy/slow time and space in a workday and a workweek. Not overworking. Using her planner and online calendar to strategically ‘hold space.’ • Boundary management: Practicing boundary setting. Not volunteering to take on more, saying NO (creating and employing a ‘thanks but no’ email signature) and declining requests for more work. Keeping space open for self-care, energizing projects, creativity, and inspiration, and for the administrivia of academia: ‘the stuff that comes up.’ • Stress and emotion management: Practicing mindfulness and presence. Mindful mornings and slow starts. Taking breaks. Moving her body. Reducing stress through meditation. • Healthy habits: making wellness choices around nutrition, alcohol consumption, time in nature, and exercise and movement; listening to her body. • Purpose-building habits: Engaging in regular habits of writing. Morning pages. Not emails. Creative writing. Research writing. A regular sufferer of burnout, one of the biggest takeaways for Ali was Loleen’s directive to have a worst column in the rubric focused on overwork and ‘over-activity.’ The purpose of the worst column is to draw attention to the behaviors that create burnout. Too often we put these kinds of expectations and high-achieving levels of activity in our best column. Ali’s worst column outlined the behaviors she wanted to avoid: My diary is overflowing with tasks. I am overworking; working more than seven hours a day often; working over a weekend, working when I could be prioritizing my own creative pursuits or rest. Experiencing overwhelm and feeling like I am drowning in work. Doing all my work in front of the computer – too much sitting. Not engaging in any lifegiving pauses, routines or rituals that give me time and space. Too much ‘efforting.’ Work is intense and intensified. Writing her rubric helped Ali see where and why her work practices were so often a recipe for burnout: This rubric is helping me say ‘Enough!’ It is helping me notice burnoutpromoting practices. It is helping me make decisions with clarity. I am grateful for this process. I am reducing stress, enacting boundaries, and doing more of what feels nourishing and meaningful. I am doing less. And less is giving me more. I am finding the process is empowering me to continue to make choices in favor of myself, my relationships, my health. It has helped me listen to my weariness, to what is behind it, and to recognize I am so much more than the institution’s definition or vision of success. I am

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Ali reads her printed rubric document every other day, checking in on herself with awareness and self-compassion, and adjusting her focus accordingly. Ali has not had face-to-face teaching commitments this semester. She is aware that it has been much easier to meet her goals when her diary has not been completely crowded with classes and coordination. Next semester will bring more demands and an over-full teaching load, so Ali knows protecting her wellbeing will require much more attention and effort. However, Ali feels hopeful she is better equipped to survive her intensified workload. Yet, she is aware of her tendency to participate in a working life where there is “often no boundary between work and anything else.”41 Ali is aware she has, with her rubric, been attempting to heal some academic injuries and “soothe some of the harsh psychic consequences of the always-on, constantly striving, contemporary academic culture.”42 She also knows, and our shared conversations remind us of this repeatedly: when “the academic culture” is “a substantial source of the problem,” it is quite problematic to arrive at solutions that are mostly “an individual matter of better self-care” or that “involve work to change the self, in one form or another.”43 Authoring Our Lives and Work: The Dangers of Individualist Frameworks We want to do academia differently and we don’t want our “vitality, selfimage, and identity” to be “chained to productivity and reputation as the culture of higher ed would make us believe.”44 But, establishing what is “meaningful and realistic productivity” is no easy task and this does “wax and wane at different decision points and stages of our careers, personal lives, health, and interests.”45 From sharing our stories of experience, we recognize the structural barriers are continuous across the course of women’s academic careers and “one has to develop sufficient emotional intelligence to withstand daily (sometimes hourly) attacks on professional identity.”46 In seeking a holistic continuum of life/work success, our rubrics have helped us remember that academic work has no boundaries, question if it is possible to “balance imbalances,” and recognize the psychosocial impacts of neoliberalism.47 The neoliberal university has caused us to automatically internalize experiences of not meeting standards (even our own) as shameful, and that we must work harder. This exercise in

Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards 81 authoring our lives through our rubrics has revealed we must take care not to leave “the power relations and structural contradictions of the neoliberal university untouched and unchallenged.”48 We need to continue to reimagine universities and engage in collective resistance.49 Our relationship of professional trust is a space in which to do this. This experiment has facilitated vulnerable sharing of the peaks and valleys of our academic lives, reminded us of the gendered inequalities that exist in our institution, of our curtailed level of seniority, the unequal impacts of parenting, the incidences of overwork and stress, the emotional labor, and how the “housework of universities” (first-year teaching, pastoral care, committee work) is so often left to women.50 By ‘rubric-ing’ our work/lives, we are identifying needed boundaries and naming those experiences that support wellbeing, motivation, and meaning. We recognize that we are “deeply invested in and passionately attached to work,” and the pleasures of our academic work often “bind us more tightly into a neoliberal regime with ever-growing costs, not least to ourselves.”51 But our passion and care also help us to survive and find meaning. In so many ways, our rubric creating/writing exercise offers caution and reminds us to stay vigilant to how neoliberalism “directs our attention to new and emerging forms of discipline, which operate as technologies of selfhood that bring into being the endlessly self-monitoring, planning, prioritizing, »responsibilized« subject” the university requires.52 An endemic feature of academia is the “punishing intensification of work,” and an “internalized” “audit culture.”53 We need to take care in applying our rubrics so that we do not perfect our “polished self-discipline and self-governance” and become “model neoliberal subjects” who are highly self-regulating, selfauditing, and conscientious.54 We seek to understand the relationship between our work and our psychosocial experiences, how our “long hours and bulimic patterns of working,” our “passionate attachment to the work,” the challenges of “keeping up” with the huge volume of work, and “the collapse or erasure of boundaries between work and play” are daily features of life in the contemporary university.55 We hope our imperfect and experimental approach to “managing the unmanageable” might offer insights and hope to others seeking to frame their own futures and construct meaningful academic careers.56 Sharing our personal experiences, creative processes, challenges, and reflections is a political act, for this is a dialogue with larger cultural narratives about academic success. It is time to speak back to the neoliberal university and call out the harmful impacts of exploitative expectations on academics, and in particular, academic women.57 When reading our essay, we hope readers will remember their own worth, and recognize the deep, structural challenges at play, even when they seek to mess with the metrics and set their own standards for what it means to be successful.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Nixon, 1. Schriever and Grainger, 720. Mountz et al., 1235. Harré et al., 5. Schriever et al., 55; Schriever, 1962; Henderson et al., v; Black, 25. Devlin. Sims, Women Academics, 4. Ibid., 4. Black and Dwyer, 6. Baker. Pope-Ruark, 163. Baker, 29–30. Bottrell and Manathunga, 1; Gill, 42; Sims. Ibid., 91. Pope-Ruark, 56; Suart et al., 1; Taylor et al., 1. Pope-Ruark, 86. Ibid., 86. Harré et al., 12. Gill and Donaghue, 96. Pope-Ruark, 16. Berdahl. Ibid. Ahmed, 206. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Assembling Academic Persona, 19. Moriarty, 3. Dix, 6. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Academic Career Construction, 55. Dix, 5. Berdahl. Moriarty, 4. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 6. Sim, Academic Leadership, 73. Gill and Donaghue, 96. Sims, Women Academics, 3. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Gill, 40. Gill, 40–1. Gill, 53. Gill and Donaghue, 98. Ibid. Pope-Ruark, 18. Ibid. Sims, Women Academics, 3. Gill, 51. Gill and Donaghue, 92. Black and Dwyer.

Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards 83 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Brabazon, 53 Gill. 52. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 48. Capecci and Cage, 36; Sims, Women Academics, 3.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Institutional Life. Duke: Durham, 2012. Baker, Kelly J. Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces. Kaloomps: Raven Books, 2017. Berdahl, Loleen. “How to Create a Plan for Success that Allows Flexibility.” Academia Made Easier, https://loleen.substack.com/p/how-to-create-a-plan-forsuccess. Accessed 1 April 2022. Black, Alison L. “Responding to Longings for Slow Scholarship: Writing Ourselves into Being.” Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir, edited by Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 23–34. Black, Alison L. and Rachael Dwyer. Reimagining the Academy: Shifting Towards Kindness, Connection, and an Ethics of Care. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Bottrell, Dorothy and Catherine Manathunga. Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume 1: Seeing through the Cracks. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. Brabazon, Tara. 12 Rules for (Academic) Life: A Stroppy Feminist’s Guide through Teaching. London: Springer Nature, 2022. Capecci, John and Timothy Cage. Living Proof: Telling Your Story to Make a Difference. 3rd ed., Granville Circle Press, 2019. Devlin, Marcia. “No Change at the Top for University Leaders as Men Outnumber Women 3 to 1.” The Conversation, 8 March 2021, https://theconversation.com/ no-change-at-the-top-for-university-leaders-as-men-outnumber-women-3-to-1154556. Accessed 1 May 2022. Dix, Hywel. “Career Construction Theory and Life Writing.” Life Writing, special issue, vol. 17, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–7. Gill, Rosalind. “Breaking the Silence: The Hidden Injuries of the Neoliberal University.” Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, edited by Róisín Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill, London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 228–244. Gill, Rosalind and Ngaire Donaghue. “Resilience, Apps and Reluctant Individualism: Technologies of Self in the Neoliberal Academy.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 54, 2016, pp. 91–99. Harré, Niki, et al. “The University as an Infinite Game: Revitalising Activism in the Academy.” Australian Universities’ Review, vol. 59, no. 2, 2017, pp. 5–13. Henderson, Linda, et al. (Re)Birthing the Feminine in Academe: Creating Spaces of Motherhood in Patriarchal Contexts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

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Moriarty, Jess. Autoethnographies from the Neoliberal Academy: Rewilding, Writing and Resistance in Higher Education. London: Routledge, 2020. Mountz, Alison, et al. “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol. 14, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1235–1259. Nixon, Jon, et al. “The Time of Friendship.” Journal of Educational Administration and History, vol. 48, no. 2, 2016, pp. 160–170. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa. “Academic Career Construction: Personnel Documents as Personal Documents.” Life Writing, special issue, vol. 17, no. 1, 2020, pp. 45–57. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa. “Assembling Academic Persona and Personhood in a Digital World.” Persona Studies, special issue, vol. 8, no. 1, 2022, pp. 9–21. Pope-Ruark, Rebecca. Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Schriever, Vicki. “Merging Motherhood and Doctoral Studies: An Autoethnography of Imperfectly Weaving Identities.” The Qualitative Report, vol. 26, no. 6, 2021, pp. 1962–1973. Schriever, Vicki and Peter Grainger. “Mentoring an Early Career Researcher: Insider Perspectives from the Mentee and Mentor.” Reflective Practice: Intentional and Multidisciplinary Perspectives, vol. 20, no. 6, 2019, pp. 720–731. Schriever, Vicki, et al. “Mentoring Beyond the ‘Finite Games’: Creating a Space for Connection, Collaboration and Friendship.” Reimagining the Academy: Shifting Towards Kindness, Connection, and an Ethics of Care, edited by Vicki Schriever et al., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 55–78. Sims, M. “Women Academics in the World of Neoliberal, Managerial Higher Education.” Societies, vol. 11, 2021, p. 25. Sims, M. “Academic Leadership in a Neoliberal Managerial World: An Autoethnography of My Career.” Social Alternatives, vol. 41, no. 1, 2022, pp. 70–75. Suart, Celeste, et al. “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Perceived Publication Pressure among Academic Researchers in Canada.” PLoS ONE, vol. 17, no. 6, 2022. Taylor, Carol A., et al. “Grim Tales: Meetings, Matterings and Moments of Silencing and Frustration in Everyday Academic Life.” International Journal of Educational Research, vol. 99, 2020, p. 101513.

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‘Making Spreadsheets Won’t Get You Tenure’ Autoethnography, Women Administrative Faculty, and the Genres That Make Them (In)Visible Candis Bond

I was a few weeks into my first full-time academic job as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at a midsized, public university in Georgia – a position I still hold. I was sitting in my department’s conference room with other tenure-track faculty and our assigned mentors, waiting for a meeting on tenure and promotion to begin. The department chair settled herself at the head of the table and began to explain tenure and promotion requirements. As she spoke and showed us the documents that would comprise our tenure dossier several years down the road, I experienced a growing sense of alarm. Teaching, research, service … Teaching, research, service … the terms kept coming up. We would get just one page devoted to each of these categories in our dossiers. The chair finished her discussion and opened the conversation to questions. I slowly raised my hand. “What about administration? Do we get a page devoted to administrative work?” I asked tentatively. A mentor chuckled. “Making spreadsheets won’t get you tenure,” she said definitively. The realization that 50% of my contractual effort allocation would not count toward my promotion and tenure unsettled me. That 50% represented my role as the first tenure-track writing center director at the university. None of the other junior faculty members in the room (and not many across the university) had this kind of effort breakdown. Unless I found creative ways to insert this work into other documents, it would remain invisible. And yet, that 50% was, in my opinion, the best and most interesting part of my job. It was why I had taken the position. I did not imagine ‘administration’ to be making spreadsheets; I imagined growing a program, expanding services, and impacting the university curriculum. DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-6

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This meeting was one of the first of what Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, in their book Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research, call “epiphany” moments in my career as a woman administrative faculty (WAF) member navigating the tenure and promotion process within a US university.1 Epiphanies, they explain, are “those remarkable and out of the ordinary life-changing experiences that transform us or call us to question our lives.”2 As an earlycareer assistant professor also tasked with administering a university-wide program, I realized quickly that the performance evaluation and tenure documents my university used did not reflect the daily realities of my labor. Furthermore, as a first-generation academic from a working-class background, my lack of knowledge about academic genres early in my career impacted my ability to engage them in empowered ways. In this essay, I theorize how these genres – most notably annual performance reviews and tenure and promotion dossiers – shape women’s career experiences and influence acts of self-representation. As women write in these genres, they must make intentional choices about what to disclose and keep private. These decisions can have profound significance for how they are perceived by others, their career trajectory, and their sense of self. For women who must toe the line between faculty and administrative roles, these genres present challenges and opportunities, limitations, and affordances. Methods and Findings: Rhetorical Genre Analysis and Autoethnography As I reflected on my career and the genres it required, I used rhetorical genre analysis (RGA) and autoethnography as guiding methodologies and methods. RGA emerged out of my field of Rhetoric and Composition and a sub-field called rhetorical genre studies (RGS), which was established in the 1980s. Prior to this time, the study of genres focused on “textual regularities” such as types of language used and formatting conventions.3 These “textual regularities” were discussed in a vacuum, detached from pertinent social situations, activity networks, and actors. The emergence of RGS, however, shifted attention to the ways genres are grounded in and emerge out of social activities. In their foundational text on RGS, Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway explain that a rhetorical understanding of “genre” connects “a recognition of regularities in discourse types with a broader social and cultural understanding of language in use.”4 They point out that using RGS as a lens to examine genre helps unearth implicit assumptions about communication strategies and how they relate to social and cultural norms.5 In her now-famous essay “Genre as Social Action,” RGS theorist Carolyn Miller argues that genres emerge out of recurrent

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social activities and acquire “meaning from situation and from the social context in which that situation arose.”6 I use RGA to uncover how academic career genres respond to and sustain gendered social activities, norms, and expectations. RGA asks one to identify and analyze elements of the rhetorical situation, including speaker, message, purpose, audience, exigency or occasion, and past, present, and future contexts. It also encourages consideration of the limitations and affordances of specific genres for representing social actions, including the ways genres can constrain certain actors while privileging others. I pair RGA with autoethnography in order to reflect on how my personal experiences as a WAF connect with wider socio-political contexts. Autoethnography uses the personal to consider wider social trends, but it is a reflexive tool for (re)constructing and creating the “I” that evaluative academic career genres so often leave out. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explain that life writing is not just recording life events; rather, it is “an ongoing process of reflection” that includes “how one has become who he or she is.”7 For women, the process of autobiographical self-construction can be empowering, a way of “talking back” and gaining agency, as Smith has argued.8 Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle suggests academic career genres be viewed as autobiographic texts to allow for women’s embodied, lived experiences. She notes, however, that as they currently stand, these genres are so “driven by form that there is no room for self-awareness and control over the construction of ideal academic subjectivities.”9 Autoethnography, as both a research method and form of life writing, can elicit and make legible narratives of academic subjectivity otherwise silenced, offering women a sense of agency as they compose in career genres. It can also help women connect personal experiences to wider social trends and contexts. I hope my stories, while specific to myself, my US institution, and my intersectional identity as a white, heterosexual, cisgender woman, resonate with women in similar roles and provide models for “sense-making processes.”10 In addition to offering a narrative of critique that can give women more agency when writing in academic career genres, I hope my stories inspire readers to incorporate autoethnographic practice into their career narrative process. The research questions guiding my study were: what are the experiences of women who occupy both faculty and administrative roles, and how do existing academic career genres make transparent or obscure these experiences? As I thought reflexively about epiphanal moments in my career as a WAF, I focused on times when I engaged in emotional labor due to the tension I felt between my administrative and faculty roles. Two major themes emerged through my study: 1) academic career genres reflect patriarchal, gendered assumptions about labor that constrain WAF as they attempt to self-represent and assign value to their labor and 2) these genres

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do not provide space for emotional labor related to role duality and conflation that WAF undertake daily. I define ‘role duality’ as times when a WAF member’s role as faculty competes with their role as a unit administrator. ‘Role conflation,’ on the other hand, occurs when a WAF member’s individual identity as a faculty member is assumed to also define their unit; the unit and the individual faculty member are perceived to be synonymous. Creating Spaces for WAF in Evaluative Genres: Navigating Role Duality and Making Labor Visible Academic career genres, such as annual review documents and tenure and promotion materials, impact women’s agency when performing their professional ethos. RGA can help women identify the frameworks within which they write and the responses and self-representations they have available. RGA prompts critical thinking about questions such as: To what exigency(ies) do I respond? What purpose(s) do I have? What is my ethos? What audience(s) will read these texts and what are their respective expectations and purpose(s) for engaging with my self-representation? All factor into one’s performative act of self-representation in academic career texts, and for WAF, they carry the additional weight of reflecting not only on individual identity, but on programs. Institutional ethnographer Michelle LaFrance explains that the annual review “is a transactional practice that grounds our ongoing conversations about the status and value of our work in the actualities of the everyday doing, knowing, and being of real people.”11 In this section, I focus on this genre and the ways it both prescribes and offers possibilities for self-representation for WAF. I became more conscious of the constraints and affordances offered by these genres in my third year on the tenure track. I vividly recall a meeting with a supervisor that year. I held back tears as I walked down the long, narrow hallway on my way to her office. I was burning the candle at both ends. During my first three years, I had substantially grown my program. My contract was to teach two courses a semester. However, I had implemented in-class writing workshops when I began my position, and these had taken off – I was consistently doing 40–50 workshops each year alongside my teaching. I was still doing all the tasks I had begun three years earlier, but I now had this extra work that did not seem to fit anywhere. In my first year, I did not put any of this new work on my annual review document because I did not know where it would go. During my second and third years, I was inconsistently reporting these activities under teaching or administration, without accounting for them clearly in either category; this was entirely a result of the highly prescriptive form. At our meeting, my supportive supervisor told me that performance reviews were not just informative: they were persuasive genres with

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audiences beyond herself – news to a first-generation academic who thought this genre was merely a tool for communicating my accomplishments within my department. She told me that the dean used reviews to assess requests for effort allocation adjustments and coached me on how to frame my workload narrative so that the dean would understand my labor and find my request compelling. She asked me to consistently place my workshop and staff training labor under “teaching,” and to use the spaces provided to make a case for reducing my classroom teaching assignment so that my new activities were formally integrated into my teaching effort allocation. Taking her advice, I approached my teaching narrative on my annual evaluation very differently that year. I included statements such as: “I have consistently gone beyond my assigned course load (2/2) in my role as writing center director”; “this past year alone, I researched, designed, and presented 40 in-class writing workshops for students, faculty, and professionals”; “in addition to researching and conducting such workshops, I am continually involved in designing staff training”; and “all of these tasks that I complete on a daily, ongoing basis take up large amounts of time, time that far exceeds my assigned teaching effort, which only accounts for my 2/2 course load.” Up until this point in my career, I had never used an annual review to make a specific argument about my workload or reframed my administrative labor so that it carried more weight with university audiences beyond my immediate supervisor. I knew I could make a case for receiving merit raises, so I always made sure to show how I met and exceeded my annual goals. Yet, I did not see that I could also use this genre to reshape my audiences’ expectations of me and the work I do; I had kept my narratives brief and constrained to the format generated by our reporting software rather than thinking of the genre as a rhetorical act of self-presentation. My university’s annual performance review document is standard compared to other R2 public universities in US contexts. It begins with a list of effort categories and duties that fit under each. Effort categories are arranged by priority: teaching, scholarship, clinical care, service, and administration. Administration is listed last and has the fewest duties (five, compared to an average of 15.5 across the other categories). The bullet items listed under “administration” are also not descriptive of duties related to administrative labor; instead, they refer to types of administrative roles faculty might hold (e.g. academic support, student services, etc.). Thus, there is no guiding framework for how the university defines “administration” to help administrative faculty describe their day-to-day labor, set worthy goals, or align their administrative labor with the university’s mission and vision. The remainder of the performance review document is broken into five effort categories. Faculty set goals in each area and provide narratives and self-assessments for each goal within the

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categories. Supervisors also provide an assessment and rationale within each category. Throughout this process, administration comes last. The “introductory effort” category descriptions combined with the lack of emphasis on administration in the remainder of the review makes it challenging for administrative faculty to make their labor visible. This contributes to the role duality I experienced as a young first-generation academic. I left out administrative duties or inconsistently reported them because these activities were not given space and prominence within the review format, and, therefore, appeared unvalued. While all administrative faculty may experience role duality, it is more pronounced for WAF due to the gendered social situations out of which academic career genres emerge. The Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group (SSFNRIG) notes, “Historically, universities have been maledominated, with clear images of the ‘professor’ as a learned man with no obligations aside from his scholarly … tasks.”12 They go on to explain that: The image of the unencumbered worker has had implications for what type of work is valued in the academy and what is not. Tasks that are typically coded as feminine—the care work of dealing with students, the administrative tasks of running departments … are typically less valued work than the work that leads to research publications and grants. This difference in the value of certain work over other types has long been reflected in the criteria for tenure and promotion.13 Katherine Denker further links valuation of labor within the academy to a reward system, arguing that traditionally masculine work, such as research and administration at the executive level, leads to more opportunities for awards and recognition, while feminized labor, such as service, teaching, and mid-level administration, is not recognized within the university’s cultural economy. Cassandra Guarino and Victor Borden report similar findings in their study of women faculty and service. They argue that service and administrative labor, which fall more heavily on women in academe, are perceived as “good citizenship” rather than as compensated roles. This “uncompensated internal service is usually acknowledged and factored into annual performance reviews, but … generally carries less weight than research or teaching, especially in promotion and tenure reviews.”14 Several studies have found that women and BIPOC faculty’s invisible administrative labor can lead to high rates of attrition, or a “leaky pipeline,” as the SSFNRIG calls the phenomenon, as well as barriers to promotion and tenure.15 The invisibility and devaluation of administrative contributions can be particularly demoralizing for women who perceive their administrative roles as central to their academic identity, as I do. It is impossible to separate my role as faculty from my administrative role because it is a

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holistic identity: my scholarship is related to the work I do in the center, my teaching supports the training of center staff, and my service is chosen strategically to advance the mission of the center on campus. The effort categories on annual performance reviews, as well as the required statements within tenure and promotion dossiers, assume that administration is simply unassociated service, contributing to the role duality WAF experience. In my tenure dossier, this forced me to fit my administrative labor into the required statements in ways that may have seemed odd or inappropriate to the committees evaluating my materials. This challenge is an experience of epistemic injustice that is rooted in the rhetorical situations that ground academic labor. Miranda Fricker defines epistemic injustice as “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.”16 She offers two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial, which “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word,” and hermeneutical, which occurs “when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their experiences.”17 WAF are likely to experience both forms of epistemic injustice as they selfrepresent on career texts. They will face prejudices about the value of their work and their identity as women that may undermine the salience of their narratives; they may also lack the tools, language, and genres required to make sense of their unique experiences and contributions. Although the genres I worked within as a WAF were constraining, they also offered affordances and room for rhetorical play that positively impacted my career. As a white woman on the tenure track, I was privileged in how I presented my labor, and I was generally assumed to be competent. People in similar roles who occupy staff rather than faculty positions often do not have the same flexibility on annual review forms,18 and women of color may face increased microaggressions and doubts about their capabilities;19 they may also hesitate to negotiate genres for fear of being perceived as challenging the status quo. The forms I was expected to use for annual performance reviews were open-ended. Faculty can rewrite lists generated from our activity-reporting software as narratives; they can add or omit items; they can use colors, highlighting, fonts, and other textual features to make certain activities pop more than others. And they can even begin to remap how their labor may fit into different categories than originally reported, doing so in ways that make their labor more visible and, by extension, valued. Annual review documents would benefit from revision to reflect the wider scope of labor WAF undertake; but, as my experiences demonstrate, these genres do offer flexibility for WAF to make their labor more visible. As my career advanced, I learned that the constraints of academic career genres could be partially canceled out through their flexibility and openness.

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Freedman and Medway argue that “genres [are] not [always] bound to be oppressive to writers, they may even, beyond allowing them to write what conscience or desire dictates, actively make possible the realization of their political aspirations.”20 I approached these genres differently with this new perspective: if my activities were not seen or valued, perhaps there were ways to use the constraints of the genre in new ways to tell my own story in terms audiences would recognize and appreciate. While I was proud of my supervisor’s and my accomplishment in my third-year review – my unseen administrative labor was now explicit in a higher-valued category: teaching – I also felt frustrated. I highly value administrative work and see it as central to my long-term career trajectory of moving more fully into academic administration. However, the solution, in this case, was to move labor I saw as connected to leadership and program-building to the category of teaching, something most audiences would associate with the traditional faculty role (and a feminized role, at that), rather than with a leadership role. The solution was to lean into role duality rather than to fully represent my roles holistically as complementary and connected. By completing my annual performance review and submitting my tenure dossier, I become part of a community that values certain kinds of labor and devalues others; I become part of procedures that link certain types of labor to salary increases and promotions; I become part of networks that craft understandings of my roles as faculty and an administrator, thereby influencing perceptions of my unit for a variety of audiences. By completing an annual review, I may be responding to my department chair’s need to assess my classroom performance. Simultaneously, I may be responding to my dean’s need to understand who deserves a merit pay increase or greater allocation of college resources. I may also be responding to a provost or president’s need to assess the value not of my own performance, but that of the unit I represent. These various exigencies and audiences shape my self-representation and invocation of genre. As I have progressed in my career, I have gotten better at anticipating my audiences’ assumptions and expectations so I can create compelling self-narratives. I have also gained insider knowledge of how people in similar positions have been perceived by these audiences within the dominant campus culture. These contexts drive my decisions when I compose. I write not as myself, but as the person I think my audiences see, who is simultaneously striving to be the person I want them to see; to write in these genres is to engage in a performative act of self-creation. Evaluative Genres and the Illegibility of WAF Emotional Labor Navigating role duality and its partner, role conflation, engages WAF in emotional labor that is also not visible within academic career genres. In

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this section, I explore the dimensions of this labor and the ways academic career genres constrain women’s abilities to narrate their experiences and receive credit for their work. In March 2022, I sat down to complete my annual performance review document for the sixth time in my career. I had tenure and hoped this might make me bolder, but once again, I found myself thinking most about what I could not say. During the past two years, I had testified in a Title IX case that involved a female student employee and a male faculty member. I had also been verbally harassed in my office by a male faculty member, received an abusive email from another challenging my leadership abilities, and submitted my own Title IX report for a case of sexual harassment. During that same timeframe, I earned tenure and led my writing center through a transitional period as it became its own independent academic unit within my college. It was a period of intense emotional labor that tested the limits of my fortitude, resilience, and diplomacy. While dealing with intense emotions of anger, disgust, injustice, fear, sadness, and isolation, I also had to manage my ‘brand’ to ensure my unit remained operational and my integrity as both a faculty member and administrator remained intact. The year had been draining; the events had directly impacted my performance and perception of myself as an academic leader. It was so trying that I doubted my memory of events, so I approached a colleague who had overheard the verbal harassment, asking, “Was it really as bad as I’m remembering?” She assured me it was. Yet none of it could be spoken on the page. As a WAF, I exert a great deal of energy managing role duality and colleagues’ often gendered expectations for my behavior. Sometimes my two roles are complementary, as when I’m training my staff in the teaching of writing through a course I developed for my home department’s degree program. This task advances the unit I administer, the writing center, by ensuring high-quality writing support. It also supports my discipline by advancing knowledge in the field, as well as my home department by supporting its degree programs and majors. Other times, however, I find my roles in tension. For example, as a writing center administrator, I support writing curriculum and students across the university. My unit and labor are disciplinary, but disciplinary expertise is framed largely as university service. At the same time, my English faculty colleagues work hard to dissociate themselves from a service identity and instead emphasize their inherent value. As in this scenario, sometimes my goals as an administrator conflict with the goals I might have if I was strictly faculty in my home department. WAF may also feel the need to overcompensate in research and teaching for fear that their administrative labor and programs will not be respected if they do not exceed expectations. Mid-level administrative positions, such as being a program director, are often perceived as doing university “housework” which can lower the prestige

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of the faculty in the position and the unit she oversees.21 Role duality in these cases can pull WAFs in two directions to the point of burnout. I imagine many WAFs have felt torn between competing agendas and struggled with role duality; I imagine these women also struggle to balance their worthy ambitions, desire for advancement, and their workplace culture’s gendered expectations. For instance, a graduate program director may choose to advocate for her program and her position within it, even if it means another program within the department suffers cuts; she may choose to leave the classroom to support her unit, even though it means this increases the workload for junior faculty in her department. Faculty members of all genders likely struggle with these decisions, but women engage in more emotional labor due to gendered norms and expectations.22 While men are often celebrated for their ambitious leadership, women often face penalties. Managing administrative ambition and role duality can be exacerbated by the ‘us’ (faculty) versus ‘them’ (administration) mentality within academic culture. In her book, A Leadership Guide for Women in Higher Education, Marjorie Hass notes the “disparaging tone” in which many faculty members speak about “‘the administration.’”23 She also identifies the ambiguity women administrators may feel when trying to “own [their] ambition” within this atmosphere as they simultaneously face prejudices against administration and biases against women.24 As administrative faculty, I occupied both sides of the divide; as a female administrative faculty, I felt this tension perhaps more acutely than male colleagues in similar positions did. Career genres such as annual reviews and tenure and promotion dossiers reflect these wider cultural norms and rhetorical situations by dismissing the importance of administrative labor and forcing faculty to prioritize other forms of work; they also provide little space for women to report on the emotional labor they engage in to advance their careers and unit goals. In addition to managing role duality, WAF must also navigate role conflation. Role conflation occurs when colleagues view your unit through the lens of your individual identity as a (female) faculty colleague. Faculty have a range of personalities, and these personalities do not always affect colleagues’ perceptions of efficacy. However, when you are a WAF, your personality and identity as a faculty member can be perceived to impact the efficacy and value of your unit. Your actions can significantly impact colleagues’ perceptions of your unit and its daily operations and success. And if your personality and behaviors do not align with gendered expectations, you may lose faculty support or your seat at the administrative table. The stakes of role conflation become higher when women administrators must report gender discrimination or sexual harassment. When I reported a note I received on campus to the Title IX office – a note that spoke in explicitly sexual terms about my body and what the author

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would like to do to it – I worried that colleagues would doubt my ability to lead. I thought they might perceive me as a victim, or as someone who deserved this kind of mistreatment. I only showed the note to two female colleagues I trusted because I worried people might think that if I could not do my job without being sexualized, perhaps I could not handle other aspects of the position. Similarly, when I testified at the Title IX hearing on behalf of a student who was sexually harassed, questioning began with a reference to my administrative identity and the faculty senate’s support of a recent funding request I had made. I recall worrying, perhaps selfishly, that my participation in the hearing might negatively impact perceptions of my unit or my leadership. I worried that I and my unit might be perceived as “tainted,” to use Leigh Gilmore’s term. In her book, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives, Gilmore argues that women who testify are disbelieved for three reasons: “because they are women, because through testimony they seek to bear witness to inconvenient truths, and because they possess less symbolic and material capital than men as witnesses in courts of law.”25 When WAF engage in the physical, intellectual, and emotional labor of testifying and reporting sexual crimes, they risk their units as well as themselves being perceived as suspicious, inconvenient, and lacking in credibility. Gilmore argues that victim-blaming narratives “falsely represent women’s vulnerability to harm as their culpability and recasts the compromised situations in which they live (relationships, workplaces, homes of various kinds) as willful choices or even risk-taking behavior.”26 Given my positionality, I am privileged in my testimony; I tend to be believed and colleagues respond kindly to my admission of vulnerability. This is not always the case for women who are further marginalized by sexual orientation or race; women of color, especially, face intersectional discrimination that operates to discredit them and their labor. Handling workplace harassment is a real part of WAF jobs, but it is bureaucratic and emotional labor that is rarely made visible within career narratives; these are things that we are legally bound to not talk about and which are deemed unprofessional, inappropriate, or illegible within the dominant discursive communities within which we write. As a WAF, I work in a historically patriarchal and misogynistic culture that makes it likely I will become the target of or witness to such harassment. According to a 2019 survey of American college students by the Association of American Universities, 13% of undergraduates and 10% of graduate and professional students reported experiencing sexual violence on campus.27 Male faculty sexual misconduct is so common it has become a dominant trope in popular culture, such as in Netflix’s The Chair. In this fictional university, as is often the case in real life, it becomes a problem a WAF must labor to resolve. In popular culture and in the real world, this labor is rarely visible or rewarded.

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When writing this piece, I grappled with whether and how much to include about incidents of workplace harassment for the reasons discussed above. I hope to work in administration throughout my career, and I realize current and future colleagues might perceive me as unprofessional, inconvenient, or untrustworthy for discussing these issues. Even within the space provided here, in this collection, much could not be said; legally, most details of my experiences cannot be shared. I considered publishing anonymously, but to do so would eliminate the possibility of receiving credit for my scholarship: I would be undertaking uncredited labor to speak about uncredited labor – the irony! I agree with a participant in Ferdinandt Stolley’s study who wrote, “‘As a woman in a professional setting, it is always dangerous to discuss the emotional labor that I undertake … I do not want to be seen as less rigorous in my scholarship, less demanding of my students/employees, or less serious in my dedication to the institution’.”28 Hass also speaks of this danger. As a provost and university president, she “rarely speak[s] publicly about the more egregious and embarrassing forms of sexism” she has experienced because she “worr[ies] that those stories would undermine [her] credibility.”29 But Hass also writes that she works toward “greater courage,” as do I. She states, “Keeping our stories of sexism to ourselves reinforces the idea that they arise because of our individual failings. Sharing them gives them their rightful place as symptoms of broader patriarchal structures.”30 In the end, I included my experiences with gender-based harassment, but my purpose is not to assume the role of victim. Instead, I intend to show how academic career genres render invisible the emotional labor WAF undertake and to provide tools that can help women to begin to theorize this work. If our academic career genres do not account for the full scope of our experiences, the first step to making this labor legible is to become attuned to it ourselves. Prior to conducting my RGA and autoethnography, I was not fully conscious of the extent of the emotional labor I was performing daily, nor was I able to classify it in any meaningful way as I have done here, as related to role duality and role conflation. I encourage other women to use my methods – and to adapt them creatively to suit their circumstances – to continue to theorize about domains of women’s academic labor and avenues they might take to pursue more meaningful and complete forms of self-representation. Conclusion: Moving Toward Evaluative Genres as Empowered Spaces I hope that women can use my stories and the tools I employed to identify pathways to empowerment and agency. This empowerment may remain private by taking the form of processing workplace trauma or validating

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aspects of labor and self that are invisible in more public genres. On the other hand, women may act publicly to validate their labor through career genres. My stories of using career genres to make arguments about the value of labor might provide avenues for some readers who wish to push back against the constraints of these texts. My strategies, however, do not substantially alter genres but rather work with more intention within them. For those wishing to reshape genres altogether to make labor – especially emotional labor – more visible and valued, Ferdinandt Stolley offers a helpful heuristic: identify emotion-driven activities; count the hours spent; identify the outcomes; align the outcomes with your stakeholders.31 Similarly, the SSFNRIG recommends “operationalizing” emotional labor on academic career genres to align them with institutional goals. Another option is to treat academic genres as autobiographical, including the personal as well as the professional.32 These are all strategies I hope to try in future iterations of my own career texts. Ultimately, WAF should receive credit for the full scope of their labor and its outcomes. Genres, being reflective of social action, are flexible; women can lean into this flexibility to reform not only genres but also the activity networks within which they operate. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Adams et al., 49. Ibid., 26. Freedman and Medway, 2. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Miller, 163. Smith and Watson, 20. Smith, 20. Ortiz-Vilarelle, 49. Adams et al., 26, 103. LaFrance, 82. SSFNRIG, 229. Ibid., 229, emphasis added. Guarino and Borden, 673. Bird et al.; Denker; Guarino et al.; Park; SSFNRIG; Street et al.; Ward. Fricker, 2. Ibid. LaFrance, 85–105. Matthew. Freedman and Medway, 12. Macfarlane and Burg. Bird et al.; Dencker; Guarino and Borden; Macfarlane and Burg; Park; Street et al.; Ward. 23 Hass, 7–9. 24 Ibid.

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Candis Bond Glimore, 18. Ibid., 10. AAU, np. Ferdinandt Stolley, 104. Hass, 37. Ibid. Ferdinandt Stolley, 106. Ortiz-Vilarelle.

Works Cited Adams, Tony E., Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, eds. Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research. London: Oxford UP, 2015. Association of American Universities. Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct, January 2020, https://www.aau.edu/sites/ default/files/AAU-Files/Key-Issues/CampusSafety/Revised%20Aggregate %20report%20%20and%20appendices%201-7_(01-16-2020_FINAL).pdf. Accessed 14 March 2023. Bird, Sharon R., Jacquelyn S. Litt, and Yong Wang. “Creating Status of Women Reports: Institutional Housekeeping as ‘Women’s Work.’” NWSA Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, 2004, pp. 194–206. Denker, Katherine J. “Doing Gender in the Academy: The Challenges for Women in the Academic Organization.” Women and Language, vol. 32, no. 1, 2009, pp. 103–12. Ferdinandt Stolley, Amy. “Unleashed Emotion: Centering Emotional Labor in Our Professional Documents.” The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negoatiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration, edited by Courtney Adams Wooten, Jacob Babb, Kristi Murray Costello, and Kate Navickas, Logan: Utah State UP, 2020, pp. 96–112. Freedman, Aviva, and Peter Medway. “Introduction.” Genre and the New Rhetoric, edited by Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway. London: Taylor & Francis, 1994, pp. 2–18. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Gilmore, Leigh. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives. New York: U of Columbia P, 2018. Guarino, Cassandra M., and Victor M.H. Borden. “Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family?” Research in Higher Education, vol. 58, 2017, pp. 672–94. Hass, Marjorie. A Leadership Guide for Women in Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2021. LaFrance, Michelle. Institutional Ethnography: A Theory of Practice for Writing Studies Researchers. Logan: Utah State UP, 2019. Macfarlane, Bruce, and Damon Burg. “Women Professors and the Academic Housework Trap.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, vol. 41, no. 3, 2019, pp. 262–74.

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Matthew, Patricia. “Introduction: Written/Unwritten: The Gap between Theory and Practice.” Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, edited by Patricia Matthew, Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2016. Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 70, no. 2, 1984, pp. 151–67. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa. “Academic Career Construction: Personnel Documents as Personal Documents.” Life Writing, vol. 17, no. 1, 2020, pp. 45–57. Park, Shelley M. “Research, Teaching, and Service: Why Shouldn’t Women’s Work Count?” The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 67, no. 1, 1996, pp. 46–84. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Indiana UP, 1993. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2nd ed.). U of Minnesota P, 2010. Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group. “The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequities and Time Use in Five University Departments.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, vol. 39, 2017, pp. 228–45. Street, Donna L., Charles P. Baril, and Ralph L. Benke, Jr. “Research, Teaching, and Service in Promotion and Tenure Decisions of Accounting Faculty.” Journal of Accounting Education, vol. 11, 1993, pp. 43–60. Ward, Kelly. “Faculty Service Roles and the Scholarship of Engagement.” ASHEERIC Higher Education Report, vol. 29, no. 5, 2003, pp. 3–186.

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‘Not Another ARC Summer’ Grant Applications and Life Narratives of Motherhood Kate Douglas

Many years ago, on a suffocatingly hot summer day at my university in South Australia, a much-admired senior female colleague popped her head around my office door to ask me how my Australian Research Council (ARC) grant application was progressing. I said I was struggling for time and lacked focus. She said that she had decided not to apply this round after her teenage daughter had proclaimed, ‘Please! Not another ARC summer!’1 This conversation stayed with me as I struggled through many ‘ARC summers’ after. Grant applications have a low success rate and take a lot of time to complete, but there are significant pressures to apply. Many colleagues have commented that the deadlines for these applications (in the middle of the Australian summer school holiday break) are not family-or leisure-friendly. And a notable irony of these proposal forms is the inclusion of the ‘Research Opportunity Performance Evidence’ (ROPE) statement. The purpose of the ROPE criterion “is to enable evaluation of a researcher’s activities, outputs and achievements, in the context of career and life opportunities and experiences, including, where relevant, significant career interruptions.”2 The scheme states that ROPE places “particular emphasis on supporting those researchers in underrepresented groups or experiencing proportionally more career interruptions, including women, Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, and early and mid-career researchers.”3 The ARC has made considerable public noise about its plans for gender equity in grant success. But, informally, in forums like Twitter, a strong alternative commentary has developed. Statistics cited report a higher proportion of men leading successful projects, and that this leadership and success increases as men’s careers progress. On Twitter, academics who are mothers offer testimony on how difficult it is to apply for grants during the school holidays. Queer researchers discuss the ambiguity around the definition of ‘primary carer’ and associated career interruption articulations. Non-binary researchers report feeling invisible when it comes to reflections on gender and grant success.4 DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-7

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In this paper, I discuss my own experiences constructing ROPE documents considering the spaces provided in the documents, as well as the public counter-narratives around ROPE. I have applied for ARC grants through my early, mid, and senior career stages, without success. Not being successful at winning an ARC has been a blip in an otherwise very successful career. So, why have I let this failure feel so career-defining? Drawing on life narrative theory, I reflect on my use of life narrative practices to construct a career narrative considering my personal life as a cis woman, who is also queer, and a parent. I argue that the limits of ROPE and the life narration it invites function as modes of “cruel optimism,” to borrow Lauren Berlant’s term, which is consistent with the processes of grant applications, more generally. I conclude the paper by making suggestions for ways forward that are less cruel and more overtly focused on equity. A note on terms: When I use the terms ‘woman,’ ‘women,’ or ‘female,’ I do so inclusively, referring to anyone who identifies as female. I also want to acknowledge the difficulties that nonbinary and trans academics have traditionally faced when it comes to the collection of statistical information on application forms. Even though I do not speak for you, I see you. I acknowledge that male/female are no longer simple binaries for establishing cultural disadvantages between people. And, of course, being a mother is not exclusive to those assigned female at birth; it includes anyone who identifies with the term. Life Narrative as Leveler As foundational life narrative scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explain, there are many different aspects of “the self” and myriad ways in which people identify and differentiate themselves from one another daily.5 One of the central myths of life narrative, they explain, is that: Readers often conceive of autobiographical narrators as telling unified stories of their lives, as creating or discovering coherent selves. But both the unified story and the coherent self are myths of identity. For there is no coherent “self” that predates stories about identity, about “who” one is. Nor is there a unified, stable, immutable self that can remember everything that has happened in the past. We are always fragmented in time, taking a particular or provisional perspective on the moving target of our pasts, addressing multiple and disparate audiences. Perhaps, then, it is more helpful to approach autobiographical telling as a performative act.6 When we tell stories about ourselves, then, we are performing aspects of the self that are appropriate to the time and space of the telling. Where at home, amongst friends and family, we might disclose aspects of our self that are quite personal, at work, we might enact a professional persona in

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which only certain aspects of our life narrative are shared. Or indeed, these identities might be flipped entirely. Perhaps our different personas might even pervade different aspects of our lives. Life narration is also a means by which human beings enact agency, as Smith and Watson explain: We like to think of human beings as agents of or actors in their own lives rather than passive subjects of social structures or unconscious transmitters of cultural scripts and models of identity. Consequently, we tend to read autobiographical narratives as acts and thus proofs of human agency. They are at once sites of agentic narration where people control the interpretation of their lives and stories, telling of individual destinies and expressing “true” selves … But we must recognize that the issue of how subjects claim, exercise, and narrate agency is far from simply a matter of free will and individual autonomy.7 What Smith and Watson acknowledge here is that life narration can function as a great leveler, and it is often deployed as such, for instance, in the construction of work profiles, or in social media, allowing people to take control of their own narratives. However, life narration, as a cultural process, is heavily characterized by social and cultural trends, conventions, and controls. Most genres and forms of life narration happen via templates, through gatekeepers, and, thus, are subject to limits. So, our agency to self-represent, in turn, has limits. Further, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Smith and Watson explore how life narration often occurs from a place of vulnerability. To make oneself known to others is filled with challenges, primarily because it is difficult to know and to articulate the self. And the minute we begin to articulate the “I” into recognizable forms of narration, we are externalizing the self in ways that can feel disorienting and impersonal.8 This has become an obstacle that scholars, particularly women, face when narrating their lived experience. There is an expectation that the life narratives of academic women must be overdetermined by intellectual rigor constructs (a space where we are forced to earn access). Smith and Watson offer an astute summary: “Autobiographical subjects, then, are multiply vulnerable: to their own opaqueness, to their relationality to others, and to the norms.”9 On this idea of vulnerability and articulating different selves: I am about to tell you a story of failure. As I reflect, I draw upon foundations laid by Smith and Watson, Berlant, and Lauren Fourier’s excellent work on “autotheory.” Fournier explains that autotheory emerged in the early twentyfirst century to consider the ways that literature and criticism integrate autobiography. Such self-aware, self-conscious writing acknowledges the inevitability of autobiography and subjectivity in writing. It also asserts a

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space for this sort of writing – the power of our stories and our right to contextualize our professional experiences within our personal ones. Me and the ARC Living and working at an Australian university means working in institutions that have underlying, but also quite visible, colonial influences and power structures that overdetermine who academics are, who can be them, and what is considered ‘professional success.’ The Australian Research Council (ARC) is an Australian Government entity that distributes around AUD$800 million in grants per year in a competitive application process. It was established as an independent body but has been in the headlines lately for ministerial interference in outcomes, particularly for Humanities research. This was particularly the case during the reign of the previous, Liberal (Conservative) government in Australia. Although I have had some notable grant success with various funding bodies over my career (including ARC LIEF – Linkage, Infrastructure, Equipment, and Facilities grants), I have applied over 10 times for an ARC Discovery without success. (Discovery Grants are perhaps the most prestigious research grants in Australia. They recognize research across all disciplines, and the importance of “fundamental, ‘blue sky’ research” to Australia).10 My lack of success is not statistically significant. According to the ARC website, the success rate in 2021 was 20%.11 But to drill statistics down a little is particularly revealing. The success rate for applicants from universities outside the ‘Group of Eight’ (Go8) is consistently lower than 20%; for instance, my university had a success rate of 9.1% in 2021.12 This is likely due to Go8 universities being much better resourced when it comes to research support. These institutions can offer specific advice and actual labor on grant bids. The well-respected ‘ARC Tracker’ on Twitter recently reported that one Go8 institution was re-writing National Interest Statements for applicants who had been ‘NIT-picked.’13 Am I, in applying for ARC Discovery after ARC Discovery, subjecting myself to what Berlant refers to as “cruel optimism”? Cruel optimism refers to the condition “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing”;14 it is “attachment to compromised conditions of possibility.”15 An example of this, then, is me applying for an ARC grant over the summer because I believe it is good for me and my career. As Petra Bueskens and Kim Toffoletti note, being a mother in academia means being stuck within a system that “proffers ‘flexibility but mandates the prioritization of institutional goals at the expense of mothering.”16 Many women mask their unease with a “façade of busy fulfillment, a positive outlook, and good humor.”17 We are supposed to simply be grateful to have a job with such excellent conditions and flexibility.

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I have been institutionalized to believe that spending time on an ARC grant over the summer, during my #flexible time, is a better idea than spending the entire summer with my family, holidaying, reading for leisure, etc. But maybe the truth is that ARCs are not for people like me: academic women, mothers in the discipline of English at non-Go8 universities? But the remote possibility that I will win an ARC seduces me most years because I am, to quote Berlant, desperate for a “good life” that will “add up to something.”18 Having a grant will contribute to having a good (better?) life at work: more prestige, respect, and pats on the back in the corridors. This is what I believe. But, as my therapist would point out, I tend to believe in things that I do not know to be true. The ARC powerfully asserts that, in the 2021 round, “the success rate for female, male, and unspecified CIs in this round of Discovery Projects is 20.7 percent, 19.8 percent and 13.9 percent respectively.’’19 But perhaps a more telling statistic in this block of statistics is that, “of the 7118 Chief Investigators (CIs) named in applications in this round, 2110 were female, 4972 were male, and 36 chose not to specify their gender.”20 One way to interpret these statistics is that when women do participate, they are as successful as their male counterparts. But women do not participate anywhere near as actively as their male colleagues. The ARC reports that, since 2003, male investigators have outnumbered female investigators by 2.83: 1.21 Michelle Barker, Ann Webster-Wright, Deanne Gannaway, and Wendy Green suggest some of the reasons why women’s participation in high-level academic activities is less than men’s: women are less able to commit to and prioritize a work self and identity than men are, “It typically falls on women to take caring roles, whether they be in home situations or the workplace. For example, academic women perform significantly more internal service to the university than academic men”22 (which reminds me: I need to check in on one of my academic mentees! I participate in the University- and College-wide academic mentoring schemes and have for over 10 years. Caring at home, caring at work). Barker, Webster-Wright, Gannaway, and Green suggest what stories are absent when discussing academic success “Because of the focus on excellence in academia, the public stories we hear celebrate the shining stars: the award winners, major grant holders, national fellows,” it is true. At my university, we have a weekly College newsletter; a highlight reel for these shining stars. Two of my female colleagues recently told me that reading the newsletter renders them too exhausted to contribute. Barker and colleagues go on to explain that we too often see the end result of success, not the journey and the associated complexities of this journey. Thus, it is easy and common for women to feel alone in the struggle.23 In 2018, the ARC launched a report and associated strategies to increase women’s participation in ARC applications, which included

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having more women in the ARC’s leadership body, The College of Experts.24 A change in the Federal government in 2022 has again brought the ARC firmly into the spotlight. Incoming Federal Education Minister, Jason Clare, announced a review of the ARC in July 2022.25 We await to see what this will bring. There is a sense that there are numerous issues that might be addressed around ARC participation and success which include the lower success rates at non-Go8 universities, or within nonSTEM disciplines. The non-family-friendly timing of the application comes up again and again in discussions.26 So, what we are left with, as researchers, is a system that is hard to believe in, but impossible to sidestep. This tweet, by Karen Benjamin Guzza (@kbguzzo) was widely shared amongst my academic friends recently: “When did academia lose sight of the fact that pursuing grants should happen bc you have a research idea that requires funding to carry out, rather than trying to come up with potentially fundable ideas bc you need to get grants?” Enough ROPE Applying for an ARC Discovery is expected of senior researchers in Australia. Applying for these grants “determines belonging in the academy,” to borrow Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle’s concept.27 Big-time academics apply for ARCs. But! Success rates are low, and writing the grants is incredibly time-consuming, often with little institutional support. (Because everyone else is applying, too, grant support is most often directed towards, as I was once told, “the horses most likely to come in for a win”). My last Discovery pitch was 46 pages long and represented my shortest effort so far (likely because it was a solo rather than a collaborative effort). Discovery grants are structured as follows: Part A is an administrative summary (short statements, objectives). Part B is “Classifications and Other Statistical Information.” Part C is “Project Eligibility,” so, more administrative information. Part D is the big effort: “Project Description.” This is a 10-page outline of your project (but this section also includes a section on “Investigator/s” so it represents the first invitation to write life narrative. Part E asks for budget documents. Part F is when things get interesting: “Participant Details including ROPE.” ROPE = “Research Opportunity and Performance Evidence.”

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These are examples of what Katja Lee describes as “the hard … mechanisms employed by organizations to manufacture, shape, and control the working identities of employees. The hard tools – those that are structural and explicit – include induction, training, evaluation and assessment, surveillance and discipline, promotion, and policy (amongst others).”28 Similarly, Ortiz-Vilarelle writes: In some stages of personnel review, system software and other automated platforms used for standardisation and efficiency, mediate the academic subject by restricting users to entering details according to the parameters set by the programme and by the institutional subscriber. These methods of further reducing professional experience to chartfields and to biodigital data entry are counter-intuitive to the way in which individuals experience, remember and recount their careers and lives through syncretic processes of making meaning.29 However, as Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis posit in their outstanding collection, Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir, constructing stories of the self is a means of writing your own truth and controlling your narrative. In the case of grant applications, being able to add nuance, color, and context to an otherwise career-focused bid seems in the spirit of changing the game towards more equitable outcomes. Part F is the life narrative section of the grant proposal. According to the ARC website, the aim of the ROPE Statement is to support “equitable access to research funding.”30 The website states that the ROPE was introduced in 2011 to support researchers who have experienced career interruptions. Doing so allows funding schemes to extend eligibility timeframes.31 Asking mothers to account for “interruptions” is something that Bueskens and Toffoletti label as problematically “careercentric,” as they powerfully assert: “In 200 words or less, women have to package their experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and/or mothering in a neo-liberal discourse that both drastically minimize the labor involved in caring for children, and – truly absurdly – asks women to account for their “lack of productivity.”32 As Bueskens and Toffoletti argue, such life narrative “spaces” do recognize that carer responsibilities impact women’s careers.33 It just is not done well. “Work” and “life” cannot be neatly separated and compartmentalized by many (most?) women.34 The ARC explains, “ROPE is designed to support all eligible researchers, with particular emphasis on supporting those researchers in under-represented groups or experiencing proportionally more career interruptions, including women, Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, and early and mid-career researchers.”35 This is a good idea and would seem to reflect a genuine attempt to redress

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systemic inequalities. The ARC website explains that “research opportunity” also incorporates: [A]ny significant interruptions relating to career and/or life experiences, which have affected a researcher’s capacity, productivity or contribution. The ARC recognizes that the impact of any interruption may extend beyond the duration of a specific event, and the full extent of any interruption, reflecting individual circumstances, can be included for consideration by assessors under ROPE. Interruptions can include, but are not limited to: • unemployment • non-research employment • limited or no access to facilities and resources – such as through workplace interruptions • disaster management and recovery • misadventure • medical conditions • disability • caring and parental responsibilities, and • community obligations, including Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander cultural practices and protocols.36 All of this would seem to offer straightforward opportunities to articulate and contextualize research opportunities. But, here, in italics, is the kicker statement: ROPE statements should be clear, contextualized, constructively presented, and contain all information necessary for assessors to evaluate research activities, outputs, achievements and impact relative to career and life opportunities and experiences. Significant career interruptions, where relevant, should be presented simply, quantified where possible, noting that the impact of the interruption may last longer than a defined period. Personal or confidential information should not be included. It is clear, then, that there are parameters within the spaces provided for personal context. There are genre conventions. Ortiz-Vilarelle notes something similar, reporting on her promotion review “during which colleagues advised me, a life writing specialist, to not get ‘too personal’ in my promotion essay … It is the compulsory obligation to tell less than the truth.”37 Perhaps it is obvious why “personal and confidential information should not be included.” Assessors are just people like you who may not feel comfortable reading personal disclosures, especially because the

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applications are not anonymized. This might impact their ability to provide an objective review of academic work. Encouraging disclosure might result in applicants feeling pressure to disclose or even up the ante when they do not want to disclose. But, as Agnes Bosanquet’s incredibly powerful reflection on her promotion application “Details Optional: An Account of Academic Promotion Relative to Opportunity” attests, these forms can be woefully inadequate in accounting for “opportunity.” This is primarily because of the conventions around personal disclosure. Bosanquet’s reflection, in offering personal disclosures of: A life-threatening birth, a daughter with epilepsy, a too-slow PhD, a grandmother bringing a baby for breastfeeds between lectures, a relationship on the brink, a teaching focussed appointment, secondary infertility, a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, an implanted neurostimulator to manage debilitating nerve pain, eight years as a part-time academic, a miracle baby, a university restructure, a relationship on the brink again, a daughter on the cusp of puberty with severe epilepsy unable to attend school for eight months, another university restructure, a pandemic …38 highlights the difference between writing autoethnographically – in her case, for the journal Life Writing – and in writing administratively, in the spaces provided in promotion applications or grant bids. This is tricky. And as this collection attests, there is a strong desire for nuanced discussion on this issue. As Bosanquet argues, these forms actively discourage detailed personal disclosure (but as her article shows, there are aftereffects of this silencing, and a need to take this up elsewhere). Bosanquet’s piece helped me reflect on my own context. For instance, I have always wanted to contextualize myself as working-class and being (along with my sister) the first in our family to attend universities. But I cannot remember ever having space to do so. My experience of being a working-class student and academic has often been that of an outsider; an imposter. This was less so when I lived and studied in the cities of Newcastle and Brisbane (cities with robust working-class cultures and easy-going, accepting ethoses around newcomers), but more so when I moved to Adelaide to commence my first permanent position. Adelaide’s class structures can be quite visible. I felt them in the corridors where comments were made about where I had come from, and my willingness to speak of my working-class origins and first-in-family status to my undergraduate students. My ARC ROPE tells a very bland and not-very-revealing story. Subheading one explains:

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Amount of Time as an Active Researcher

It is 19 years since I graduated with my PhD (Dec 2003). I took a period of maternity leave (June 2011–June 2012). This sentence is not complete. It is factual. But it does not explain that I have been the primary carer for two stepchildren (a term I hate) since 2004 as well as having a biological child in 2011. It does not disclose that my partner (now ex-partner; another facet to the hidden narrative) was a shift worker through our entire relationship and that school holidays were prime time for investing in family, not for writing ARC grants. Even in non-traditional family structures, it is more likely that the parent with the most flexible job will keep the home fires burning. Remember to buy the Christmas presents; Don’t forget to book the surf and swim lessons; Birthday parties require gifts. The best thing about academia is the flexibility. The worst thing about academia is the flexibility. As Ortiz-Vilarelle argues, these narratives “leave no room for expressions of experience that shape the conditions for lives and careers.”39 Nowhere can I explain that my partner’s job always took precedence over mine, or how often I felt the sting of comments about how ‘lucky’ I was to have job flexibility, or even that I was over-paid for the hours I worked. These comments, coming from someone I loved and trusted, contributed significantly to my own lack of self-belief around my career, and my ability to articulate my own successes with much conviction. My lack of ARC success is now saturated by the feelings of failure I have experienced. Did I give enough to the proposal? Could I have given more? Why did I even bother? Why did I not instead spend 100% of my school holidays with my children? I cannot write too much of a sob story in my ROPE because I am conscious of constructing a self or persona who is successful. As Bosanquet argues, where in institutional self-writing, “Life events are framed … as ‘obstacles’ which have impeded research output,” in autoethnography, these “obstacles” commonly function as epiphanies, significant life moments that frame and propel the writing.40 It is very risky to present a vulnerable self in academia at a time when job insecurity is high

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and expectations around work hours are excessive.41 Instead, like Bosanquet, I can offer more detail of vulnerabilities, even failings, in this autoethnographic space. But this does not help me do better in the process of winning a grant. I feel shame in offering context because I think that many (most?) people also have a story of difficulty. Mine is one imbued with a great deal of privilege. Here’s my privilege at the start of subheading two: Research Opportunities

I commenced a full-time, balanced (teaching 40%, research 40%, and administration 20%) role at Flinders University in 2004. I started at Lecturer and progressed through to Professor in August 2017 which is my current position. I direct a highly successful research group at Flinders (The Life Narrative Lab) and lead international research networks including the International Auto/Biography Association (Asia-Pacific). Flinders has offered support for my research throughout my career, for example, access to internal funding and research mentors. I have a full-time job and have held this full-time job for almost 20 years. This is something. This is a lot. I feel gratitude every day. But I also recognize this is the gratitude I am supposed to feel. I am good at my job, but also not that good because: I have three children and I have always been the primary carer. It is genuinely difficult, and indeed not desirable to me, to take long periods of time away from my family. Because of this, I have been unable to take advantage of some of the opportunities that have come my way over the past decade, for example … to name a handful of examples, over the past 19 years.42 I do not regret any of this. I regret the foolish belief that I would ever win an ARC DP. But what I regret the most now are the lost summers. I regret taking on the ROPE and the way that it made me think about career interruption as something that renders me lesser. It is these interruptions that have made me who I am. It is my children, but most significantly, my youngest child, who shaped the direction of my research, and who made me align my work self with her life. I started reading and studying life narratives for children because these were the books that I was reading with her, the books I had time to read. My ROPE explains: “I have defined the parameters of the field of children’s writing and reading life narrative, and modelled methods for approaching this

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research (close reading, contextual and paratextual readings, readership studies, and practical research on children’s life narration).”43 This definition is important. It is an example of the ways in which women (especially life narrative scholars) resist patriarchal academic norms. In actively shaping our research around personal identities and life events, we have agitated for more fluid boundaries between life and work … or just “life,” as Bueskens and Toffoletti would remind me. In her discussion of cruel optimism and women’s academia, Briony Lipton rightly explains how, “women’s participation continues to be measured and evaluated in relation to male norms, participation, and achievements,” and “increased participation rates do not necessarily indicate a broader structural change to gendered power relations in Australian higher education.”44 This seems a mandate to actively reflect on our participation in the institution and resistance to its norms. In my research, my personal life now strongly defines my academic work. As I now work at the intersection of life narrative research and children’s literature, I will no doubt pivot into life narrative and young adult literature as my daughter (and new step-daughter) grow into that genre. My challenge from here is to have the ARC take this research as seriously as I do. Whatever the outcome, I am glad my research has moved in the ways that it has. I am doing research that I love (though without grant money); that aligns closely with my own personal life, life conditions, and academic goals and values. And I feel as though there is more optimism and less cruelty involved in these processes. Would explaining this context in my ROPE have made any difference? To the ARC success, no. For me, perhaps, yes. Conclusion Life narrative provides useful tools for scholars as we are increasingly required to articulate academic lives and personas. We have opportunities to contextualize our lives and career gaps in the interests of equity. However, Ortiz-Vilarelle reminds us that: The laws and policies of confidentiality that mediate the production and reception of self-authored career documents are not taken up here as part of the institutional boundaries between careers and lives. Instead I aim to push past these limits in order to initiate conversations about the coexistence of career narratives and life narratives in both theory and practice.45 When scholars are invited to share personal narratives in grants, the limits are very clear: share, but share only what is asked.

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As Smith and Watson explain, we exist as numerous different selves, different “I”s as we move through different life spaces and experiences daily. In certain spaces, we can tell certain stories. This has long been accepted. There are different genres for telling stories about the self. There are limits for the sake of audiences, and requirements for privacy and propriety. But increasingly, these spaces overlap, as institutions seek to employ life narration to address equity issues. Life narration and the articulation of personal contexts can be used as tools of social justice, of restorative justice. But limits remain, which again leave people frustrated, alienated, and not helped by the stories that they are permitted to tell. The inclusion of documents like ROPE in grant applications opens a door only to close it again. What is the way forward from here? Should we hack the processes a bit more, transgress the boundaries as we control our own institutional personas and life narrations to offer the context we need to tell? Will the norms change to fit us if enough women take this approach? Although not everyone can win a large grant, grant processes like ROPE should map us to feelings of success instead of feelings of failure, and this is where I find Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism particularly potent. A more optimistic approach might involve recognizing ways for scholars to articulate career interruption in more nuanced ways. It might allow for more complex life storytelling that allows researchers to feel heard and have their barriers included in the narrative of their careers. Notes 1 The main grant round which Humanities and Social Science researchers apply for is the ARC Discovery, usually due the last week of February, coinciding with the end of the Australian summer holidays and the beginning of semester one. 2 https://www.arc.gov.au/policies-strategies/policy/arc-research-opportunityand-performance-evidence-rope-statement 3 https://www.arc.gov.au/policies-strategies/policy/arc-research-opportunityand-performance-evidence-rope-statement 4 https://twitter.com/RebeTaylorMelb/status/1475268817735405572/photo/1 5 Smith and Watson, 38. 6 Ibid., 61. 7 Ibid., 54. 8 Ibid., 58. 9 Ibid., 58. 10 https://www.arc.gov.au/funding-research/funding-schemes/discovery-program# :~:text=Discovery%20funding%20recognises%20the%20importance,creating %20jobs 11 https://www.arc.gov.au/funding-research/funding-outcome/selection-outcomereports/selection-report-discovery-projects-2021#:~:text=The%20ARC%20received %20a%20total,Discovery%20Projects%20approved%20for%20funding

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12 https://www.arc.gov.au/funding-research/funding-outcome/selection-outcomereports/selection-report-discovery-projects-2021#:~:text=The%20ARC%20received %20a%20total,Discovery%20Projects%20approved%20for%20funding The Group of Eight (or Go8) is a group created to define the top eight research-intensive universities in Australia: the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, the University of Adelaide, Monash University and UNSW Sydney. 13 The ARC Tracker https://twitter.com/ARC_Tracker/status/1574948064720486402 Their bio describes them as “part human, part bot, 100% UNOFFICIAL. I track Australian Research Council grant outcomes. Bot checks for announcements of outcomes each minute.” “NIT-picking” is a process by which highly ranked grant applicants are asked by the ARC to re-write their National Interest Test sections to explain the grant’s benefit to the community. The National Interest Test remains a controversial part of the grant application process. 14 Berlant, 1. 15 Ibid., 24. 16 Bueskens and Toffoletti, 13. 17 Ibid., 15. 18 Berlant, 1. 19 https://www.arc.gov.au/funding-research/funding-outcome/selection-outcomereports/selection-report-discovery-projects-2021#:~:text=The%20ARC%20received %20a%20total,Discovery%20Projects%20approved%20for%20funding 20 Of the 7118 Chief Investigators (CIs) named in applications in this round, 2110 were female, 4972 were male and 36 chose not to specify their gender. 21 “NCGP Trends: Gender data visualisations”. https://www.arc.gov.au/fundingresearch/funding-outcome/grants-dataset/trend-visualisation/ncgp-trendsgender-data-visualisations 22 Barker, Webster-Wright, Gannaway, and Wendy Green, 30. 23 Ibid., 30. 24 “Increasing female participation in NCGP processes.” https://www.arc.gov.au/news-publications/media/feature-articles/increasingfemale-participation-ncgp-processes 25 https://ministers.education.gov.au/clare/universities-australia-2022-gala-dinner 26 Lauren A Rickards. Twitter. https://twitter.com/LaurenARickards/status/ 673732934768025605 27 Ortiz-Vilarelle, 45. 28 Lee, 4. 29 Ortiz-Vilarelle, 48. 30 https://www.arc.gov.au/about-arc/program-policies/research-opportunity-andperformance-evidence-rope-statement 31 https://www.arc.gov.au/about-arc/program-policies/research-opportunity-andperformance-evidence-rope-statement 32 Bueskens and Toffoletti, 18. 33 Ibid., 18. 34 Ibid., 19. 35 https://www.arc.gov.au/about-arc/program-policies/research-opportunity-andperformance-evidence-rope-statement 36 https://www.arc.gov.au/about-arc/program-policies/research-opportunity-andperformance-evidence-rope-statement

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Ortiz-Vilarelle, 45. Bosanquet, 438. Ortiz-Vilarelle, 47. Bosanquet, 437. Barker, Webster-Wright, Gannaway, Green, 30. Subheading two “Research Opportunities”, Douglas ARC ROPE 2022. Douglas ARC ROPE, 2022. Lipton, 486. Ortiz-Vilarelle, 46.

Works Cited Barker, Michelle, Ann Webster-Wright, Deanne Gannaway, and Wendy Green. “You’re Not Alone Discovering the Power of Sharing Life Narratives as Academic Women.” Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir, edited by Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 11–22. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Black, Alison L. and Susanne Garvis, eds. Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir. New York: Routledge, 2018. Black, Alison L. and Susanne Garvis, eds. Lived Experiences of Women in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir. New York: Routledge, 2018. Bosanquet, Agnes. “Details Optional: An Account of Academic Promotion Relative to Opportunity.” Life Writing, vol. 18, no. 3, 2021, pp. 429–42. Bueskens, Petra, and Kim Toffoletti. “Mothers, Scholars and Feminists: Inside and Outside the Australian Academic System.” Lived Experiences of Women in Academia. New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 13–22. Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. MIT Press, 2021. Lee, Katja. “Work(ing) Persona.” Persona Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1–13. Lipton, Briony. “Measures of Success: Cruel Optimism and the Paradox of Academic Women’s Participation in Australian Higher Education.” Higher Education Research & Development, vol. 36, no. 3, 2017, pp. 486–97. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa. “Academic Career Construction: Personnel Documents as Personal Documents.” Life Writing, vol. 17, no. 1, 2020, pp. 45–57. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. The Australia Research Council. www.arc.gov.au. Accessed 30 March 2023. The ARC Tracker on Twitter. https://twitter.com/ARC_Tracker. Accessed 30 March 2023.

7

Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a Curriculum Vitae Leena Käosaar

This essay is dedicated to my maternal grandmother, Helga ValgeristSitska Mõttesport “The only sport that I practice is the sport of thinking (in Estonian, mõttesport).” My maternal grandmother Helga Sitska writes this to her sister, Aino Pargas, in November 1956, in one of her first letters across the Iron Curtain. This correspondence which lasted 33 years constitutes the most extensive written record of my family history. “Philosophy has always fascinated me, more and more so as years and life go by,” she writes and continues with an account of everyday family life, skillfully navigating the information to get past the eye of the Soviet censor. Memm, as we called her, was my main caretaker throughout childhood and one of the most important people in my life. From an early age, she encouraged and supported independent thinking and conscious self-development. For her, the process of gaining knowledge in philosophy, history, the arts, and literature was never separated from the mundane matters of daily life. When I think of her, I see her standing by a rickety gas stove, stirring something in a big pot, her hair extending in gentle waves up to her jawline, leaving her forehead exposed – a hairstyle typical of the 1930s – accentuating both feminine elegance and intellectual strength. As I try to guess the contents of the pot, she casts an attentive look at me over her shoulder and asks what I learned at school that day. This is a real question, not family small talk, and soon enough I am slouched on the wooden stool beside the kitchen door with books piling up on the floor beside me. “I believe it was Socrates who first developed the idea,” she says. “But do bring the Encyclopedia of Antiquity from the living room and let’s check” was a typical remark by her during our long conversations. This was my homework routine, indeed the most important part of my schooling and a template for my future, although I was not yet aware of it. DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-8

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Memm was not a scholar, although during her studies in the Faculty of Law at the University of Tartu before WWII, one of her professors invited her to join his research group and pursue a degree. Under the Soviet regime, she had a hard time finding employment for political reasons. During my childhood, she worked as a real estate lawyer for the municipality of Tartu and although she was good at her job, she did not enjoy it; she wanted as little as possible to do with the Soviet regime. She taught me the pleasures of “the sport of thinking,” the art of alerting my mind to the ways of the world, ideas, people, histories, emotions, and the power of thought. Both she and my grandfather led a life characterized by what I consider creativity and the cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities. This was visible in the design of their home with its subdued shades of furniture and carpets characteristic of prewar times. Paintings, pottery, and bookshelves extending along the wall creating a sensory world of childhood that I enjoyed so much. She was not a feminist either, although the way in which she raised me and my sister held women in equal esteem with men and promoted our professional self-realization in the future. She created for me the space of intellectual womanhood that, in turn, has played a central role in fashioning a space for academic womanhood in my adult life. Coercers and Coaxers In an account of the autobiographical, renowned Estonian novelist Jaan Kross considers the nearly non-existent possibilities of using life experience in the fictional work of his generation, an experience that would extend to the prewar period as well as the onslaught of the Soviet regime. Referring to the Soviet standard of CV, the anketa, Kross explains how the Soviet security apparatus not only kept an eye on this document but often also actively shaped it as “official co-author, undisputed censor and what is most ridiculous, sometimes even a generator of ideas [about what] to include and highlight if one wished to present him/herself to the authorities in a more favorable light.”1 As Bertaux, et. al. argue regarding the principles of operation of the Soviet regime, “in a society dominated by a giant system of internal espionage, talking about yourself could always leave perilous clues, hostages to the future.”2 Jaan Kross took these risks in his work, as did my grandmother by telling me about the past, about living under a repressive regime, and by writing about that in code to her sister. Yet for both, as for others of their generation as well as their children, anketa nevertheless defined the space they needed to navigate to earn their daily bread. As I write about this, my laptop rings, announcing the arrival of a new e-mail. It is a message from our program director, cautioning colleagues to attend the departmental meeting as new instructions will be given on how

Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a CV 117 to properly edit and revise our ETIS (Estonian Science Information System) profile – our online academic CV. Meticulously laid out in boxes titled, e.g., “general information,” “career,” “qualification,” “honors and awards,” “publications,” and scientific projects,” and monitored closely on an institutional as well as on a national level, the ETIS CV defines the space of our academic existence.3 Without a doubt, ETIS CV cannot really be compared to the Soviet anketa, because even when failing to meet important criteria or deficiently filled in, the former does not hold power over the entire professional career of its subject, nor does its reach extend to potentially perilous consequences comparable to those harbored by the anketa during the Soviet period. The ETIS system has no direct relation to the Soviet surveillance mechanisms; rather, it is the product of the adoption of the neoliberal operation principles in academia, carefully and perhaps overeagerly shaped according to the example of the Western world. As Marling and Aavik argue, in Estonia, “neo-liberal policies, with their stress on the thin state and individualism, were perceived as the clearest alternative to the Soviet period that Estonia wanted to leave behind”4 and “neoliberally oriented academic reforms have met little or no resistance in the academic community.”5 The ETIS CV is an embodiment of neoliberal academic values through foregrounding numeric scores and metrics,6 demanding a demonstration of “perpetual performance, productivity, competition, efficiency [and] quantification,”7 and promoting “concomitant self-promotion and self-surveillance.”8 As a system for recording and accessing outcomes, it functions as a matrix for determining the value of the subject for academic research and administration based on information entered in the spaces of the online form. This confirms Martin A. Danahay’s view of “the C.V. as autobiography turn [ing] the subject into a public artifact who has already been prepackaged in such a way as to be acceptable to a prospective employer.”9 While the digital formatting of the ETIS CV, as well as other similar platforms, embrace an increasing degree of “standardization and bureaucratization,” the impact of this autobiographical space of continuous visibility and surveillance further standardizes academic subjectivity.10 In his revision of the influential La Pacte Autoiographique (1975), Philippe Lejeune proposes a more flexible scale of autobiographicity extending from “the banality of curriculum vitae” to “pure poetry.”11 On both ends of the scale, autobiography ceases to exist; the pact no longer holds. The Oxford English Dictionary provides this definition of the word banal: “commonplace, common, trite, trivial, petty.” What the Soviet anketa and the ETIS CV have in common is that, based on their potential impact on individual self-perception and agency, neither can be considered trite or trivial. Both have required a structure for training subjects in skills necessary for ensuring adherence (and loyalty) to the normative standards

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by which their lives are measured and controlled. There are, however, crucial differences in the logic of operation between the two modes of coaxing or coercing people into “getting a life.”12 In the Soviet system, the establishment of the anketa in 1940 can be tied to the objectives of the regime for the “erosion of individual agency” as a measure for successfully asserting state power over every aspect of individual lives.13 In neoliberal contexts that are driven by principles of economic rationality in all areas of life, including academic governance, such self-regulatory practices take on new intensity when viewed in comparison to totalitarian regimes.14 The “neo-liberal professional” as an “enterprise of the self” is advanced as a subject of individual freedom rather than institutional control.15 The ETIS 1.1s My ETIS profile shows that for the year 2005, I have two 3.1s, one 3.2s, one 1.1, and two 6.8s. The numbers indicate my research output with 3.1 and 3.2 standing for articles in edited volumes, and 1.1. for an article published in academic journals, verified via scientific indexing databases, most importantly the Web of Science. As an example of what Smith and Watson consider characteristic of “signify[ing status] more than stat[ing facts]” in professional resumes, this information provides an estimate of my approximate value as an academic employee in the Estonian academic community.16 For the next year, I have four 3.2s, one 3.1, and a 2.3, the latter marker standing for “Dissertations published in a series of dissertations (excluding manuscripts).” This is the year I defended my doctoral thesis and got my Ph.D. ETIS also shows my standing for the years 2005–2006 to be “Research Fellow Extraordinarius” (the last word meaning shorter-term contract) of the Institute of Cultural Research and the Arts at the University of Tartu with a workload varying from 0.25 to 1.00 as an affiliate of a nationally-funded research project in the field of comparative literature. What an ETIS profile does not show is that my middle daughter, Emma, was born in 2005. By that time, Estonia had an excellent parental leave system that made it possible for a mother (and later also a father for part of the parental leave period) to stay at home with the child with full salary (with an upper limit that came nowhere close to my lecturer’s salary) for 18 months. My ETIS profile, however, shows no “career interruption,” a term that, according to Bueskens and Toffoletti, betrays “a host of assumptions,” including a prioritization of career over motherhood and a demand for “our biographies […] concord with the time frames constructed and normalized under neo-liberalism.”17 Close to the time when Emma was eight months old and I was on maternity leave (at least on paper), I received a call from my thesis supervisor and the head of our

Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a CV 119 program, who asked me to hand in my thesis in three weeks if I still wanted to have a job upon my return. The rules for applying for research funding had changed and it was no longer possible to include doctoral students in research projects. Within one week, I had developed an anxiety disorder. I woke up panicked at five o’clock in the morning, was unable to concentrate, and felt continually overwhelmed by a sense of doom. I thought, “I can never do this. I will fail. This will be the end of my academic career, an embarrassing end.” When I return to this time in my memory, I see Emma sleeping in her stroller in our garden, covered with the most water-resistant rain shade it was possible to find. She was a good sleeper – she could stay outside even in the pouring rain while I wrote my thesis. I set up my workspace near the window, so I could check on her almost without interrupting my work. I needed to make a huge effort to finish my thesis within the limited work hours I had at my disposal and felt guilty for sacrificing time that I could have been focusing not only on my baby daughter, but also on my oldest daughter who had just started school. However, I also remember being empowered by the knowledge that I had gathered bit by bit alongside my work as a lecturer over so many years, finally coming together in my thesis. The moment when I realized I could stand by my work with confidence was jubilant. I handed in my thesis in four and a half weeks – which was good enough for the purposes of the research application – and successfully defended it a few days before Christmas. Still, on maternity leave, I could finally have some peaceful time with my daughter. “I did it all,” I thought. I was able to be a good (enough) mother and manage my academic work. Yet, anxiety kept returning with each new academic writing task, sometimes more mildly, sometimes more or less overtaking my life. Of course, the anxiety was never just about work but just as strongly about the fear of abandoning my duties as a mother since I did most writing after-hours and on weekends when I could have been with my children and my family. Like many other academic mothers, managing work required an advanced support system and continuous, often complex and tenuous arrangements that “‘free’ [us] from the maternal role so that [we] can work more.”18 I learned to live and work with anxiety, write more and better, and publish in more prestigious journals and edited volumes – those that I could mark with the highest qualification ranks on ETIS. As a single parent, I am slowly learning to let go of the ideals of what Sharon Hayes has referred to as “intensive mothering,” characterized by the need for constant, extensively time-consuming nurturing by mothers and their sole responsibility for providing care.19 Instead, I am trying to adopt at least some principles of Donald Winnicot’s paradigm of “good enough mother,” based on a perception of “human beings […] who both succeed and fail” and as such, provide the needed consistency and predictability

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for their children.”20 “Is this really true?” I ask myself when typing these lines. “Did I not abandon the plan to provide feedback to an MA thesis in bed before going to sleep since Helene became very sad when I did not hold her hand as usual when she was drifting off to sleep?” It is even more complicated with becoming a “good enough” scholar – even writing these words makes me cast a frightened look over my shoulder in anticipation of an evaluation such as ‘lack of motivation’ or ‘insufficient dedication to academic responsibilities’ showing up on an assessment report. Although I keep telling myself that to survive in academia, I need to reduce my workload to realistic quantities, I am currently recovering from the exhaustion of writing an extensive grant application and suffering from heartburn and insomnia because my research work got desperately delayed in the process. When my oldest daughter Hanna was born in 1998, ETIS had not yet been established. Neither was the paid parental leave system. She was an excellent sleeper. When I think of her first months, I see her tucked away under a roof’s edge at a summer house that my grandfather built for his children in the 1970s in a small resort town in southern Estonia. It was an endlessly rainy summer, and I was struggling to translate the whole curriculum of Estonian Basic and Secondary Education into English. I had gotten this side job that equaled my yearly salary a few months before Hanna was born and I never mentioned this fact to the specialist in the Ministry of Education who contracted the translation. I managed a lot of translating during her midday naps but also developed vestibulopathy and was unable to even raise my head from the pillow for several weeks. Fortunately, it passed, and I was able to finish the translation nearly in time. The money I earned made it possible for me to hire a babysitter and return to my job at the university when Hanna was 8 months old. So, there was almost no “career interruption” with her either. Painting Rainbows and Unicorns When I return to these memories now, when I see the big, old-fashioned strollers I chose in the hope that they would make possible these long naps outside – blue with a small floral print for Hanna and blue with red stripes along the sides for Emma – it seldom occurred to me that instead of quickly hushing my girls to sleep and rushing inside to work, I could have taken long walks with them. I could have rested or, during the time when my middle daughter was a baby, spent time with the oldest who had just started school. I could have told my supervisor that in the middle of my parental leave, it was impossible for me to finish my thesis within these time limits. Yet I never did any of this despite the idealistic belief that hard work would ultimately pave my way to academic

Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a CV 121 success, one which characterized my disposition when my oldest daughter was born.21 Even if, in principle, motherhood was not considered a serious shortcoming of my performance, it was something that could easily work to my disadvantage, should it suit the interests of my institution.22 Through my ETIS CV, I am subject to constant public visibility. So, at work, I tried to hide my motherhood as much as possible. It was nearly invisible on my ETIS CV where information on parental leave can only be added to an optional box titled “additional information.” I have removed that information numerous times because I did not believe it would be beneficial. I believed that, although it was known that I have children, I would earn points by not mentioning maternity leave on my CV. I have sometimes added it when I have felt rebellious against the system that pressures women to work through maternity leave as unpaid or nearly unpaid work. As Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle reminds us, the CV “introduces the academic as a self in progress toward yet-to-be-accomplished goals […] written with the aim of projecting a narrative of success and accomplishment.”23 In addition to the institutional to keep an ETIS CV updated – visibility in the virtual system at a time of relative professional invisibility in other academic contexts – provided the possibility of exercising an aspirational (academic) self. This possibility offered self-confirmation and a sense of safety in updating the CV despite being on leave. In the competitive context of research funding, there is added pressure to document despite parental leave(s) invisible on the CV. My life did not change much with my youngest, who was born when I was well into my mid-forties. My job responsibilities had considerably increased as I worked two part-time jobs – one as an associate professor at the University and one as a senior researcher at the Estonian Literary Museum. Despite the similar old-fashioned stroller with a big sleeping basket, light beige with a wide stripe of navy blue along the sides, Helene rarely slept outside on her own for more than 30 minutes. So instead of working, I took her on long strolls around Tartu, counting my steps on my smartphone and often coming close to 20,000. Nevertheless, to show that I am a committed and conscientious worker, I continued fulfilling some administrative duties at the University when I was already on maternity leave. I continued research and organized a large international conference at the museum, having unsuccessfully negotiated payment for most of this work. I no longer believed that this was a good way of combining work and family duties, but as my faint protest against the excess of responsibilities during maternity leave yielded no results, I was eager to comply for fear of losing my job. Eventually, I did lose my job at the museum after two unsuccessful attempts to secure research funding for our research group. I had been working very hard on two half-jobs,

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contributing considerably more than would fit into the 20 work hours per week for which I was paid. I had extensive international contacts, articles published in prestigious international journals and volumes in my field and invitations for keynotes. Yet, I failed to move up the academic career ladder however lucky I was to be granted a full position at the University. I often feel that I have not been successful in making the best use of the spaces provided for me within academia – how else to explain my inefficiency at moving up the academic ladder despite subjecting my whole family life to an “academic regime?” I keep wondering about my own co-creation of those spaces, about my unquestioned conformity to the norms and regulations of the system, and about internalizing the perception of academic space to the extent that it dominates not only my life, but the life of my family. I do not feel confident writing ‘between the lines’ of my ETIS CV, so I keep censoring myself. I tell myself, “I want to make it clear that I have managed my academic responsibilities, that I am managing them.” Topics such as these are unpopular even among my female colleagues; none of us would “risk one’s credibility as a competent, capable and serious academic.”24 I have approached my superiors concerning promotion and raise, and have witnessed how easily I border on expendability. “Would it be the same for my male colleagues?” I have wondered. After teaching classes and attending meetings, I do not rush home to work on my articles but to cook Peppa the Pig pasta and pumpkin bread (my youngest daughter’s favorite), sew clothes for dolls, practice writing letters and numbers, and paint rainbows and unicorns. As I have now recently become a single mother, the position of a full professor that would require extra effort in hours and expected results but would come with little monetary compensation has lost its appeal for me. “But I am probably fooling myself to think that it would work anyway,” a voice inside my head cautions me as I feel a wave of anxiety rushing through my body. This time, my reaction is almost justified by a realistic assessment of my situation. Strangely, now when the trajectories I had carefully laid out for my life and so committedly followed no longer seem valid, fear seems useless. More than midway through my academic career and shaken by the sudden change in my family life, am I in a position to cast a critical look at my life in academia – the only professional experience that I have ever known? Intertwined as it has always been with the endless tasks, joys, and worries of motherhood, have I been reluctant to recognize these bonds and connections, perhaps depriving my life, including my professional life of strength and richness by depleting an essential part of it? Can I finally start charting my own trajectories and creating my own spaces? Is there a possibility of thriving, as opposed to merely surviving, as I seem to have done so far?

Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a CV 123 The Desire for a Story In an account of autotheory as a feminist practice, Lauren Fournier defines autotheory as “a term describing a self-conscious way of engaging with theory – as a discourse, frame, or mode of thinking and practice – alongside lived experience and subjective embodiment” that she views as characteristic of the post-millennial cultural production “on the edges of art and academia.”25 Highlighting the potential of autotheory found in its “innate troubling of dominant epistemologies and approaches to philosophizing and theorizing and for its capacity to make space for new ways of theorizing and understanding […] lives,”26 Fournier notes that autotheory is first and foremost an artistic practice that emerges in works of visual art as well as literary works that “exceed existing genre categories and disciplinary bounds and reveal the entanglement of research and creation.”27 As a feminist practice, autotheory relies on an understanding of the illusoriness “of the separation of art and life, work and the self, research and motivation that can be considered one of the cornerstones of feminist (theoretical and philosophical) thought throughout its history.”28 Autotheoretical insights have informed my thinking about my experience of academic womanhood, including the methodological vistas of autotheory, in particular an emphasis on its “personal-theoretical, incidental, gut-centered nature.”29 To be honest, the performance- and output-based academic rating and scoring mechanisms of surveillance-based governance and the implementation and internalization of self-regulatory practices that shape my academic existence seem to rule out the possibility of incidental and intuitive embodied thought and reflection. Furthermore, in the account of my (academic) life, I have represented myself as one committedly subjected to the demands and structures of current academic governance with any deviations from it mediated in a guiltridden manner – their inclusion justified only by offering proof of having been able to correct and rectify them with minimal damage to my academic performance. My story did not turn out the way I planned it; the inclusion of my ETIS profile, meant to be ironic, came to dominate my narrative. Rather than criticizing the reduction of my value as a scholar to numerical and metric parameters, I ended up showcasing myself as a mere standard despite the absurdity of considering ETIS as an actual indicator of academic quality, or a measure of one’s life.30 “I need to show that I am a serious scholar,” I thought. “If I can prove this, I can offer a glimpse ’behind the scenes,’ provided that the overall impression I leave is one of (relative) success.” Unwittingly, I may have produced a neoliberal kind of life narrative “featur [ing] an ’I’ who overcomes hardship and recasts […] systemic harm as something an individual alone can, and should, manage through pluck, perseverance, and enterprise […] transform[ing] disadvantage into value.”31

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In her Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (2000), Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero elaborates on a paradigm of selfhood that centers on the narratable self that grounds self-perception and identity to the involuntary narrative capacities of memory.32 A similar concept is advanced by Paul John Eakin, who underlines identity’s reliance on “living a narrative” and conceptualizes autobiography as a discourse of identity and a “fabric of lived experience” that shapes and organizes life on a daily basis in the format of a series of partially unconscious fragments.33 As an “interplay between socio-cultural structures and individual creativity,”34 these processes highlight the relational nature of identity and subjectivity.35 Although Cavarero and Eakin’s conceptualization of selfhood and identity bear certain resemblances, for Cavarero, the “I” cannot be perceived via the concepts of the individual or subjectivity, but it has affinities with singular existent, a term employed by Jean-Luc Nancy, designating “a singularity, or a hereness (haeccitas) as the place of emission, reception or transition […] of affect, of action, of language.”36 Cavarero’s paradigm relies on Hannah Arendt’s postulate of the uniqueness of each human being: “who I am vs. what I am,”37 that for Arendt can be mediated via action and speech, and for Cavarero via (life) story.38 However, for Cavarero, this does not depend on the capacity of the person to narrate her story: “the who [someone] is shows itself … with clarity in the perception of a narratable self that desires the tale of her own life-story.”39 As a means of “coercing” a life story, ETIS and other increasingly webbased CV formats proceed from a contrasting vantage point – they demand a record that proceeds not from a desire for a narratable self but from an institutional application of a matrix consisting of “efficiently processed biodata particles.”40 This may, and often does, reflect back to its owner within the framework of “the banality of a CV,” robbing her of her41 uniqueness, striving to limit her existence to the “what I am,” and harboring the danger of erasing the “who” – the desire for her story – by an institutional inclination to “overturn the epistemic status of every story.”42 When, as a girl, I sat on the stool by the kitchen door, alert and elevated by my conversations with my grandmother, what held my attention was, in Cavarero’s terms, being able to contemplate the design that my life might leave behind – the possibility of my life “allow[ing] itself to be looked upon in the end like a design that has meaning,” a perception of myself as a narratable self.43 For Cavarero, as well as for Eakin, identity is formed in interactive exchange and reciprocity. This can be viewed as the core of Cavarero’s paradigm of selfhood that extends beyond language into a recognition of the nature of existence, embracing an embodied situatedness perceivable through our everyday (inter)actions. Anxiety did not interrupt my academic career but, perhaps, enhanced it by constantly pressuring me to strive even harder to conform to the norms

Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a CV 125 – at least to their publicly visible contours. Nearly invisible to the outside, it may not have hindered or interfered with my life as a mother either, as I strove equally hard to fulfill my maternal and familial duties despite being constantly torn between the urgencies of my domestic life and academic demands. What it did do, however, was create a deep-set distrust of myself, extending from bodily self-perception to estimations of my intellectual, common-sensical, emotional, and intersubjective capacities. It silenced the intuitive mode of being, posited by Fournier as the methodological core of autotheoretical thinking. The “who I am” got lost, evened out by institutionally-conditioned narrow planes of existence tipped by anxiety-ridden torrents of self-doubt that mark the (inner and undocumented) path of my academic womanhood that I have kept wellhidden so far. Rushing to conclude my paper before picking my daughter up from kindergarten, my hands slide on the keyboard due to excessive dryness, and I keep hitting the wrong buttons. I never find the time to properly take care of that as I scuffle between writing this paper, rinsing out my daughter’s muddy gloves and rain pants so that she can wear them the next day, hastily planting hyacinth bulbs in my garden before it gets too cold, reminding myself to get more glitter glue, and arranging to gather apples from my mother’s garden to make the last batch of apple juice. These are small, everyday chores that all seem to lean in on the already narrow spaces provided for me in neoliberal academia, stealing valuable time needed for teaching, reading, researching, writing, and administrative duties. I should manage them better, put them off, or discard them altogether, yet I value this trivial familiar space that creates calmness through its regular, repetitive nature and keeps me alert through its small irregularities and moderately chaotic nature. “Can domestic routines become precious moments snatched from more thoroughly exhaustive work practices, or do their rhythms constantly signal their lack of value?” asks Ben Highmore in his study of the relevance of the mundane sensory world of everyday existence.44 While keeping an eye on the stew I am making for supper, following the advice of Memm for how to prepare the golden butter that brings out the essence of carrots and rutabagas, I am also sifting and sorting through ideas for this paper, engaging in my method of thinking by the stove. I bring Helene home and she leisurely leans against me on my lap, insisting that I pull off her outerwear while she tells me about the game of monsters, princesses, and witches she played with her friends today. “What powers did you have?” I ask her, sinking into this moment of peaceful intimacy we share in the quickly fading light of a rainy autumn day. Yet again, our big, extremely furry cat with lynx-like tufts of hair at the tips of her ears betraying her Main Coon ancestry is taking a nap on the dinner table, comfortably stretched out between the

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sugar bowl and a pile of books – some of mine that I have been using for my research lately and some of Helene’s that she has been browsing while I work (“working along with me,” as she calls it). This is my lived experience. This is (also) who I am. And I hope that Helene will be able to see, just as I once did – sitting on the stool by the kitchen door, discussing the world – the design of her life, the “who” that she is. Although I teach creative non-fiction, writing my own story proved to be a much greater challenge than I anticipated. Writing about my life as subject to a biodatafied form revealed to me, to my utter surprise, the extent to which my CV shapes my self-perception both in and outside the academy. As I read more about academic motherhood, my inner voice gathered momentum; its initially coherent, linear design started branching into various directions, each toward a new kind of self-perception and a new (life) design. Notes 1 Kross, 11. 2 Bertaux et al. 3 For example, each publication added to the profile needs to be checked by an official to guarantee that it is listed under the correct classification that, in turn, influences research funding given to the department and success in national research funding schemes. 4 Marling and Aavik, 44. 5 Ibid. 6 Mattson et al., 3. 7 Henderson et al., v. 8 Mayes, 1. 9 Danahay, 358. 10 Ibid. 11 Lejeune, 127. 12 Smith and Watson adopt the term from Ken Plummer who has defined the coaxer/coercer as “any person or institution or set of cultural imperatives that solicits or provokes people to tell their stories” (Plummer 21, cited in Smith and Watson, 64). 13 Cronshaw and Leydesdorff, xiii. 14 Kahlert, 1. 15 Ball, 217, reference to Rose. 16 Smith and Watson, 65. 17 Bueskens and Toffoletti, 18; In Estonia, the term for parental leave is gender neutral. According to current legislation, both parents can use the paid leave in equal share. Previously, the period of parental leave for the father was considerably shorter. In practice, fathers use parental leave proportionally for fewer months and not all fathers use parental leave. In Estonian, however, the term used is “lapsehoolduspuhkus” which means holiday taken to take care of the child. 18 Ibid., 15. 19 Hayes, 32.

Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a CV 127 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Winnicott, 179. O’Reilly, 77. Goodier, 54–6; 59. Ortiz-Vilarelle, 16. Bueskens and Toffoletti, 15. Fournier, 18. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15. Henderson et al., 104. Gilmore, 89. Cavarero, 33. Eakin, 1–4. Ibid., 106; Gullestad. Eakin, 43–98. Nancy, 4–5. Cavarero, 13. Kottmann, vii–viii; Cavarero 13. Cavarero, 56. Ortiz-Vilarelle, 19. Although Cavarero’s concept of the narratable self is not gender specific, she uses the feminine pronouns “she” and “her.” 42 Cavarero, 133. 43 Ibid., 1. 44 Highmore, 1.

Works Cited Ball, Stephen. “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity.” Journal of Education Policy, vol. 18, no. 2, 2003, pp. 215–28. Banal. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2023, https://wwwoed-com. Accessed 29 April 2023. Bertraux, Daniel, Rotkirch, Anna, and Paul Thompson. “Introduction.” On Living Through Soviet Russia, edited by Daniel Bertraux, Anna Rotkirch and Paul Thompson, New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 1–23. Bueskens, Petra and Kim Toffoletti. “Mothers, Scholars and Feminists: Inside and Outside the Australian Academic System.” Lived Experiences of Women in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir, edited by Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 13–22. Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives. Storytelling and Selfhood. New York: Routledge, 2000. Cronshaw, Richard and Selma Leydesdorff. “Introduction to the Transaction Edition.” Memory and Totalitarianism, edited by Luisa Passerini, New Brunswick: Transaction, 2005, pp. vii–xviii. Danahay, Martin. “Professional Subjects. Prepackaging the Academic C.V.” Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, edited by Smith and Julia Watson, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1996, pp. 351–68.

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Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories. Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Eakin, Paul John. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. Cambridge: MIT, 2021. Gilmore, Leigh. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives. New York: Columbia UP, 2018. Goodier, Bethany Crandell. “Spies Like Us. The Lives of Double Agents Evolving Identities and Strategies of Mothers in Academe.” Academic Motherhood in a Post-Second Wave Context, edited by D. Lynn O’Brian Hallstein and Andrea O’Reilly, Bradford: Demeter, 2012, pp. 49–73. Gullestad, Marianne. Everyday Life Philosophers. Modernity, Morality, and Autobiography in Norway. Oslo: Scandinavian UP, 1996. Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Henderson, Linda, Black, Alison L. and Susanne Garvis. “Preface.” (Re)birthing the Feminine in the Academe: Creating Spaces of Motherhood in Patriarchal Contexts, edited by Linda Henderson, Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. v–xii. Highmore, Ben. Ordinary lives. Studies of the Everyday. New York: Routledge, 2020. Kahlert, Heike. “Introduction. Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance.” Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance, edited by Heike Kahlert, New York: Springer, 2018, pp. 1–12. Kottmann, Paul . “Translator’s Introduction.” Relating Narratives. Storytelling and Selfhood, edited by Adriana Cavarero, New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. vii–xxxi. Kross, Jaan. Omaeluloolisus ja alltekst. Eesti Keele: Sihtasutus, 2003. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Marling, Raili and Kadri Aavik.“Gender Studies at the Time of Neo-liberal Transformation in Estonian Academia.” Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance, edited by Heike Kahlert, New York: Springer, 2018, pp. 41–64. Mattson, Christopher, Bushardt, Reamer L. and Antino, Anthony, R. “When Measure Becomes a Target, it Ceases to Be a Good Measure.” Journal of Graduate Medical Education, vol. 13, no. 1, 2021, pp. 2–5. 10.43../JGME-D-2 0_01492.1 Mayes, Eve. “Uncreatively Writing Women’s Lives in Academia.” Lived Experiences of Women in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir, edited by Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 13–22. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Introduction.” Who Comes after the Subject, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 1–8. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa. “Assembling Academic Persona and Personhood in a Digital World.” Persona Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1–13. 10.21153/psj2022vol8no1 art1563

Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a CV 129 O’Reilly, Andrea. Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering. Toronto: Demeter, 2006. Plummer, Ken. Telling Sexual Stories. Power, Change and Social Worlds. New York: Routledge, 1994. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. “Introduction.” Getting a Life. Everyday Uses of Autobiography, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996, pp. 1–24. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Winnicot, Donald W. Winnicot on the Child. New York: Perseus, 2002.

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Getting an Academic Life The Untranslatable, or How to Curate a Polish-Canadian CV Eva C. Karpinski

When my doctoral supervisor passed away in 2010, I received her academic CV in preparation for putting together a festschrift dedicated to her. The CV shows her as a pre-neoliberal scholar whose career started in the early 1960s: not many prestigious book monographs there, but several edited collections and over 200 articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, many of them foundational to the emerging fields of Canadian literature and feminist translation studies. What caught my attention was a note appended to the section on “Articles in Journals,” explaining that neither this section nor the following one, listing conference proceedings, differentiates between refereed and non-refereed items because “[r]efereeing was unknown in Canadian literature criticism before 1986.” Later I found an interview in which she spoke about her difficulties within the department to get tenure, related precisely to what was perceived as the problem of having non-refereed publications: Well, all of the Canadian periodicals, Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, none of them were refereed publications in the sense of having an anonymous, distanced referee. As the people from Studies in Canadian Literature said, ‘you get a far better reading here. There are five of us who are editors, who are all Canadian specialists. We read everything and we fight over everything, and you get a really thorough reading here.’ But, they were not considered blind referees.1 It puts things in perspective to hear of academics from the then “young” disciplines, including Canadianists but also women’s studies professors, who back in the 1970s and ‘80 s had to fight to open up new spaces for themselves while being forced into increasingly bureaucratized metricsbased systems of corporate universities. Similar situations still occur today when with my feminist colleagues we make a case for having our collaborative research-creation projects and co-authored texts acknowledged as worthy of tenure and promotion. DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-9

Getting an Academic Life 131 In their trailblazing collection Getting a Life, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson recognize that in different institutional locations subjects are constructed through “managed frameworks” that demand specific kinds of “[prepackaged] personal recitations.”2 Extending their discussion in the same volume, Martin Danahay looks at the academic curriculum vitae (CV) as a site of professional disciplining and ideologically fraught selfreproduction on the level of both the university as a hierarchical institution and the subject as homo academicus, a professional intellectual whose life is entangled with power-knowledge production in academic circuits.3 To meet the conditions of intelligibility and eligibility for belonging, such individuals shape their autobiographical accounts negotiating lack and excess in order to fit into institutional spaces provided for this documentation. Arguably, some of my supervisor’s publications were not considered reputable since they did not fit the neoliberal model of excellence based on external quality control and evaluation. However, as her note demonstrates, she pushed back and asserted her agency while simultaneously widening the space delimited by the academic CV format, providing an explanatory context that allowed her to historicize and relativize the rules of the game. In this chapter I turn to my own CV as a site where I construct my academic persona, or “do persona-work,” that is, mobilize and perform a public identity that allows me to manage the demands of academic labor.4 Superimposed on my life narrative, the academic “me” often feels asynchronous with the daily business of living my life. As an immigrant settler scholar who has transitioned into the Anglo-dominant Canadian context, I read my CV as evidence of the compromise between my own individual agency and the institutional regime of academia. In its play of opacity and transparency, this “recited” piece of life writing that constructs me as an academic is haunted by the untranslatable and governed by the rule of desirable optics. While I surrender myself – voluntarily albeit begrudgingly – to the institutionally prescribed frames, I must accept the fact that the academic CV filters out those parts of a personal story that cannot be spoken, understood, or credited.5 It also conceals the work of translation that, within the confines of the institutional spaces provided, has attended many moments of self-fashioning since I embarked on my academic journey. Forced to live in monolingual contexts – of communism and Polish academia – initially, I sought escape into English without, however, allowing myself the possibility of movement or exchange between my languages. Rather, keeping them separate and hiding in another language constituted a mode of internal exile. Immigration has brought me to the next stages and new versions of living in (non)translation.

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Biographical Ruptures Writing about narrative methods in social sciences, Catherine Kohler Riessman observes that qualitative researchers often craft their survey and interview questions so as to confine the respondents’ answers and discourage unwanted “digressions.”6 Such “dehumanizing practices”7 closely resemble the constraints of institutional spaces provided for performing one’s academic persona, for example in a CV. Her research is pertinent to my story since she has studied “disruptive life events – personal accounts of experiences that fundamentally alter expected biographies.”8 To Riessman’s list of “divorce, chronic illness, and infertility,” I can add migration even though I am a little bemused by the curious phrase “expected biography.” I tend to view biography as overdetermined, in the Freudian sense, by the complex, unpredictable, potentially unlimited series of events and experiences that may have an impact on a person’s ability to construct a coherent narrative of self. At this point I am also tempted to digress: if being happily married, healthy, and successfully reproductive amounts to an expected biography, doesn’t “expected” translate into “heteronormative?” This little sleight of hand reinstates us into the zone of normativity and regulation, the domain of the titular “spaces provided,” where fluid, messy, fragmented, interminably re-interpretable personal narratives of lives as events in progress can be truncated into case studies, CVs, or even harvested as statistical data, and where biography itself affords the possibility of a container-genre for the existential flux of daily survival. For Riessman, inasmuch as personal narratives are social, individual case studies, they occupy “the intersection of biography, history, and society,” which means that the social, or the institutional, blends with the personal in very concrete material, performative, and discursive ways, through highly regulated/regulating mediations.9 Canadian institutional ethnographer Dorothy Smith provides further helpful language to grasp these material-discursive-performative entanglements of sayable and doable, tension and resistance, coercion and selfdisciplining, when she describes how any localized, sited attempts at making sense of our own experience “from where we are in our everyday lives,”10 are connected to “translocal” forces and ruling relations that “organize and shape what we do and experience.”11 Closer to home, in the field of autobiography studies, Smith and Watson observe that whenever we participate in various institutions of everyday life, from the nation-state to church, health care, education, family, and corporate workplace, each location elicits certain kinds of autobiographical telling “implicated in the microbial operations of power”12 that make it possible (or not) to become a particular kind of subject. Focusing on everyday orderings of the production and negotiation of identity through institutional discourses, in collecting

Getting an Academic Life 133 samples of what they call “backyard ethnography,” Smith and Watson remind us that these institutions survive and continue only if they impose “structures of legible subjectivity” on their stakeholders.13 Taking myself as a case study, I situate my story in the institutional microcosm of academia spanning at least two global locations, languages, and multiple points of transit between them. For almost four decades now I have been apprenticed to different academic cultures, first as a university student in socialist Poland studying English literature (read: British and American classics); then as a Fulbright graduate student at SUNY Buffalo (who made the mistake of returning to Poland to defend her dissertation); and since 1989 as a Polish-Canadian migrant slowly making my way back to becoming a university professor in my adopted country. After arriving in Toronto with a 10-month-old baby born in West Berlin, where my partner and I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall while waiting for our immigrant visas, I believed I was fully employable and well prepared for an academic job in Canada. Previously, I had worked a couple of years as an assistant professor at my home university, started publishing articles and reviews in Polish scholarly journals, and even received a few coveted fellowships, including one in Oxford. We left Poland when communism was in its final throes because I refused to give birth there. However, during my pregnancy, I was still mindful of the academic imperative to be productive and was lucky to obtain a scholarship from the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University of Berlin to study American minimalist fiction. While living in the Etage, a bohemian commune of young German professionals where we found shelter, with my big belly squeezed into the desk, I was typing a paper on Raymond Carver, Anne Beatty, and Grace Paley to make sure it was done before my due date. I did not expect that a few years later, I would have to re-invent myself to be able literally to “put myself on the market,” as one of my Canadian mentors suggested. I soon learned it was not good enough to arrive in Canada with a PhD in American literature from a Polish university, for which I had produced a 400-page dissertation on John Barth and postmodern fiction, written in English. It did not help either, in the long run, that I immediately accepted a full-time job as a professor in one of Toronto’s community colleges (which I expected to be similar to American liberal arts colleges). I was grateful for this gift of a job that provided financial stability and benefits for my young immigrant family. However, I was so attached to my ego identity as a scholar that I could not find full satisfaction in this secure, well-paying employment that not only legitimized my entry into Canadian society but also gave me an opportunity to work with amazing students of all backgrounds. It was a fast-track learning process in terms of my pedagogy and acculturation, but once I realized that in addition to a heavy

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teaching load, it was not a place that could support my research and academic publishing, I knew I had to start looking for an exit. In the end, it took me twenty years to obtain a tenure-track position at a Canadian university, during which time I was also an adjunct faculty for fifteen years. Crafting a New Academic Persona The biographical rupture of migration, combined with motherhood in transit (leben unterwegs, as our German roommates described our precarious situation), and the hasty choice of my first post-secondary employment thwarted my initial efforts to re-start an academic career and forced me to take radical steps in order to repair the record of my professional identity “spoiled” by the stigma of academic credentials from some unrecognized “elsewhere” in Eastern Europe. In her article on (self) constructions of academic subjectivity mediated through standardizing digital software, Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle touches upon the paradox of academia as a place both restrictive towards autobiographical self-disclosure of the type I share in the previous paragraph and demanding constant selfmanagement and curation of an academic profile.14 The fact that the CV’s restricted function is equivalent to keeping one’s finger on the pulse of one’s professional life (while completely ignoring its existential context) indicates that administrative structures of academia, after all, still operate from a long positivistic tradition of separating the personal from the professional. Ortiz-Vilarelle refers to Ebony Coletu’s “biographic mediation” as any structured solicitation of personal information for the purpose of deciding “about who gets what and why.”15 For transnational, translingual subjects, biographic mediation involved in constructing an academic CV as a document that will be used for judgment and evaluation is further complicated by decisions and choices around what to translate and what not to carry over from one cultural-linguistic context to another. Combining persona studies and life writing approaches, Ortiz-Vilarelle views the academic persona as a composite construct, “a transactional category of functional life writing” which may include CVs, tenure and promotion letters, and other “self-authored career documents.”16 She defines them as “highly autobiographical assemblages of academic persona formed in the intersections of professional data entry and self-expression” and, one might add, self-concealment that in my own experience can be both personal and professional.17 For individuals like myself – immigrants, mothers, underemployed or precariously employed, latecomers to the profession – it may be necessary “to mask aspects of their selfhood deemed unsuitable for specific purposes and environments.”18 She recognizes that career personas “iterate a type of person … and not a specific person,”

Getting an Academic Life 135 conforming to the standards, requirements, and expectations of their desired academic environments that wield their institutional power to regulate, evaluate, and promote.19 Sadly, these standards are still steeped in the old, familiar, gendered, and disembodied private-public binarism that fails to account for the whole person, relegating the private subject to the level of insignificance and invisibility. Migration, parenthood, disability, illness, depression, mourning, or even relationship break-ups all are deemed irrelevant, an embarrassment of sorts. Similarly, as long as fluency in English is demonstrated, the subject’s life in other languages is of lesser importance. But sometimes, another persona (or two) may be lurking untranslated in the blank spaces of the CV, muted so as to optimize one’s chances for a coveted academic employment. With the goal of securing an academic job in the new country, I needed a “persuasive and authoritative” persona that would speak to potential hiring committees in the voice of my CV.20 On top of getting another, North American PhD, the strategic upgrading of my CV required a series of domesticating translations that I believed were necessary to pass the screening and meet the demands of a particular audience. It also meant deemphasizing or discarding what was foreign and untranslatable, including my unpronounceable hyphenated name. Already in the first days of immigration, at the recommendation of a bank clerk who opened our first Canadian bank account, I took my partner’s name and simplified its spelling from “Karpińska” to “Karpinski” – substituting the masculine vowel ending “-i” for the vowel ending “-a” that to any Polish ear identified me as a woman. As much as this gesture liberated me from the hierarchically gendered Polish language, it inscribed me into a different grammar of the patriarchal erasure of the feminine. I also contracted my former family name to the middle initial “C” and changed the spelling of my first name from “Ewa” to “Eva” to put an end to mispronunciations confusing me with a female sheep. From then on, everything I will have published or presented will be recorded in my academic CV under this Canadianized name. However, before I could even start building a new academic persona, I ran into the problem of not fitting into the entrance spaces provided to prospective candidates by the Graduate Program in Women’s Studies where I decided to pursue my doctorate. The admissions committee did not know how to treat my application: I already had a PhD from Europe and held a permanent position in a postsecondary institution that in the snobby academic marketplace was classed as less prestigious; apparently, I was already a colleague, as I was told by an esteemed Toronto professor whose books on postmodernism I had reviewed for Polish literary theory journals in my previous life. When I met her in the early 1990s seeking career advice, she was a strong advocate of opening the ranks of the

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Association of Canadian University Teachers of English (ACUTE) to college professors of English, to create a larger membership base for what is currently known as the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE). I felt held back by her polite diplomacy in welcoming me as a colleague – which I knew was far from the truth – and thought she was sending a double message in the same conversation inviting me to audit her graduate seminar. This was the first in a series of indirect tests I had to pass. Still, I appreciate her giving me a subtle hint as to what my next step should be. My applications to graduate school were rejected twice, each time met with incomprehension as to why I needed another PhD. And each time I was given a consolation prize, first a chance to audit one of the required courses and then to enroll for a year as a special student. I had to prove myself as a verifiable candidate worthy of admission. No wonder when I was finally accepted, in 1996, the year I was pregnant with my daughter, I was afraid to disclose my pregnancy to the program for fear of being rejected again. Personal Costs and Rewards of Self-translation To gain legitimacy in the eyes of the institution with the power to accept or reject my job application, I was trying to shape what I thought was the story of a more desirable, preferred self. The first years were an immense project of personal growth and consciousness-raising, filled with voracious reading and self-education, to the point of living the cliché of an immigrant driven to work harder than anyone else. It was an immersive process of learning about Canada, getting to know its cultural imagination, history, politics, shared references, and everyday idioms, but most importantly, discovering the pleasures of Can Lit. As a result of this extensive learning and unlearning, my research fields have shifted. I left behind British and American postmodern fiction and embraced Canadian women writers whose exciting, experimental, language-conscious, and politically alive texts I could process through the newly acquired lens of feminist theory and intersectional analysis. When I was finally able to write my dissertation, my topic organically grew from who I was becoming: a selftranslated scholar wanting to work on immigrant women’s life writing as a process of self-translation. The in-betweenness of my positioning, where the old met the new – worlds, cultures, scholarly passions – could be detected in my adoption of a comparative US-Canadian perspective demanding that for every Mary Antin there had to be a Canadian Laura Goodman Salverson and that as a scholar-translator I was uniquely qualified to mediate between them. My choice was definitely influenced by my lived experience, showing the intertwining of personal lives and professional lives,21 when one needs to

Getting an Academic Life 137 survive the chilly climate of rejection due to lack of “Canadian experience” but also faces one’s own fear of not measuring up, constantly propelled by impostor syndrome to do more and more. I was already a proficient English speaker when I arrived in Canada, which must have been the factor that played a decisive role in getting an instant job offer. However, in my career, I have been plagued by insecurity as a non-native speaker of English whose language expertise and knowledge of history, literature, and broader cultural contexts surpassed those of my students. Yet as a perfectionist, I had to prove to myself and others that I deserved to be recognized as a legitimate user/owner of English. I hated this complicated relationship with the English language, rooted in my irrational fear of illegitimacy because of my accent, or so I imagined. I cringed when students felt at liberty to ask where I was from – and interpreted their curiosity as micro-aggressions. Paradoxically, the CV’s standard format “hides” my accent, or rather provides a blanket of uniformity to hide behind. I have muted these and some of my other stories. What happened to this “other” academic persona who belonged to the department of “English philology” and published her early essays in Polish academic journals? Where on the pages of my CV is the mother of two young children, working a full-time college job and writing her new dissertation while also TA-ing in her first university job contract, to get a foot in the door and build seniority in a unionized academic environment? The intense labor of being a superwoman juggling so many responsibilities, the anxiety and self-doubt about my age, my accent, my academic future, combined with corrosive emotions related to anger, fatigue, worry, and constant stress, all this eventually took a toll on my health. After several years of such life, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. At that time, I was already on the academic treadmill and felt the increasing pressure to document achievement in the neoliberal university that prizes productivity, competitiveness, and quantifiable results. One extreme example of prioritizing academic persona-work was a poorly timed decision to go to a conference in Hawaii between two chemotherapy cycles. Because my immune system was compromised, I needed a painful booster shot of Neulasta and spent a 12-hour flight wearing a mask on the plane. My partner and my daughter went with me to make sure I was not alone facing the unknown. Every evening during our stay they waited for me to come back from the sessions and sit on the hotel balcony where I could at last take off a blond bob wig that I would wear to blend in with other conference participants. Such personal sacrifice to give birth to my new academic persona would not have been possible without the support of my family, a support they have often given at a significant cost to themselves. My mother took an early retirement to come to Toronto to help raise her Canadian grandchildren. Her essential role is not recorded in my employer’s files, so the least I could do was to dedicate my Canadian dissertation to her.

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Navigating the Walls and Barriers in the Spaces Provided In contrast to these ups and downs, the academic CV embodies a steady professional advancement model of a career structured through seriality, repetition, chronology, replication, continuity, and emulation, all markers of appropriate rhetorical address and progression through the ranks, leaving no room for rupture and gaps. Trying to reproduce this template to gain entry into the profession, for me and for many others, has meant not only doing repair work to cover up any irregular life trajectories but also conforming to a professional ethos that leans toward individual achievement, competition for scarce funding, and a race for recognition. Danahay notes the remarkable uniformity of the CV across academic institutions and, I might add, the same is true about another functional genre, the cover letter.22 A stranger to Canadian academic culture, I had to learn by mimicry how to fit in. Fortunately, a fellow job-hunting immigrant, a wannabe academic from Poland shared with me her sample letters and her CV, which I dutifully imitated. To this day I cannot vouch for the effectiveness of this strategy since in response to my portfolio I was only short-listed once, and I suspect thanks to the celebrity power of my Buffalo supervisor, Ray Federman, who sent a reaffirming reference letter. Nevertheless, despite my initial lack of success, my efforts to present myself as an “appropriate” candidate signaled my identification with and willingness to conform to the institutional norms. This entailed my downplaying of what under different circumstances (that is, for anyone not aspiring to become a university professor) would have been an immigrant success story, namely my gainful employment at a community college. Having internalized the educational hierarchy, I was afraid to mention this “irrelevant” job experience; in fact, such dismissal was abetted if not encouraged by the very format of the academic CV, which does not even have a category for “other work experience,” not to mention such unmentionable career interruptions as cancer treatment or depression.23 The challenges I faced while trying to accomplish transnational academic mobility corroborate some research findings on the darker side of making an international move, in particular the calculus of risks and unfulfilled expectations. For example, Julia Richardson and Jelena Zikic’s study on international academics and transience, although not specifically focused on immigrant academics, identifies the positive and negative dimensions of risk involved in embarking on an academic career in a new country.24 One familiar risk is associated with a lack of recognition or marketability of the professional qualifications earned in devalued geographic and institutional locations that do not carry much “career capital,”25 especially when amplified by the perceived cultural distance. Finnish-American education

Getting an Academic Life 139 scholar Heidi Harju-Luukkainen draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social capital to elaborate on vertical and horizontal dimensions of building transnational career capital upon relocation, where vertical connections give a newcomer access to groups and individuals with power, influence, and resources whereas horizontal connections provide her with information, support, and advice from her own community or individuals with similar background and experiences.26 Depending on this capital, the career paths of transplanted academics can take a different course, putting them in the categories of “the invited,” “the useful,” or “the uninvited.”27 While initially, I appeared as “uninvited,” cut off from teaching and research, with the help of my horizontal networks, that is, our family’s Polish-Canadian sponsor who was a college professor, I got my first teaching contract and transitioned into the category of “the useful.” It took me several years of building a vertical career path to advance to feeling “invited” again into academic circles. As “uninvited,” I could not capitalize on my PhD from Eastern Europe without getting a horizontal leg-up. Once I added a “useful” post-secondary teaching experience and the Canadian degree, I became vertically mobile. Interestingly, the status shift from outsider to insider also enhanced the relevance of my previously overlooked assets such as Fulbright, JFK, and Oxford fellowships. They were now viewed in terms of international academic experience associated with reputable or elite universities that could add value to the immigrant’s job application, confirming the inner logic of reproducing and reinforcing existing institutional power structures. If career capital is built of different networks and resources that are important to establish one’s position in academia, graduate school was my first self-conscious encounter with intersectional power dynamics that form the institution. I understand both whiteness with its unspoken social capital and middle-class privilege accorded by my stable teaching job as factors that have contributed to completing my transition from college to university. While working full-time, I could afford to study part-time by hiring babysitters and relying on my mother’s help. More importantly, I was able to pay to attend several international conferences. In graduate seminars that I took in the mid-late 1990s I was surrounded by people who looked like me, mostly white cis-gender women, queer and straight; most of our professors also fit this description. I experienced collegiality and support as a graduate student in this environment, and felt I never had to contend with classism, racism, or ableism. And while I received a lot of help from white professors, they were also acting as gatekeepers. As Ruth Pearce, a trans scholar from the UK, puts it, “you can only survive at so many intersections within the academy.”28 There were maybe three women of color in my cohort working with white supervisors, which is perhaps the reason why one of them, a Black woman from the Caribbean, was held back by her PhD committee on

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account of petty (and racist-colonial) concerns with subject-verb agreement in her writing. I take satisfaction from knowing that she is now a respected colleague at a highly-ranked university. As a structural privilege, whiteness continues to function as a condition of intelligibility within institutional spaces of academia. Nevertheless, I have not abandoned hope (and a sense of duty) that with a lot of learning, unlearning, and constant self-reflexivity my “new immigrant whiteness”29 can be turned into an aspirational critical standpoint. By lucky coincidence, in my first year as a full-time college professor, I was invited to co-edit a multicultural reader for College English, a project which was a marked departure from textbooks filled with canonical short stories by British and American authors, with an occasional Canadian writer thrown into the mix. The Internet was not widely available yet, so I did my hands-on bibliographic research scouring public library shelves and catalogues and sifting through literary and popular magazines. I dived into mostly autobiographical narratives told by marginalized and colonized voices, often in non-standard Englishes or English as a Second Language. Sometimes it was not easy to persuade my co-editor to go along with my choices. But I developed this collection for community college students and myself, to find ourselves mirrored through the personal stories of others. Ironically, Pens of Many Colours, which has gone into three editions, remains marginal to my current academic CV as a college reading anthology. Yet, it has been my first tool of self-decolonization rather than a mere multicultural reader celebrating inclusion and representation. Reading first-person narratives by people occupying many intersections of difference, I have been led to a double self-recognition as Eastern European “other” and settler-immigrant on stolen land, “uninvited” in the sense of colonial complicity. Centering BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) stories, the textbook framed multiculturalism through histories and everyday-ness of coloniality, antiBlackness, and anti-immigrant racism, all too familiar to most of my students from their daily experiences. I started this reflection remembering my doctoral supervisor not only because her career illustrates the oppressiveness of academic spaces provided and the necessity of pushing against them, but also because through her I have learned to practice thinking through translation. In translation studies, the issue of proper names has generated discussions about what is and what is not translatable. For years I have been carrying the legacy of thinkers like Derrida, for whom the proper name as a singular signifier is untranslatable. Looking at my CV, I think of how the name change, by creating two “heteronyms,” has thrown me into belonging to two different temporalities and erased the early output published under my original Polish name. I question the anxiety around a name: what would listing the titles “published as Ewa Chrzanowska-Karpińska” reveal about me?

Getting an Academic Life 141 Would my Polish-Canadian CV become a document with an accent? What else, except for “other job experience” such as the University of Wrocław or Seneca College, does my CV hide? Is it not ironic that my “buried” Polish academic persona has come back to haunt me once the obscure Polish communist-era academic journals with names such as Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich (Problems of Literary Genres) or Anglica Wratislaviensia started to be digitalized, and all of a sudden, I could Google myself under my “retired” name and find out that there was a certain biographic capital to be cashed on. This “biocapital,” attached to the hypertextual existence of my old academic persona that has been lying dormant for more than 30 years, could now be extracted to enhance my academic value, add to my citations index, and augment my accomplishments. Except, under what name? How does a person with two names cohere? And does she have to? Nota bene, today, three decades later when difference has been commodified to a much greater extent, and people more often retain their foreign or exotic-sounding names, I find myself finally unburdened from the paradoxes of self-translation. When my accent reveals I am not from “here,” I am usually questioned about the right pronunciation of my name: is it [ee]+[vuh] or [eh]+[vuh]? To which I answer that I respond to both, where responding to both is not a symptom of successful integration; rather, it’s a disavowal: I am both and neither. To return to what happens to lives and their narratives in the spaces provided, I recall Eveline Kilian and Hope Wolf’s work on life writing and space. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s idea that “space is a practiced place,” they claim that through spatial practices such as mobility and movement, one can rewrite the meaning of space and initiate “a dynamic of (re)creation and decreation of self.”30 It is an accurate shorthand for my experience as a self-translated immigrant settler academic negotiating her hyphenated CV. But I also ask: How does translation affect space? Translation as a vector of movement troubles the very concept of spaces provided, using space as an agent rather than a background or setting. It connects to many “elsewheres” and pluralizes, refusing the assimilatory logic of either/or and embracing both/and. It teaches how to dwell in multiplicity, in the discomfort of being both and sometimes neither. Translation frays the edges of belonging as it reveals what is incommensurable, unstable, untranslatable – and asks for acceptance of imperfection and limitations. The spaces provided by academic institutions that I inhabit, erected on stolen land, always already enforce a predicament of living in complicity, with no possible moves to innocence, inviting, at best, a commitment to reflexivity, harm reduction, and care. However, over the course of my career, I have learned that institutional spaces are contingent and therefore expandable. Historicized, they lose their fixity and rigidity; when practiced with hope, they may offer change.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

York Collective, 152 Smith and Watson, 10–11. Danahay, 353. Lee, 3. Smith and Watson, 12. Riessman, 367. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 368. Smith, 409; emphasis in the original. Ibid., 412. Smith and Watson, 12. Ibid., 11. Ortiz-Vilarelle, 9. Ibid., 10. Ibid. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 11. Ibid.; emphasis in the original. Lee, 4. Burchard et al., 5. Danahay, 355. Ibid., 361. Richardson and Zikic, 175–6. Harju-Luukkainen, 36. Ibid. Ibid., 37. Pearce, 818. Sadowski-Smith. Kilian and Wolf, 4.

Works Cited Black, Alison L. and Susanne Garvis, eds. Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphor, Manifestos and Memoir. London: Routledge, 2018. Burchard, Melissa et al. “Telling Stories, Gaining Wisdom: Putting Our Voices into Our Practice.” Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos, and Memoir, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 1–10. Danahay, Martin A. “Professional Subjects: Prepackaging the Academic C.V.” Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996, pp. 351–68. Harju-Luukkainen, Heidi. “‘We Would Love to Have You Over … ’ Building Career Capital in a New Academic Environment.” Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos, and Memoir, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 35–44. Kilian, Eveline and Hope Wolf, eds. Life Writing and Space. London: Routledge, 2017.

Getting an Academic Life 143 Lee, Katja. “Introduction: Personas at Work.” Persona Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015, 1–13. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa. “Assembling Academic Persona and Personhood in a Digital World.” Persona Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2022, 9–21. Pearce, Ruth. “A Methodology for the Marginalised: Surviving Oppression and Traumatic Fieldwork in the Neoliberal Academy.” Sociology, vol. 54, no. 4, 2020, 806–24. Richardson, Julia and Jelena Zikic. “The Darker Side of an International Academic Career.” Career Development International, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007, 164–86. Riessman, Catherine Kohler. “Analysis of Personal Narratives.” The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft,edited by J.F. Gubrium et al., Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2014, pp. 367–80. Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States. New York: NYU Press, 2018. Smith, Dorothy. “Institutional Ethnography: From a Sociology for Women to a Sociology for People.” Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis, 1st Ed., edited by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber, Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2007, pp. 409–16. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. The York Stories Collective. York Stories: Women in Higher Education. Toronto: TSAR, 2000.

9

Crossing the Lines Using Personnel File Documents to Negotiate Embodied Space Cynthia Huff

At the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in December 1993, I bought a copy of Gesa Kirsch’s Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation, which theorizes, contextualizes, and embodies women’s experiences in academia by focusing on faculty in composition studies and women’s studies. As a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Illinois State University Department of English as well as the relatively new Director of Women’s Studies, I thought this book could help me navigate the institutional spaces in which I found myself, to tread the fine lines between those spaces. As Shirley Ardner writes in Women in Space, “space defines the people in it” and “at the same time, people define space” and objects structure the environment.1 Ardner’s remarks proved more than prescient for me in many ways. I knew I was in an unenviable academic position, caught between two spaces. I had to earn tenure in the English department, which constituted itself as English Studies to secure and maintain a PhD program, while simultaneously revitalizing a Women’s Studies Program that was all but moribund when I became its director. Women’s Studies was housed in one space, the College of Arts and Sciences, while the Department of English was in a separate space, within the College of Arts and Sciences yet its own fiefdom. As a faculty member with a joint appointment, I occupied two spaces and had to cross the lines between them. This meant that I had two supervisors to please, the College Dean and the English Department chair, and two annual performance evaluations to navigate, both of which were taking up space in my personnel file. Although I also examine a late-career document, my last Post-Tenure Review essay, I will initially talk about hiring and performance documents from my early career at Illinois State University to show how this latecareer document glides over and sanitizes my embodied, lived experience as an Assistant Professor, a feminist, and a young mother trying desperately to find her way in academia, to perform the requisite academic role. As Judith Butler writes, “the gendered body is performative”2 and this observation holds true for academic bodies and subjectivities. My last, DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-10

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summative post-tenure review product, while decidedly autobiographical, cherry-picks highpoints of my academic career to enact institutional expectations of accomplishments in a supposedly seamless career while remaining silent about significant parts of my personal and institutional embodiment and performance both early and later in my academic career. In many ways, my last post-tenure review career narrative conforms to the genre constraints of traditional autobiography where the writer is the hero of his (sic) own story, the performer who orchestrates her role in keeping with the narrative of heroism. Career narratives, like life narratives more generally, can be varied and deeply personal creations, yet both exist within certain generic and institutional constraints. Frequently assembled in edited collections that center on a common theme, the focus of some career narrative collections vehemently protests women’s unfair treatment within academia while others emphasize ways in which women can construct career narratives that subvert academic hegemony; and, of course, many do both by advocating for women’s agency in the face of adversity, hence making women academics, at least in some senses, the heroes of their own stories. Life writing is also varied. An umbrella term for a variety of genres, life writing ranges from trauma narratives to overcoming ones to narratives that combine many foci and take a variety of forms from traditional autobiography to graphic memoir. A relative newcomer to life writing practice and scholarship, career narratives, because they exist within or have a decided reference to an institutional setting, take as their form and context that lived experience and situation as well as the spaces of academe; and because, historically, women in any significant numbers have only become part of the academic landscape within the last several decades, documents accessing women’s conception of their lived experience within academia are fraught creations. Not surprisingly, career narratives, whether written specifically for institutional use and assessment or to look back at institutional situatedness and spaces, have been used by women academics to work toward a more inclusive, complex accounting of their personal and professional lives. This gesture can, in turn, trouble the institutionally imposed boundaries and spaces of academia that segment lived lives, giving women academics the sense of continually walking and crossing fine lines. Pushing boundaries has also been a feature of life narrative theory and practice as both have expanded what counts as autobiography beyond writing the life story of the singular self and beyond its original conception as the inscription of the great man whose life trajectory and self-presentation act as a model for others. What is important to both career narrative and life narrative is how in form, function, and narration they have historically existed in and out of the space of the traditional academic narrative. Although accepted now as

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a legitimate academic genre, life narrative has historically only relatively recently achieved that status while the study of career narratives is quite new. Moreover, authors of articles about career narratives and of life writing genres frequently self-reflexively situate themselves within institutional/historical spaces, whether these are academically or narratively generated, while also questioning and resisting their confines. The resulting tension and its interplay mean that examining the two in concert is especially fruitful when it is done self-reflexively through the space of one’s personnel file. Opening Space: Learning the Perils of Academic Embodiment I saw myself in 1993, and still do, as enacting the feminist work Kirsch characterizes in her introduction. Here, based on Sandra Harding’s analysis, Kirsch says, “women’s exclusion from public life has led women to develop their own cultural artifacts and value systems” and reexamine “the basic concepts and theories that define disciplinary work to uncover ‘blind spots’ and neglected areas of research.”3 Her comments substantiated my research in 1993, which focused on, and theorized women’s experience as portrayed in their diaries. In many ways, in its emphasis on blind spots and neglected areas of research, as these relate to women, Kirsch’s text became the early theoretical, academic underpinning of my embodied personal and academic experiences and the way these are read and negotiated. When I joined the faculty of Illinois State University in 1989, the genre of career narrative didn’t exist nor did calls to young women scholars to fashion their careers and their narratives about these careers to foster agency that created a personally meaningful life-work balance. Today, that is not the case, for a significant part of career narrative theory and practice proclaims that even within the confines of the neoliberal university, faculty can create a personally meaningful career. In Academic Identity and the Place of Stories, Susan Carter uses what she characterizes as a fruitcake imagination to resist the bean-counting mentality of academic institutions’ current neoliberalism to give her reader tools, such as storytelling, games, and imagination, that she feels help foster individual agency.4 Similarly, in Autoethnographies From the Liberal Academy: Rewilding, Writing and Resistance in Higher Education, Jess Moriarty participates with a variety of collaborators to create ethnographies that individually and in toto are meant to demonstrate ways in which scholars can counteract the deadening effects of the neoliberal university.5 Carter and Moriarty’s call for being attuned to and fostering personal agency dovetails with Kirsch’s earlier urging to women academics to think about what has been left out, what traditional scholarship doesn’t examine, and how to see the ways in which women’s

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experiences have been erased or situated in academic spaces. In line with much of current career narrative scholarship and with Kirsch’s urging to uncover “blind spots,” I begin this chapter with a self-expressive move that narrates my early dis-ease as a feminist and woman, an outsider in the academy which barely tolerated feminists of the right sort, yet was eager to use their publications, even feminist ones, to bolster institutional status. By doing this, I situate myself and my narratives, both the ones I wrote at the behest of and in relation to university requirements and the reflective one called forth by this chapter, within a particular time and place and within or without institutional spaces, whether they are college and departmental spaces or the object space of my personnel file. These are moves that I would argue are necessarily critical to looking at the intersections and contradictions of the genres of career narrative and life writing as these inform each other. In 1989 my joint appointment with one foot in English and the other in Women’s Studies placed me in two locations at Illinois State University. I literally occupied different physical spaces on campus, embodied by my walking between them daily, and the performance documents I completed emphasized different aspects of my academic identity and performance. My appointment designation as Director of Women’s Studies was administrative/professional while my appointment in the English department was a standard tenure track one, supposedly evenly split among teaching, research, and service. It was clear at my interview for the position of Director of Women’s Studies that the Dean was most interested in community outreach that publicized Women’s Studies, though she and the hiring committee were also keen to land a candidate with a strong research record, administrative experience, and someone whom they conceived could fit into a central Illinois community. The English Department also wanted someone with a robust research record whom they thought would be a team player in an overwhelmingly male environment. As a straight, white woman who had a husband and a two-year-old daughter when hired, I embodied both the Dean’s and the Chair’s conceptions of a Women’s Studies Director who could speak to central Illinois residents, could be the right sort of feminist negotiating multiple spaces, a tricky positionality, and a fraught embodiment. Even as a feminist, and “working as a woman within feminist fields” which in itself “creates specific tensions,”6 I still sported enough identity markers to embody the concept of the ideal academic worker for Illinois State University. In addition to being marked as a white, straight woman, my research record was certainly robust enough for a beginning scholar and new Assistant Professor. As a graduate student, I had been awarded a Fulbright research grant to England, the basis of my first book published in 1985; and by 1989 my publication record was substantial enough for the chair to write

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in his memo to the dean about the conditions of my appointment: “Considering her publications, her acceptances, and her professional presentations, she has probably accomplished enough in the area of scholarship to merit the rank of Associate Professor.” He also said that I should be given three years credit toward tenure and, revealingly, “she would not be perceived as a strident feminist, which is probably important if Women’s Studies is to develop at Illinois State University.”7 Contrary to the Chair’s recommendation in his memo to the Dean, I was awarded only one year toward tenure, for which later I had to fight since neither the Chair nor the Dean had bothered to check current Board of Regents regulations when I was hired. By 1993 when I purchased Gesa Kirsch’s book my future as a tenured Associate Professor – despite my publication record and my success revitalizing Women’s Studies – was tenuous. Both then and in retrospect, I think the reasons for this were twofold and equally damning to me and my academic future. One involved my physical embodiment since I became pregnant in my second year at Illinois State University and the second, my institutional embodiment since I took my role as an advocate for Women’s Studies more seriously than anticipated. Both meant that to have any chance of success at Illinois State University I constantly had to walk fine lines. Writers of career narratives frequently talk about the perils of becoming pregnant while a graduate student or assistant professor. In “Spectacular Bodies: Racism, Pregnancy and the Code of Silence in Academe,” Julia Chang discusses how academic women of color are outsiders and spectacles who are meant to stay silent, not to question the status quo, and how their pregnant bodies only increase their identity as spectacle. As she says, “What a fine line to walk – to be visible but unheard, to be marked different but conform.”8 As an assistant professor and Director of Women’s Studies, my pregnant body made me hyper visible, and the spaces I continually occupied as exemplified by my physical and institutional embodiments reinforced each other to my detriment. A pregnant body is frequently designated a disabled body, an ill body, which was legally the case in 1990. Choosing not to stay silent but to advocate for Women’s Studies and students didn’t help either for I was not the “gender stereotype of the ‘good woman’ as docile, deferential, accommodating, perpetually pleasant and self-sacrificing.”9 In short, I proved not to be the team-player feminist, the ideal academic worker, the non-strident administrator the Dean and Chair had wanted to appoint. Indicative of the departmental minefields that new faculty frequently must walk through, when I accepted the position at Illinois State University the English department featured warring factions, only united by their firm underpinning of male privilege. I experienced how deep and strong that male privilege ran at the first departmental retreat, which

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occurred my very first semester at Illinois State University. After a long and exhausting day of meetings meant to determine the future course of English Studies and secure the long-anticipated Ph.D. program, I went for what I hoped would be a refreshing swim. Before I even managed to dive into the water, I was joined by two full professors, each from one of the warring factions. Their greeting to me was this: “Do you know what the initiation rite is for new female faculty? Strip them naked and throw them in the pool.” Flabbergasted, I beat a hasty retreat to the room I shared with a new hire in composition studies, a woman who had attended my high school and with whom I had reconnected now that we were feminist colleagues. I immediately told her what had happened and her advice to me was not to talk about it, that even worse sexual harassment happened in business, that my husband had given up a tenure-track job to come with me to Illinois, that I had my future in academics as well as a two-year-old to consider, etc. Her advice is distressingly common for women on the tenure track as depicted in career narratives, which also often resist this advice in their authors’ quest to counter the constraints of the neoliberal academy so that we are mindful of not “recreating the very structures we wish to challenge.”10 I knew I had to negotiate tricky spaces, to walk the fine lines called forth by my joint appointment but I felt compromised and dirty as a newly minted Director of Women’s Studies not to stand up to the patriarchy and vowed at least to talk to the chair of the department, not thinking that I would be silenced and gaslighted. When I recounted to him what had happened his response was “You did not experience sexual harassment since neither of those men is your direct supervisor.” His response was typical of what still happens to women if they dare to speak out or challenge the bastion of male privilege as detailed in the introduction to Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power and the Resistance of Women in Academia. Discussing the myth versus the reality of academia, the editors characterize women’s treatment thus: “the related behaviors include shaming, disregard of cultural values, bullying, harassment, trolling, gaslighting, betrayal, lying, tokenization, coercion, stealing intellectual property, stealing grants, silencing, and blatant disregard for university policies and processes.”11 As my career narrative presented here shows, I experienced these behaviors again and again from my supervisors. Beaten and deflated by the Chair’s response, I retreated but vowed that as Director of Women’s Studies, I would at least try to stand up for students who were sexually harassed and hear their voices. Supporting students and talking with them about sexual harassment and other taboo topics off limits in the lunchroom, the English department’s bastion of male privilege, as well as getting pregnant, soon embodied my professional and corporeal identity to my institutional detriment, making it impossible for me to be the ideal academic worker. Both my Department

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Faculty Status evaluation and my administrative professional status evaluation bear this out, especially when contextualized. After my son was born, I was hospitalized for puerperal fever, an illness that until then I thought had vanished with the Victorians, given that I had read numerous accounts of it in the women’s diaries that I researched. When the semester started in mid-August I had added mastitis to my post-partum health issues. My best option, since no parental leave existed then, was to take my allotted six weeks of sick leave, to acquiesce to the legal designation of my maternal body as an ill, disabled body, after the Labor Day break. The irony of this did not escape me. Consequently, I started the semester but then another faculty member taught my Introduction to Women’s Studies class, then dubbed Women Today to make it more palatable to students scared of the label feminist. The substitute instructor was less radical and rigorous than I was. She did not teach thought-provoking books like Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class, which in today’s conservative climate could also be conceived as making students uncomfortable. When I returned to the large lecture class after my allotted six weeks of sick leave, the students rebelled at what I asked of them and went to the Dean, claiming that the class was too challenging. It was a difficult semester, especially since the students made it clear to me and the Dean that my taking sick leave was not fair to them, a response that only underscores how women’s embodiment is silenced and erased and how institutional response perpetuates this. Then, and certainly in retrospect, I realized just how much my childbearing, maternal body was a problem for the institution of higher education “that privileges an ideal (masculine) academic subject.”12 It became increasingly obvious that I did not, and could not, fit that ideal, that the best I could do was tread the fine lines between my assigned spaces as Assistant Professor and Director of Women’s Studies. Counter Space: Subverting Career Documents But what I did not yet realize was that my difficulties had only begun, that they would follow me through tenure and beyond, that my publication record wasn’t enough to cancel out my embodied life as a woman and a feminist, that I was quite literally one of those academics who is always an outsider, “marked as ’bodies out of place.’”13 In February of 1992, I received a shocking annual evaluation letter from the Department of English. Although it positively stated that I had been considered for exceptional merit before being assigned merit, the shock came via the Department Faculty Status Committee’s decision to deviate from the normal evaluation restricted to teaching, scholarship, and service as prescribed in the university process to include several paragraphs questioning my professionalism. As career narratives attest, an

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evaluation committee’s disregard of university policies and procedures is commonly experienced by women faculty, particularly feminists and women on the tenure track. The accusation of my lack of professionalism was allegedly based on a letter sent to the Dean by a student in my Women’s Studies seminar the previous spring. The student supposedly wrote about the seminar’s sense of intimacy “created by the fact that many personal experiences were shared during these meetings in relation to women’s roles, patriarchal attitudes, and life experiences in general” and claimed that I had “shared opinions and information about other (English) professors.”14 Scared that this letter was building a case to deny me tenure, I knew it was punishment partly for helping a student navigate institutional channels after she’d been repeatedly harassed, including at her apartment, by one of my male colleagues in the English Department, who was a favorite of the Chair. Fighting to have my institutional embodiment vindicated, I rebutted this accusation of unprofessionalism. I asked to see the alleged letter, quoted procedural concerns substantiated by the Faculty Handbook, and detailed some central tenets of Women’s Studies pedagogy. “Women’s Studies pedagogy,” I wrote: is founded on the tenet that personal experience cannot be separated from the global study of women, literature, and society. Hence many issues and students’ personal experiences were discussed during class sessions, including childbirth, reproductive rights, women and writing, the nature of the literary canon, gender and pedagogy, women’s sexuality, rape, sexual harassment, etc. These are central concerns of Women’s Studies and were integral to the course content of the seminar. Pedagogically, it would have been inappropriate both to the discipline of Women’s Studies and to the nature of this seminar to discourage this kind of discussion.15 Although I had not yet purchased Gesa Kirsch’s Women Writing the Academy, I see this rebuttal as instantiating women’s value systems in important ways and, moreover, fashioning a part of my career narrative by using the space of my personnel file to subvert university procedure intended to silence me. I was literally laying out for my personnel file, for members of the department faculty status committee, and for an academic institution how Women’s Studies was a discipline that embodied and intricately connected women’s varied and significant experiences to a mind-opening pedagogy in process. I now realize that in using my rebuttal to assert how it would have been professionally irresponsible for me not to bring to light the blind spots that Kirsch mentions, I was envisioning how career documents are spaces that can give women voice, how they can

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subvert the bullying, harassment, and gaslighting routinely experienced by women in the academy. This, in turn, leads me to posit that career documents provide an embodied space where women can refashion the academy, that rather than letting these life narratives be restricted to the genre and content prescribed by the academy and reinforced by its hierarchy, women take charge of this institutionally sanctioned narrative to tell their life stories. I hope that by using this final career narrative to selfreflexively analyze how I used career narratives to carve out a space for myself in academe, I can encourage other women to do the same. As the following shows, to continue to function in academic spaces, I had to keep using career documents to advocate for myself. Before the ramifications of this nasty, soul-destroying academic episode meant to keep me in my place, to confine me to the box of the proper feminist, the ideal academic worker who could build a Women’s Studies program at Illinois State University while supporting the patriarchy in word and deed by concentrating on my research and not encouraging students to question systemic, institutional complicity, could begin to end, I had to fight for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor and later to full Professor. Apparently still naive about the weight of institutional norms, unable to perform the prescribed academic role, and clueless about my enduring place in the spaces of academe, the fight for Associate Professor status surprised me. The Dean and the Chair were both relatively new; I had built a vibrant Women’s Studies Program yearly featuring renowned speakers and an increasing number of minors; I had a contract for another book, had published many articles and consistently delivered conference papers; my student evaluations were favorable. But I was still tainted by my embodiment as a feminist, specifically actualized in the earlier accusation, which took up crucial space in my academic file. My taint and the reason for it only surfaced when I discussed with the new Dean why I had been recommended for tenure but not promotion. But I was even more floored by initially being denied promotion to Full Professor. My second book had been published; I sported a steady stream of conference presentations as well as articles and book chapters published; I had served on numerous university committees in addition to Master’s and Dissertation committees; students sent letters praising my teaching; my outside evaluations from colleagues in Women’s Studies, Victorian Studies, and Life Narrative were strong. I had more than fulfilled the requirements of promotion to full and both the new Chair and I thought I would sail through the promotion process. I did at the department level but once again my past, my embodiment as a feminist, became an issue, only to be resolved by the acting Dean.

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Reading Space: Self-Reflexively Reading Career Documents as Life Narrative In Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today, Cynthia Franklin discusses the genre of the academic memoir, asserting that “memoirs constitute rich texts through which to analyze academic and other institutional structures” by reading memoir “as cultural touchstones for the present-day academy.” A respected life writing scholar, Franklin is keen to address “how the genre of memoir structures the emotions represented” and analyzes the ways in which “a genre’s uses and effects cannot be considered independently of a writer’s historical and institutional location.”16 Although the career narrative I am constructing here as well as my last retrospective post-tenure review narrative that I will discuss shortly, do not neatly fit the genre requirements of the academic memoir Franklin discusses, both have their genesis in the classic liberalism of traditional autobiography, both exhibit the “commodity effects of the academic star system” and both may or may not employ “liberal genres or formations of self and subject” that “support the political status quo.”17 In the career narrative I have constructed here, I have certainly placed my career trajectory according to the ways in which my marked body did or did not fit the academic star system in its construction of the ideal academic (read male) worker; I have taken pains to situate myself, including emotions felt and experienced, as well as my female, academic body in and out of its maternal instantiation along with institutional conceptions of both in a particular time, place and academic environment; and, in keeping with the self-reflexivity of a feminist and life narrative scholar who is reading the junction and disjunction between how the institutional documents written by and about us structure our academic presentation, our complex academic instantiation, while simultaneously assessing how these do and do not ally with genres of life narrative, I find myself very much in conflicting spaces and continually crossing fine lines. In retrospect, I could read the painful academic life events I have detailed here as part of an overcoming narrative where I persevered against all odds to become the hero of my own story. That would fit the trajectory of traditional autobiography, whether fiction or non-fiction, as well as the liberal humanist bent of many academic memoirs that Franklin discusses. That reading would also align with the message from feminist writers of career narratives who urge their readers facing academic difficulties to consider how their daily actions have countered the hegemony of neoliberalism. In the Introduction to Presumed Incompetent, the editors write “Women are engaging in battles against hostile climates in different ways, understanding that even small wins can be inspiring and empowering and lead to larger changes;”18 and in Autoethnographies for the Neoliberal

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Academy, Jess Moriarty writes “independent actions and words that move away from the proscribed script can trouble, question, ignite.”19 Over the course of the thirty years I worked at Illinois State University I did do battle with institutional and neoliberal forces, standing up for myself, my colleagues and my students by questioning academic structures and doing my best to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house as my career narratives written here show.20 Like many feminists who write their career narratives – in spite of inhabiting misaligned spaces corporeally and ideologically and always walking fine lines – I fought for and won tenure and promotion to full professor in a toxic environment. As shown in the career narrative I have constructed here, I quoted university procedures and regulations to counter the gaslighting and unprofessionalism of those who condemned me for not being the ideal academic worker. My embodiment meant I had to fight to stay in the spaces of the academe and yet I still conformed to what was expected of me institutionally, performing the requisite academic role at crucial times. I continued throughout my career to amass the teaching, research, and service credentials that I could include to fill out the approved categories on the annual Department Faculty Status Report, itself designed to determine whether I could be counted as a productive academic worker, worthy of being even a small part of the academic star system. Yet, I did resist and undermine the academic system and I am proud that I used my personnel file as a subversive tool, that I contribute now and did throughout my career at Illinois State to the call Gesa Kirsch made for women to write the academy. Making my presence known within academia was itself an act of resilience and resistance; and altering English Studies and Women’s Studies at Illinois State University in even small ways to create a more hospitable environment for women faculty and graduate students than when I entered both in 1989 as an Assistant Professor and Director of Women’s Studies could be read as a career triumph. This reading of overcoming obstacles would follow the trajectory of many career narratives that feature women countering at least in small ways the dangerous effects of the neoliberal university to chart their own destinies. Likewise, this reading would follow the trajectory of traditional autobiography whose practitioner follows the liberal arc to become the person who overcomes adversity, the hero of his (sic) own story. Closing Space: Walking Fine Lines to Navigate Spaces Nonetheless, my reading of the career narratives I have constructed and contextualized is more mixed, less optimistic than these inspiring words and actions, and perhaps more wistful, less hopeful, and more self-critical than either the model of traditional autobiography actuates or the rallying

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cry of feminists whose self-proclaimed agency overcomes travail to construct personally meaningful career narratives portends. From the beginning, I was a perfect fit for an English Studies department, which on paper conceived itself positively as being a space where literature, composition studies, and linguistics, along with pedagogy, were equally valued as were the areas of teaching, research, and service. Likewise, I was a perfect fit to administer and produce research in Women’s Studies, which as a discipline emphasizes walking fine lines by being at the crosscurrents and intersections among disciplines by focusing on the experiences of and highlighting the study of women. My ace was always that broad, interdisciplinary research interests like mine, joined under the designation of life writing/ narrative, were supported by Women’s Studies, my English Studies Department and Illinois State University. Thus, it was perfectly acceptable in my final post-tenure review document to organize my academic career by emphasizing my status as a life narrative scholar. I wrote my last PostTenure Review essay in 2015, almost 26 years after I had been hired by Illinois State, and its tone is much lighter than this chapter’s. I knew it would be the last such essay I would write since I had planned to retire after 30 years of service; and, given that I had no more institutional hurdles to leap, I could have told my institutional life story more fully. I could have embedded and contextualized it by including some of the painful academic events that I’ve narrated here. I could have described what Marlene Kadar characterizes as the “too-muchness” of autobiography21 to show that in significant ways, I was not and never could have been the ideal academic worker in the Illinois State University English department, that I was for a time more at home in the space of Women’s Studies but that by its very emphasis on women, themselves marked as not the ideal academic worker, my stay there perforce put me at odds with academe. But I did not. I did not construct my last retrospective career narrative called forth by the university hailing in robust, contextualized ways that counter the generic constraints and expectations of traditional autobiography and academic institutional documents. Instead, I did for the most part what I was expected to do. I left out crucial parts of my personal and professional embodiment. I failed to tell my academic story complete with its travails and gaslighting, its pain, its micro- and macroaggressions meant to keep me in my place and space, meant to keep me performing the requisite academic role. Instead, I followed the institutional expectations and generic constraints that emphasize what a good, productive academic citizen I had been and would continue to be, as if I could slough off my marked body and become the ideal academic worker. Post-tenure review documents are spaces meant for the writer to concentrate on one’s academic life in the last five years; and for almost all of the five-page document, I followed this generic constraint, providing a

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prose narrative of my annual productivity reports and the most recent items on my vitae. I wedded these with umbrella self-characterizations, such as feminist and life narrative and Victorian studies scholar with a burgeoning interest in animal studies. I left out all details of my personal embodiment, including my age, and that undergraduate students were beginning to write on course evaluations that women’s autobiography was an important subject but that I was too old to teach it. Students writing such evaluations assumed that my aging body marked me as mentally incompetent, a common assumption disability scholars argue is made in the neoliberal United States and the neoliberal university, where a young body signals productivity. Not wanting to fall into the category of old and useless, I emphasized my position as an internationally recognized scholar of life narrative who was solicited to write articles and present at select conferences, a valuable member of the department who directed many theses and dissertations, who mentored students as well as younger colleagues, a person who had substantially contributed throughout my career at Illinois State University to the tripartite system of teaching, research, and service enshrined in the annual Department Faculty Status Report and who would always contribute to the department, the university, and the world. I ended the essay: “In short, I have no doubt that I will continue to participate vigorously in ISU’s mission to educate Illinois and the world.”22 Largely, I fashioned myself and my supposedly retrospective and personal last post-tenure review document as I was expected to do and according to the genre parameters of traditional autobiography to create myself as part of the star system. I had been and always would be the perfect, vigorous, productive, academic citizen, the ideal academic worker who would give her all to make Illinois State University meaningful. Knowing this would be my final Post-Tenure Review essay and aware of its generic constraints, I said in its second paragraph: “Even though this essay is meant to be a summary of my performance during the last five years and a projection of it for the next five, I would like to take the liberty of commenting briefly on how my more than twenty-five-year career at Illinois State University has, in many ways, been part of an autobiographical piece.”23 I am sure I meant this to be a nod, perhaps even a vaguely selfreflexive one, to my long-term interest in and commitment to life narrative theory and practice. But I did not choose to engage the complexity of life narrative, to comment on how its name and practice had evolved from the narrowness of traditional autobiography to branch toward its current instantiation in visual and verbal self-narrative. nor did I discuss how I had been embodied or situated within its broadening gesture toward inclusivity for a wide range of voices and genres. I did not embody myself personally, institutionally, or within my academic spaces. Rather, what is significant is the way I glossed over, effectively silenced, and self-edited my personal and

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professional embodiment, the way I dutifully performed the prescribed academic role by largely adhering to the generic space of the post-tenure review document. All I said about some of the early professional and personal life events I have detailed in this chapter was this: “Hired in 1989 to revitalize the rather moribund Women’s Studies Program, this assignment focused most of my efforts until my first sabbatical in 1996.”24 I do not know why I chose to do this, for at this point in my academic career, it likely would not have affected my academic status. I do not know whether it was because I was more at home in prescribed academic spaces since my clashes with the department and the university were fewer and less personal or whether neo-liberalism and its grip on productivity documents such as the post-tenure review essay helped silence me. I do not like to think of myself as so academically interpellated that the last but one of my career narratives conformed so much to expectations, that I did not take the opportunity to question the ways in which academia generally, and Illinois State University in particular, had determined my voice. I am grateful to have the opportunity to complicate my academic life story by writing this as my final career narrative while analyzing the theory and practice of the intersections between career narratives and life narratives. What is clear is that what we do/don’t include in life narrative and in career narrative matters, that we can use the career documents that take up space in our personnel files to advocate for ourselves and thus create space for new ways for women to have a voice in academe. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Ardener, 2. Butler, 173. Kirsch, 10–11. Carter, 2. Moriarty, 3. Thwaites and Pressland, 12. Chair of English Department. Memo to Dean of Arts and Sciences. Chang, 262. Aziz, 182. Chang, 271. Niemann et al., 3. Bosanquet, 74; paraphrasing V. Hey and S. Bradford. The Res-Sisters, 267. Departmental Faculty Status Committee. Evaluation Letter to the author. Huff, Rebuttal to DFSC Evaluation Letter. Franklin, 15. Franklin, 7, 11. Flores Niemann et al., 6. Moriarty et al., 46.

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20 This expression refers to Audre Lorde’s often cited words, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” See Sister Outsider: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. 21 Perrault and Kadar, 4 22 Huff, Post-Tenure Review Document. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid.

Works Cited Ardener, Shirley. “Ground Rules and Social Maps for Women: An Introduction.” Women and Space Ground Rules and Social Maps, edited by Shirley Ardener, New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 1–20. Aziz, Sahar F. “The Alpha Female and the Sinister Seven.” Presumed Incompetent: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia, edited by Yolanda Flores Nieman et al., Logan: U of Utah P, 2020, pp. 180–92. Bosquanet, Agnes. “Academic, Woman, Mother: Negotiating Multiple Subjectivities During Early Career.” Being an Early Career Feminist Academic: Global Perspectives, Experiences and Challenges, edited by Rachel Thwaites and Amy Pressland, London: Palgrave, 2017, pp. 73–91. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1999. Carter, Susan. Academic Identity and the Place of Stories: The Personal in the Professional. London: Palgrave, 2020. Chair of Department of English Studies, Illinois State University. Memo to Dean of Arts and Sciences. May 9, 1989. Chang, Julia. “Spectacular Bodies: Racism, Pregnancy, and the Code of Silence in Academe.” Presumed Incompetent: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia, edited by Yolanda Flores Nieman et al., Logan: U of Utah P, 2020, pp. 259–68. Departmental Faculty Status Committee, Illinois State University. Evaluation Letter to the author. January 31, 1992. Flores Niemann, Yolanda, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, et al. eds. Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia. Logan: Utah State UP, 2020. Franklin, Cynthia. Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2009. Hey, V., and S. Bradford. “The Return of the Repressed? The Gender Politics of Emergent Forms of Professionalism in Education.” Journal of Education Policy, vol. 19, no. 6, 691–713. Huff, Cynthia. Post-Tenure Review Document. January 5, 2015. Huff, Cynthia. Rebuttal to DFSC Evaluation Letter. February 6, 1992. Kirsch, Gesa E. Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. Moriarty, Jessica, et al., eds. Autoethnographies from the Neoliberal Academy: Rewilding, Writing and Resistance in Higher Education. London: Routledge, 2019.

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Niemann, Yolanda Flores, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. Gonzalez. “Introduction.” Presumed Incompetent: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia, edited by Yolanda Flores Nieman et al., Logan: U of Utah P, 2020, pp. 3–9. Perrault, Jeanne, and Marlene Kadar. “Introduction: Tracing the Autobiographical: Unlikely Documents, Unexpected Places.” Tracing the Autobiographical, edited by Marlene Kadar, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005, pp. 1–8. Thwaites, Rachel, and Amy Pressland.“Introduction: Being an Early Career Feminist Academic in a Changing Academy.” Being an Early Career Feminist Academic: Global Perspectives, Experiences, and Challenges, edited by Rachel Thwaites and Amy Pressland, London: Palgrave, 2017, pp. 1–28. The Res-Sisters. “I’m an Early Career Feminist Academic: Get Me Out of Here?’ Encountering and Resisting the Neoliberal Academy.” Being an Early Career Feminist Academic: Global Perspectives, Experiences, and Challenges, edited by Rachel Thwaites and Amy Pressland, London: Palgrave, 2017, pp. 267–84.

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How a Lifetime of Academic Administration Gave Me the Freedom to Write a Sisterlocking Academic Memoir An Interview with Valerie Lee Valerie Lee with Julia Watson

A paradox of occupying space in the academy is that the more roles an academic woman takes on, the more restrictions she is likely to encounter. Valerie Lee’s career combines decades of administrative service in several academic departments and university offices with impressive books and articles on Black women’s writing and vigorous teaching and mentoring. In these diverse settings, she regularly encountered micro-aggressions, but resolved not to cower; rather, she combined her diplomatic skill with a determination to inhabit her own identity, above all in her braided “locs.” Her most recent book is a series of autobiographical essays exploring how her embodied self-presentation draws on “sisterlocking discoarse,” a mode of writing that binds coarse hair to the discourses and the sisterhood of African and African American women’s narratives. Valerie Lee’s career is remarkable on many levels. She chaired what is now Ohio State’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department; she was the first woman and African American to chair the university’s English Department; and she was an interim chair of the African American and African Studies Department. The recipient of both Ohio State’s highest teaching and highest service awards – a rare accomplishment – she also provided distinguished service as vice provost of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the vice president of Outreach and Engagement. At the 134th Modern Language Association Annual Convention, the Association of Departments of English presented Lee with its Francis Andrew March Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession of English Studies.1 In sum, Valerie Lee’s career accomplishments spanned teaching, scholarship, and service at distinguished levels on both the local and national levels. On September 7, 2022, The Ohio State University Emeritus Academy Lecture Series featured an interview conducted by an emerita professor and life writing specialist, Julia Watson, with emerita professor Valerie

DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-11

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Lee on her latest book, Sisterlocking Discoarse: Race, Gender and The Twenty-First Century,2 a critical study that morphed into an academic memoir. What follows is adapted from that conversation. Julia Watson:

Valerie Lee:

Julia Watson:

In your book you employ several narrative genres, including several specific to life writing – personal and folk stories, a graduate student’s application essay, letters to your sons, travelogue experiences, various professors’ remarks, legal cases, family photographs, and cartoons – in addition to literary analysis as ways to frame how tensions around race and gender persist in higher education, grounded in experiences throughout your career. Why wasn’t writing a straightforward career narrative appealing to you? I wanted to be comprehensive, merging personal and professional experiences rather than limiting myself to one genre. I wanted to express the interdisciplinary joy of someone who held appointments in English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Comparative Studies, African American and African Studies, the Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies, and the Center for Folklore Studies. I am interested in intersecting, interlocking ways of thinking and being and how different disciplines open different frameworks. Writing a straightforward career narrative risked losing a key motif: the many ways my departmental and programmatic affiliations and administrative service duties were part of a strategic, coherent whole. As someone formally ending her professional career, I felt I had earned the freedom to broaden and mix genres, to embrace all my identities, and to write a parting note to academe in a voice that can be earnest, comical, satirical, or lyrical in ways that trump the constraints of any single genre. Your Introduction directly poses the question, “Why Begin with Hair?” It seems your own locs posed a kind of intervention in academic circles as you related to the evolving styles of Black women’s hair as “new growth.” More broadly, hair is a key metaphor in your aim to link critical analysis with storytelling (and part of what makes your book a pleasure to read). How is hair not just a metaphor but an instrumental aspect of your career and a lens through which to view both your own academic life and changes for African American women academics over the past decades?

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Valerie Lee:

Julia Watson:

Valerie Lee:

I have never had the luxury of ignoring hair because my hair never looked like anyone else’s hair in the circles I navigated. The higher I advanced, the more hair became a site of difference. In Sisterlocking Discoarse I describe the tension and the disconnect between the styles of hair that African American women writers were celebrating and the way I was still wearing my hair. As far back as 1978, Ntozake Shange boldly titled one of her works Nappy Edges. When the Civil Rights Movement was waning, Gwendolyn Brooks celebrated “… Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals—Never to Look a Hot Comb in the Teeth.” Lucille Clifton followed with poems such as “Homage to My Hair,” declaring that her nappy hair “is as tasty on your tongue as good greens /Black man.”3 And Celie, in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, loves combing Shug Avery’s hair, which Celie says is the “nottiest, shortest, kinkiest hair I ever saw, and I loves every strand of it.”4 My favorite passage on coarse hair is satirically described by Toni Morrison in Tar Baby: “Wild, aggressive, vicious hair that needed to be put in jail. Uncivilized, reform-school hair. Mau, Attica, chain-gang hair.”5 Soon I wanted my tamed, processed hair to mirror what I was reading in African American women’s literature – and not what I was seeing in the C-Suites of corporate offices and higher education. Thus, hair has taken on metaphorical significance for me. I now root discussions of leadership in hair terms: “new growth,” “nappy microaggressions,” “twisted strategic action plans.” Service is an important category of accomplishment for you. You note how the work ethic of your grandmother and mother prepared you for a life of service and taught you to see not only its challenges but also its pleasures, the aesthetics of service. What forms of service, besides writing about academic labor, are important to you now, in retirement? I decided to write a book reflecting on my career that would incorporate some of my past published essays while linking their focus on literary analysis to perspectives gleaned from my administrative life. I wanted to situate that conversation in decades of what African American women academics, writers, and artists have experienced – microaggressions, bias, invisibility, and super-visibility. In my view, that is the work my book does. Administrative

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work in the academy is undervalued. I have spoken of service as “the Clydesdale in a race run and won by [the] thoroughbreds” of research and teaching.6 I grew up valuing service. All my foremothers and othermothers worked for a living. For most of her adult life, my grandmother was a domestic for a wealthy family in Greenwich, Connecticut. After working thirteen-hour shifts in a local hospital, my mother worked at the National Archives as an archives technician. There is a crucial difference between working and performing that I have always understood. In 2018 at Aretha Franklin’s funeral, preacher and politician Al Sharpton referred to a statement that then-President Trump had made regarding Aretha having “worked” for him. Reverend Al corrected it: “No, (Aretha) used to perform for you. She worked for us.” Similarly, I performed for the academy; I worked for my family and community, a community whose folklore and literature have much to say about service.7 In retirement, I am now coaching women and people of color on how to navigate the academy; so, I am doing a type of mentoring outside academic bureaucracy. I am speaking on those occasions where I know I will be heard and believed. I am serving on K-12 school boards and college boards. And for thirty-two years I have been the Executive Director of a community book group, Womanist Readers. I am also vicariously living the careers of my husband and millennial children and grooming my grandchildren for a world where they can be what Toni Morrison called “the definers and not the defined.”8 Wow! Turning to another topic, the title and “Unapologetic,” the cover illustration of your new book, Sisterlocking Discoarse, are provocative. It is a full-frontal portrait of an African or African American woman with locs whose eyes directly and unsmilingly confront the viewer. And the coloration of the title puts “Dis” and “locking” in a different color, emphasizing their dual meanings. All this seems to resist some academic publishing conventions. Why these choices? As a full professor, I claimed the freedom to take the term “discourse,” often associated with deep-thinking terms such as “critical” and “analysis,” and blacken and feminize it to “discoarse” – an allusion to the hair

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Julia Watson:

Valerie Lee:

texture associated with Black women and a fitting pun for my very different take on the academy. Because I am a Black professor of English, I did worry that readers would think that I was unaware of the correct spelling. For there were many times during my career when as a professor of English I was met with the stare that said, “I didn’t know Blacks could read and write.” To clarify that I was in control of my narrative, my opening page defines both terms: “Discourse [is] a scholar’s intellectual conversation; discoarse [is] an intellectual conversation framed by a scholar with coarse hair and with such hair affecting her presence and promise in academe”9 I have deliberately used paintings by Black women artists for several of my books, and Sisterlocking Discoarse was no exception. The artist, Angelia Lee, originally called the painting “African Eve,” but settled on “Unapologetic” – a title that suited my discoarse about a different professional beauty aesthetic than the typical Western one. The original painting toured Russia, Spain, and some other European countries during the late 1990s; during the tour, the painted woman’s throat was slit. That my publisher had to cover up the slit throat endeared me even more to the painting because it references the historical assault on the bodies of women of color. I was not trying to stay within the rules of standard academic book design. Sisterlocking Discoarse is full of stories. What stories have stayed with you that may help other women of color navigate the various stages of the promotion and tenure path and/or administrative pathways? The folklorist in me is full of stories that speak for themselves. At the beginning of my career, I wanted to live in a city and not the small, quaint, rural landscape of the university where my first tenure-track job was located. I dared to be the first person in my department, and perhaps the whole university, to move forty miles away to the nearest city. I remember the department chair calling me into his office to explain how I might be jeopardizing my chances for tenure by moving away from that close-knit community. He explained to my twenty-five-year-old ears what tenure meant and how losing a life-long job can be devastating. After his explanation, I blurted out, “I’ll take the chance. I come from a long line of unemployed people.”

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Another memory from that time is telling. Someone remarked that my office, although beautiful, had too much “ethnicity,” asking me “How do you think white students will feel visiting such an office?” No one ever asks students of color how they feel visiting the offices of white professors because all their decorations are normalized as “professional design.” My office space always generated stories, from how I went about ridding the chair’s office of a couch that made women colleagues uncomfortable, to a story of riffing through office papers and finding a document attesting that a woman had bequeathed hefty graduate scholarship funds to the department with the instruction that the chair should never give any of the funds to certain groups of students, especially Negroes. In fact, the testator wrote that she “trusts the chair will honor her wishes,” never imagining that one day someone like me would be chair. My book also tells stories about going to conferences. Once, while traveling to a National Women’s Studies meeting, I was sitting on the plane next to a young lady who informed me that she was “pure white,” defying various readings of race as a social construct. In it, I tell sabbatical stories: what it is like to be an African American scholar standing in a bank with her four children in tow during the middle of the day when someone approached me in line to give me information on how to find a job and support my children as a single mom. Being Black and wearing a jogging outfit in public at midday accompanied by four children meant that I was not a married soccer mom or a professor on sabbatical; I could only be an unemployed single Black woman living off the resources of the state. My experiences of early-career microaggressions have generated several stories. During my first sabbatical, a white colleague advised me to place my Ph.D. credentials on my check, as well as my husband’s esquire signature, so that I could receive the type of good treatment that she received while traveling on her sabbatical. I should never have listened. Every time I used one of my newly minted checks was a disaster. Store clerks would look at the check, then look at me, then call the manager, or make comments such as, “Who are you? The Cosby family?” – a reference to Dr. Cliff and attorney Claire Huxtable, from the then-popular television show. Yes, I have stories. I hope that those who are underrepresented in the academy or in their disciplines will share their stories in increasing numbers. Stories have the power to reveal and to heal. Stories of doing feminist administrative work are particularly important. As chair, I was charged with writing a document justifying a request that our Department of Women’s Studies, which already had strong undergraduate and M.A. programs, start a Ph.D. program. Although handbooks and tips for writing such professional materials as tenure dossiers, curriculum vitae, grant applications, and recommendation letters

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can be found, at the turn of the century there were very few models on how to argue for a doctoral program in a field that was still establishing itself. My colleagues and I worked for over a year, creating charts of all the steps, rehearsing our responses to expected objections, and strengthening our bonds with statewide sister programs to ensure unanimous support. In 2002 I remember standing in front of a panel of state legislators, mostly white men, and explaining the need for our doctoral degree. The final affirmative decision remains framed on my office wall. Writing proposals, strategic action plans, academic reviews, and all the paperwork that dominates academic bureaucracy is not what I had in mind when beginning my career. But I learned to write whatever was necessary, whatever was needed to open up more spaces for the underrepresented. My career narrative notes the interplay between the type of writing and service I expected to perform and the writing and service I felt compelled to perform: There is the administrative pleasure of actually getting things done. It is not nearly the same joy as reading a Toni Morrison novel, nor is it as provocative an experience as discussing the future of the humanities. What high-level administration provides is the opportunity to revise the rules, reclaim what and who has been marginalized and renegotiate the terms of engagement.10 Although I never expected to write a career narrative, as my back cover asserts, “Sisterlocking Discoarse is about braiding and breathing and believing that a Black woman’s journey through the academy is important.” Notes 1 134th MLA Annual Convention, 5 January 2019, Chicago, Illinois. The first sentence of the award reads, “Rooted in the values of the liberation movements of the late twentieth century, Valerie Lee’s lifework of pathbreaking scholarship, administrative genius, and powerful teaching offers a blueprint for bringing the movements’ energy, creativity, and inclusivity into our classrooms and up to the highest levels of the university.” 2 Valerie Lee, Sisterlocking Discoarse: Race, Gender, And the Twenty-First Century Academy (New York: SUNY Press, 2021) contains the fuller context of the conversation. 3 Lucille Clifton, “Homage to My Hair,” in Two-Headed Woman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 5. 4 Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 57. 5 Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 113. 6 Sisterlocking Discoarse, 65. 7 Sisterlocking Discoarse, 131. 8 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 190. 9 Lee, 1.

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10 Sisterlocking Discoarse, 130. I originally wrote this statement for “Symposium: How I Have Changed My Mind,” College English: Celebrating the NCTE Centennial Symposium 74, no. 2 (November 2011): 120.

Works Cited Anson, Chris, et al. “Symposium: How I Have Changed My Mind.” College English: Celebrating the NCTE Centennial Symposium, vol. 74, no. 2, 2011, p. 120. Clifton, Lucille. “Homage to My Hair.” Two-Headed Woman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980, p. 5. Lee, Valerie. Sisterlocking Discoarse: Race, Gender, and the Twenty-First Century Academy. New York: SUNY Press, 2021. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, p. 190. Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, p. 113. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, p. 57.

11

The Poetic Cover Letter On Crafting Paradoxical Personas Vicki Hallett

Salutation Dear Reader, I write to you today in hopes that we may find commonality in our diverse experiences of writing, of having written, or preparing to write an academic cover letter, and that I might convey to you some generative insights and imaginings about this all-important missive. I recently rediscovered the cover letter for my tenure file, which I submitted in 2019, and was surprised by a strong surge of deeply ambivalent emotion. First of all, I could not believe so much time had passed, and that I had officially been tenured since September of 2020. I recalled the relief with which I received the reply from the President’s office. Upon reading it yet again, my heart lurched as I remembered how stressful the entire promotion and tenure process had been, how much sleep was lost due to the anxieties I harbored about my own worth as dictated by the metrics of the academic gristmill: grants-awarded; articles and books published; courses developed; and service rendered. The letter contained, as they all “must” do, whether applying for tenure, applying for a job, or for promotion, a laundry list of accomplishments and accolades. I sold myself and my work according to the banal logics of university committees. There was some mention of relationship building, and commitments to decolonization, things I truly believe are crucial to the future of the university and, frankly, our society. But, on the whole, the letter did not reflect the complex components of my academic career up to that point, nor my life as an academic who is also a mother, a partner, a daughter, a sister, as someone from a working-class background who is the first in her family to get a PhD, who has to keep explaining to her family what tenure means and why it is more (kind of) than “finally getting hired full time,” and how a sabbatical is not (really) a “year off” with pay. What would the letter have looked like if I were honest in different ways, about different things? If I included the kinds of things I did on a regular

DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-12

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basis that hold no merit under the current system? If I discussed my chronic insomnia, and how it is both exhausting and inspiring. If I confessed that I wrote a poetic auto/ethnographic article about motherhood, not because I am a motherhood scholar or a published poet, but because I lay awake for interminable nights thinking about how I was failing at being an academic and a mother, and praying to the Virgin Mary?1 Would I include the rants composed in my head at 3 a.m.? Would I write the letter as a long-form poem? Perhaps a (terrible) haiku would suffice? Working moms are here Keeping all shit together Award us tenure. Seventeen syllables of realness instead of three pages of partial truths. Partial, not because any of it was untrue. The coherent narrative I had crafted was simply not the entire, the only, the full and unvarnished, the incomplete and messy, the contradictory and paradoxical, the ambivalent and unrelenting, the revealing and unraveling truths. I harbor no illusions that all of that could ever be contained in a tenure file cover letter, or any of the myriad autobiographical documents we produce in the academy over the course of our careers. Would any of us want to put it all out there? Would we trust our complex realities to an institution that is based upon systems that are inherently colonialist, racist, sexist, classist, and ableist (to name the most obvious of structural oppressions)? Would any of us who simultaneously sit on multiple committees wish to, or more accurately have the time to, read all that truth(s)? Probably not. However, this is an exercise in the possible, and so this essay will ask: What do we do in the spaces of academic cover letters? How could we enlarge, enliven, and elasticize those spaces so that more complexity might fit, and be seen with more awareness of positive potential, more compassion? Could we imagine such spaces as open and fluid, with shifting dynamics? Might we risk incoherence in those spaces so that the collective who seeks social justice might make the academy different and differently?2 Bobby Noble says this about the kinds of paradoxes we might embrace: “If racialized bodies are the product of both our own labor and the work of a racial social manufacturing machine, then developing not just a tolerance, but an acquired taste, for destabilizing paradoxes within our feminist vocabularies might be one way to trouble that machinery.”3 This machinery is all around us; it makes the academy as well as the larger world. And while Noble was not referring specifically to cover letters, I wish to use the ideas he presents here to imagine ways we might refuse to make sense within the “manufacturing machine,” and so pry open the cracks in the existing hegemon of academic spaces. Lest this be another

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call to do more labor of the affective variety, like so many women are called to do – act as mothers, or be treated as potential mothers, whether they are mothers or not – this is a call to do different labor, the vulnerable, risky, feminist labor of poetically pushing the limits. The Role of the Letter as (Not) a Life Writing Genre In such imaginings, it is useful to consider the letter as a genre of life writing. Letters set up a relationship. They are meant to be relational. But, in the case of the tenure-file/cover letter, this relationship is skewed by the role it plays in one’s career development, and the fact that many of the people who read it will not respond to you directly, or only by proxy. The answer you expect will come obliquely and, you hope, will be a positive pronouncement on your dossier. There shall be no ensuing correspondence, you again hope, as you do not wish to have to write letters to anyone (including your Dean) protesting any negative decision. The letter, even one as formulaic and institutional as the academic cover letter, is a deeply private and personal document that connects the sender and recipient(s) through (in)direct communion. It is begun with a salutation, finished with your signature, and sent out into the world with the expectation of a reply. Even in the most professional of missives, there is a suggestion of interpersonal intimacy, sprinkled with generic formalities, that set them apart from most other genres of life writing. Of course, this is part of what makes letters (not) a genre, because “the public and private, professional and personal are so happily confused,” as Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley suggest.4 In the case of the academic cover letter, all of these aspects may be found in a single display of epistolary delirium. As Jolly and Stanley also point out, theorists of letters do not ascribe them the status of truth documents, nor place them neatly in the realm of autobiographical pacts. Instead, letters are often said to be created by and to create “epistolary personae,”5 whose statements within letters are judged not so much by their faithfulness to facts as by their ability to communicate effectively with their intended addressee(s). Thus, “the literal correspondence between the writer and reader provides the letter’s epistemological foundation, unsettling the linguistic correspondence between writing and world, signified and of more public genres. Put simply, the ‘truth’ of the writing is in the relationship rather than in its subject.”6 Understood in relation to the cover letter, this discussion throws into sharp relief the many considerations and stresses involved in creating such a document and such a persona.7 First, there is the addressee – perhaps the Dean of your faculty – to whom you have a relationship that is defined by power imbalance, lack of intimate knowledge (most likely), collegiality, and professional regard

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(one would hope). But this is complicated by the fact that multiple people will read the file, including some of your most immediate colleagues from your department, who will likely sit on the committee adjudicating your file. Then there are the heads of other departments who will likely not read the file, but who will be briefed on it, and may take a cursory look. Finally, there are the external reviewers, whom you have identified on a list of possibilities, but not chosen in particular. These are people you know through professional interaction, with varying degrees of familiarity. To all these people, the letter and the file must be obliquely addressed, and to each of them it must make sense. It should also inspire in them the desire to see you proceed in your chosen career, and the willingness to offer written support thereof. This brings us to the second set of considerations, which includes the what and the how. What needs to be communicated effectively, and how is this accomplished? Essentially, the writer must communicate the degree to which they have met or exceeded the expectations of their institution, and how they have done so in their work. They must also express this in a language that clearly and cleverly demonstrates worthiness to ascend to the ranks of their learned colleagues. While these colleagues will normally come from within the candidate’s faculty, they will have varied disciplinary backgrounds, and their own histories with this work(ing) process. The persona thus developed must connect with these audiences and build a fleeting, yet meaningful, relationship. Work(ing) Epistolary Personas Scholarly work personas craft and are crafted in/through/by academia in particular ways and through specific life writing performances. The cover letter is but one of these; a crucial one. In these letters, which act as maps or wayfinders for one’s dossier, narratives about career trajectory are crafted. Such narratives are meant to guide readers and reviewers of the file through its various aspects, linking them together in a coherent story, and then on to the proper conclusion, which is that the scholar unquestionably deserves the job/promotion they are seeking and the gold star of tenure/legitimacy in the academic institution. Further, the letter is meant to offer a story about the scholar which elicits positive and appropriate responses, responses that will ideally validate the scholar and the scholarship. As Katja Lee has observed, “… the legitimation of our labor depends a great deal on the persona perceived to perform it. It is not sufficient to simply do work and/or do it well, but its cultural, economic, and political value is shaped by the identity that performs it …”8 The tenure/cover letter serves as a crucible in which the scholarly work persona is forged. The list of people who read the letter, as

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signaled above, will include people who “know” the author to varying degrees, and will likely only ever read one of their formally written letters. Thus, the effort of this single and singular letter in crafting a persona is extensive, focused, and deeply important. The persona cultivated in such documents is meant to appear confident, worldly, interconnected with broad scholarly communities, dedicated, and effortlessly able to balance the demands of research, writing, teaching, and service work. This persona should function simultaneously as a unique avatar of academic excellence with its own, cutting-edge research program, and a representative for the university’s strategic goals and objectives – supporting the “brand.” As Lee further suggests, workers are not just functionaries of institutional restraint, but agents in the process of workplace persona mediation. Paradoxically, “… the negotiation and management of sometimes competing and contradictory roles, impulses, and desires can be a site of anxiety and friction but also of creativity.”9 It is this potential creativity that offers hope and opens spaces of possibility. It allows us to ask: how might we navigate the treacherous waters of the application, tenure, and promotion processes, which begin the moment we dip our first oar, while crafting a work(ing) persona, and keeping our creative souls and integrity afloat? On (Not) Getting Swamped There are many ways one’s career may get swamped in the early stages. For the working personae in academia, one of the most difficult to negotiate is service work: work that falls outside the realms of teaching and research/ writing but is of critical importance to the functioning of a college or university. This is the labor of serving on committees that oversee hiring or grant applications, promotion and tenure files, boards of various offices, review panels for journals, or mentoring students. In today’s academy, faculty are increasingly called upon to serve on some iteration of an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee. While tasked with the necessary goal of promoting these ideals in all aspects of the university community, “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” has become a buzz-phrase, complete with a helpfully condensed acronym, EDI. It has thus entered its own enclosed space where experts get assigned to deal with it so that the rest of the (academic) institution can cheerfully ignore it, while claiming to be part of a more progressive place. These experts tend to be selected from equity-seeking groups who then get tasked with even greater responsibilities that may simultaneously pigeonhole them and derail their career goals. Women, especially those who are racialized, identify as queer or trans, or live with disability, are expected to maintain a full teaching load and research agenda while helping to dismantle the very structures that make

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this so difficult. Such expertise and lived experience are invaluable, but as Audre Lorde writes, “Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.”10 Will the work of serving on the university’s EDI committee, or mentoring marginalized students who come to you because they know you share some aspect of their experience, slotted in as a line under “Service,” carry as much weight in an academic dossier as a single-authored journal article? Probably not, but it likely requires just as many hours of work, and far more consequential emotional and spiritual labor. This is a Faustian bargain, indeed. As Yolanda Niemann, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen Gonzáles note, “… faculty who engage in considerable quantity and quality of service, often assigned, and often because they are good citizens, cannot be expected to compete with faculty who engage in comparatively little or virtually no service when it comes to scholarly productivity. Yet the latter faculty receive no retribution or forfeiture of rewards for their lack of service, while the good citizens do, for their comparative lack of productivity. There is a penalty for service, which universities claim to value, including student mentoring, but there is no penalty for lack of service.”11 This brings us to the difficult conundrum faced by so many female faculty, that of doing affective labor, which takes up tremendous time and energy but goes officially unrecognized. What are these affective labors? The list of duties includes, but is not limited to: checking in with students who you believe are struggling, either via email or more informally as you pass in the hallways en route to classes; listening to personal stories that are impacting students’ academic lives; mediating between students who are having conflict; listening to and empathizing with colleagues who are also experiencing personal and/or professional struggles; mediating between colleagues who are experiencing conflict, etc. As most female academics will attest, such labor routinely occurs, yet is rarely acknowledged, even by male colleagues, as labor at all. It requires specialized knowledge of emotional states, attention to detail, empathy, self-sacrifice, and a steady supply of tissues to mop the tears. Gonçalves makes the point that the expectations and stigmas on “women of child-bearing age associated with the intersection between pregnancy and work” impact all women regardless of whether they have children, or intend to, or not.12 These stigmas essentialize women as unavoidably tethered to their reproductive capacity and mark us as differently able to perform in an academic setting. Part of this difference is linked with the paradoxical expectation for all women to be nurturing at work, but not mothering, and to simultaneously fit into “neoliberal structures which prioritize particular forms of work and recognize only certain forms of commitment as valid or valuable. In this ecology, the affective labors of mothers in academia are often occluded.”13

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(Be)Laboring Class Long before I was a mother and Associate Professor, I was a graduate student. During my master’s and doctoral work, it was common to critically assess interlocking oppressions caused by racism, sexism, ableism, etc. Classism is often included in that list, but I rarely felt that class was taken seriously as a category of analysis. However, as someone from the working class, I was attempting to find myself in academia, to see myself reflected, and that was not a common occurrence. I was loathe to out myself as a working-class striver, someone keen to access the spaces of the academy, while not fully understanding the grammar and processes required. My experience resonates with many others, as Niemann, Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Gonzáles found. “Academics from the working class face extraordinary pressure to conform to White middle- and upperclass norms not only in speech, dress, mannerisms, and vocabulary but also in the choices they make about teaching, scholarship, and service.”14 I was interested in seeing more research and reading more theory that both stimulated my growing passion for postmodernism and poststructuralism, and focused its deconstructive lenses on working-class people. Thus, when reading Bobby Noble’s work, I react with joy to his discussions of the working-class women in his life who had red hands and gruff voices, whose toil had supported families and yet marked them as paradoxically un-feminine. These women, “White, working-class, big, toughlooking, often hard-drinking” are familiar from my childhood as well, and “made a mark on me.”15 These imperfectly cross-hatched marks remain, even though I have grown up to labor in, and to construct/get constructed as a White woman in a middle-class, rarefied academic climate. What has remained with me from the time of my entry into graduate school, and as I became further entrenched in this environment, is the rough poetry of my working-class roots. The spoken-word eloquence, and dialect-driven exposition of my ancestors who were seamstresses, housewives, makers of fish,16 and bakers of bread. Women with strong hands, strong beliefs, and strong words. None of them wrote poetry, but their language was poetic, nonetheless. My grandmother used to say that when she was a young woman, “the men worked like horses and the women worked like men.” Their vibrant vernacular and loving labor inspire my research and writing even now. These days, I search for ways to express the complexities and specificities of settler colonialism in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) and Nitassinan, Nunatsiavut, NunatuKavut (Labrador). I research and write about historical life narratives from this place, and my settler ancestors are never far from my mind. Their dialects, reflecting centuries-old Irish and English vernacular speech, also reflect the reality of colonialism and all it has

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wrought on these lands and their original peoples. I reflect on my roles and responsibilities as a settler scholar, trying to reconcile my relationships to the past, present, and future in a place that does not belong to me, but to which I feel I belong. The work of poets is an inconstant source of troubling comfort. Métis poet and scholar Michelle Porter’s words are distantly familiar: She was always tumbling down rocks and cliffs beneath the slant of the sun at the same time as she pooled, still as a mountain, at the place she never, ever finished going to.17 Porter’s poetry recalls her mother’s kitchens, the ongoing flows of intergenerational trauma and love, and the interconnectedness of people and place in the past, present, and future. Our experiences are not the same, but her words feel like a call to make meaning together. As Lorde puts it, “When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I’m not excluding you from joining – I’m broadening the joining.”18 I envision using poetry, and poetic language in cover letters, as a similar invitation to broadening our ideas of who and what belongs in the academy, a space shaped by and through the oppressive and enduring dynamics of colonial and settler-colonial regimes. Poetry, Vulnerability, and the Risks of Incoherence Far from being the exclusive purview of the effete upper classes, or colonial rulers, poetry is the art of the everyday world, as Lorde well knew. It has, in her words, “been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women.”19 It is the art form most suited to the circadian rhythms of the shift worker, most pliable within short spaces of smoke breaks, most economical for those who cannot afford art supplies. It can be scribbled on scraps of paper, with borrowed pencils, shouted across factory floors, dictated into phones, and shared over cups of tea at kitchen tables. It holds the sacred and the profane with equal tenderness. It contains the vernacular and the vaunted in its multitudes. It is “heavy lightness, serious vanity,” as per the bard, and can best convey the incoherent paradoxes of our lives, such as strong vulnerability. Vulnerability is that which is denied by masculinity and attached to femininity. To be “successful” in academia, we have to abide by the standards set by a masculinist institution, from which vulnerability has been absented to an extensive degree. To place one’s vulnerability front and center is to do multiple kinds of work – to assert the so-called

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“feminine” in a masculine space;20 to privilege the human(e) (because vulnerability is not only a feminine trait) over the inhuman(e); to call attention to the ways that we are already made vulnerable and to the ways that we are made more vulnerable by the materially and socially built environment; to call out the oppressive cultures of the academy and of feminism, which projects an image of “successful” women as always strong and independent, and call in the most marginalized amongst us;21 to value vulnerability as a research and pedagogical tool.22 This is not done without risk and without understanding the immense privilege it may assume on the part of those who try to mobilize it. But are the risks of incoherence, of encountering bias and misunderstanding worth it? Mobilizing the poetic potential of vulnerability within academic cover letters can challenge the individualization of such documents. The way they force us (in many ways) to pose as coherent, selfcontained, self-perpetuating units that deny the many relationships and deep contextual ties that bind us to our societies, families, friends, colleagues, cultures, lands, and more. The individual is upheld as the primary unit and the responsible functionary, despite the academy’s recent push to “engage” with the community and to promote “interdisciplinarity.” In the humanities and social sciences, individual work is still valued more highly than co-authored work, and the individual still gets promoted/tenured or denied such advancements. Our interdependence is thus effaced. But what if it was not? What if our vulnerabilities and interdependencies were out-facing? What if we demanded that our readers “sit with what they don’t understand” to paraphrase Eli Clare, and for that to be enough? What if we stopped striving to make everything fit perfectly into the spaces provided, and instead required that they expand to fit us? What if we embraced contradiction and multiplicity and spoke about it in the many tongues of our ancestors? What if we thought with Noble and wrote the cover letter as a poetic act of resistance, full of destabilizing paradoxes? What if we continued to do what feminists do best, and pushed the limits? When it comes to pushing the limits of academic documents, Lisa OrtizVilarelle suggests that “… limitations on the sharing of personal experience as part of a career record do not do away with bias. Instead, these limits require academics to acknowledge bias as part of the process of witnessing others’ lives and also part of constructing their own.”23 So, whether or not we risk being vulnerable, putting more of ourselves into these documents means encountering bias. Acknowledging this, as OrtizVilarelle points out, is actually acknowledging the elephant in the proverbial room. There is no one working in the academy who has not experienced life events that have impacted their career, and who does not have multiple connections with the world outside of it, yet we are all

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reluctant to talk about them, to acknowledge the often-contradictory realities that shape us. By making such realities tangible, and by asking our colleagues to reckon with that, we are asking one another to acknowledge our shared humanity. In this way, writing a letter, addressed to another human being(s) that used poems and/or poetic language would not feel like a lie, but an invitation. An invitation to share in the process of becoming together, in (un)making the academy together, in an ongoing exchange of ideas, in the excellence of human failure. As Ortiz-Vilarelle further suggests, “In personnel review, the aim is to assess productivity. Reviewers are not poised to witness a life – despite the reality that witnessing a life in work is precisely what they do.”24 A poetic cover letter, one that expresses the vagaries and vulnerabilities of the life in work, addressed to the human being(s) doing the reviewing, and carrying the intimate cultural weight of epistolarity, might shift this perspective. It might poise the reviewer to witness “a life in work” if the reviewer was awakened to the paradoxical persona, and the human being who created it, in the first document to fall under their scrutiny. Inconclusive Conclusions Such letters would not be deliberately obtuse or participate in coy obfuscation. They would, however, aver the mono-culturizing of words. They would not necessarily valorize statistics or impact factors as global communicators. Not to deny the usefulness of such tools, but to recognize that they may act as blunt instruments, displaying one’s metrics, but not one’s merits. As per Paul Ricoeur, “The instrumentalization of language is the most dangerous trend of our culture. We have only one model of language – the language of science and technology. […] But it is the task of poetry to make words mean as much as they can and not as little as they can. Therefore, not to elude or exclude this plurivocity, but to cultivate it, to make it meaningful, powerful, and therefore to bring back to language all its capacity of meaningfulness.”25 My bad haiku aside, I believe poetry is a force for change, for expansion of the possible, and it can live and flourish like a dandelion, even in spaces where it is unwelcomed and disregarded. Because Because Because Because Because Because Because Because

it mirrors the sun. it cheers waste spaces. it ignores orders. it is a wanderer. it sings in this acid soil. its roots are coffee. its flowers are wine. its seeds are a circle of mist.

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Because it puns. Because it has lion’s teeth. Because it is invincible.”26 Poetry is not, in fact, a luxury.27 It is a necessity. It can help us expand meanings, open closed categories, opt out of univocal and ego-centric screeds, and “celebrate reality in the making” (à la Ricoeur) by celebrating careers/people/personas/academies in the making. By using language in a way that is expansive, polyvocal, and full of multiple meanings, we might get closer to the paradoxical realities of our lives, without exposing all the parts of ourselves that we may wish to keep private. Doing so in letters, so often composed in a “paradoxical mix of intimacy and formality,” as Smith and Watson28 point out, makes perfectly imperfect sense. We could show strong vulnerability and expect professional empathy in return. We could write creatively, not to be exclusive, but to open invitations to inclusivity – an inclusivity that is not based on one dominant group cracking miniscule doors so that a few might “join the club,” but based on the acknowledgment that the club as it exists must be torn down and built anew with different ideas and many different hands. We cannot keep doing things in the same old ways and expect things to change. The academic cover letter is part of a generic life writing tradition. Nonetheless, as Ricouer reminds us, “The shaping of a tradition in effect rests on the interaction between the two factors of innovation and sedimentation. To sedimentation we ascribe the models that constitute in retrospect the typology of compositions that allows us to order the literary genres; but we must not lose sight of the fact that these models do not embody eternal essences: they derive from a sedimented tradition whose genesis is obliterated.”29 Traditions do not bind us inexorably to the past. They rely on invention for their very survival into the future. So it is with people, and with letters. As our written communications with one another continue to shift into the electronic realm, the letter may seem to represent a bygone era. Yet, as Margaretta Jolly points out, those who “lament the letter” may not recognize the many continuities between paper letters and computermediated communications, such as our desire to remain connected to one another, or to relay information. Similarly, they may not understand that “Generalisations about any form of correspondence […] must be qualified by the context of relationship.”30 The letter has never been a static or homogenized genre, and as it shifts into the electronic era, sharing cyberspace with emails, texts, tweets, and direct messages, our theorizations about it and our uses of it will also shift. But letters will continue to matter because of the ways they are co-constitutive of and with our human connections and communications.

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Indeed, it is this very “porous quality of epistolarity as a genre”31 that makes it such an appropriate vector for destabilizing the dominant discourses of the academy. The language of our letters will leak into their surrounding social milieu, inflecting and becoming part of the epistemic conversation. Using poetic language to add layers of meaning, to open up the varied and multiplex meanings of our lives as they are created in and by our academic careers and personas, signals to our many readers that we are always already aware of how we are reading and being read by them. We are sensitive to their vulnerabilities as well as our own. The relationality of the letter is enhanced in and through poetic language. Why not use the language of poetry, the patois of our ancestors, the beautiful, bold vernacular of our mothers and grandmothers, to enliven the meanings of what we are saying, tell more complex and even contradictory truths about our lives as they unfold in our careers, to invite our audiences to make meaning with us, to share our vulnerability, and to recognize how we are (in)coherent, human(e) be-come-ings together? I look forward to reading your letters someday. Sincerely and in solidarity, Vicki Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Hallett, “Hail Mary.” Noble, “Refusing,” 167. Noble, “Our Bodies,” 37–8. Jolly and Stanley, 91. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 93. While the cover letter for the dossier described here is one prepared as application for tenure and promotion, and so is specific to North American contexts, similar dossiers are used in academic contexts worldwide to adjudicate job applications, applications for promotion, etc. They can be read as “autobiographical assemblages of academic persona” as per Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle (“Assembling,” 10). Lee, 2. Ibid., 3. Lorde, “Sexism,” 64. Niemann et al., 14. Gonçalves, 473. Low and Martin, 426. Niemann et al., 21. Noble, “Our Bodies,” 36. Historically, in Newfoundland and Labrador, to “make fish” is to process it through salting and air-drying so it may be stored without refrigeration. “Childhood, Remembered,” lines 7–10. Lorde, “Introduction,” 11. Lorde, “Age,” 116.

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Van Valkenburgh. Mintz. Hallett “On Teaching”; Behar. Ortiz-Vilarelle, “Academic,” 52. Ortiz-Vilarelle, “Assembling,” 12. Ricoeur, “Poetry,” 448–9. Mary Dalton, “Song for Dandelion.” Lorde, “Poetry.” Smith and Watson, 273. Ricoeur, “Life,” 429. Jolly, 155. Cardell and Haggis, 129.

Works Cited Behar, Ruth. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Brand, Dionne. The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos. Durham: Duke UP, 2018. Burchard, Melissa, and Keya Maitra. “Not a Matter of Will: A Narrative and Cross-Cultural Exploration of Maternal Ambivalence.” Lived Experiences of Women in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir, edited by Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 152–60. Cardell, Kylie and Jane Haggis. “Contemporary Perspectives on Epistolarity.” Life Writing, vol. 8, no. 2, 2011, pp. 129–33. Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham: Duke U P, 2017. Dalton, Mary. “Song for Dandelion.” The Time of Icicles. Guilford: Breakwater Books, 1989. Gonçalves, Kellie. “’What Are You Doing Here, I Thought You Had a Kid Now?’ The Stigmatisation of Working Mothers in Academia – A Critical Self-Reflective Essay on Gender, Motherhood and the Neoliberal Academy.” Gender and Language, vol. 13, no. 4, 2019, pp. 469–87. Hallett, Vicki S. “Hail Mary: On Prayers, Poetry and Navigating Motherhood.” Journal of AutoEthnography, vol. 1, no. 4, 2020, pp. 354–69. Hallett, Vicki S. “On Teaching for (Not) Knowing.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 37, no. 3, 2023, pp. 479–85. Jolly, Margaretta. “Lamenting the Letter and the Truth about Email.” Life Writing, vol. 8, no. 2, 2011, pp. 153–67. Jolly, Margaretta and Liz Stanley. “Letters as (not) a Genre.” Life Writing, vol. 1, no. 2, 2005, pp. 1–18. Lee, Katja. “Introduction: Personas at Work.” Persona Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1–13. Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Toronto: The Crossing, 1984, pp. 36–39. Lorde, Audre. “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Toronto: The Crossing, 1984, pp. 60–65.

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Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Toronto: The Crossing, 1984, pp. 114–23. Lorde, Audre and Nancy K. Bereano. “Introduction.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. The Crossing, 1984, pp. 7–12. Low, Katherine, and Diana Damian Martin. “Surviving, but Not Thriving: The Politics of Care and the Experience of Motherhood in Academia,” Ride: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, vol. 24, no. 3, 2019, pp. 426–32. Mintz, Susannah B. “Introduction.” Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. Niemann, Yolanda Flores, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. Gonzáles, eds., Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia. Logan: Utah State UP, 2020. Noble, J. Bobby. “Refusing to Make Sense: Mapping the In-coherences of ‘Trans’.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 11, no. 1–2, 2007, pp. 167–75. Noble, J. Bobby. “Our Bodies Are Not Ourselves: Tranny Guys and the Racialized Class Politics of Incoherence.” Queerly Canadian: An Introductory Reader in Sexuality Studies, edited by Maureen FitzGerald and Scott Rayter, Toronto: Canadian Scholars, 2012, pp. 35–48. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa. “Academic Career Construction: Personnel Documents as Personal Documents.” Life Writing, vol. 17, no. 1, 2020, pp. 45–57. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa. “Assembling Academic Persona and Personhood in a Digital World.” Persona Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2022, 9–21. Porter, Michelle. “Childhood, Remembered.” Inquiries. Guilford: Breakwater Books, 2019. Ricoeur, Paul. “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator.” A Ricoeur Reader, edited by Mario Valdés, Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991, pp. 425–37. Ricoeur, Paul. “Poetry and Possibility.” A Ricoeur Reader, edited by Mario Valdés, Toronto: U of Toronto, 1991, pp. 448–62. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd Ed., Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Van Valkenburgh, Shawn P. “Digesting the Red Pill: Masculinity and Neoliberalism in the Manosphere.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 24, no. 1, 2021, pp. 84–103.

12

Mothers and Myths A Collaborative Autoethnographic Account of Navigating Domestic Academic Life Vanessa Marr and Jess Moriarty

A Spell Find a space; each or any of these will do: Discard the contents of the laundry basket, then turn it inside out. Dress its musty darkness with glowing lights And take it out to dance until blisters appear on the heel of the stray Sock you find in its depths. Unravel the words you still have left to write and knit them together Then bury them in the forest at midnight, So that that they can grow into a tree. Give feet to the unsent message to your daughter, So that it can drop crumbs on the path through the woods To find her way home. Pause a moment while the kettle boils and stop. Hold your breath, Then blow off steam, Then on, then off again. Pass it on …1 Introduction: Finding Space in Fairy Tales We, Vanessa and Jess, share a passion for working with fairy tales in a manner that reflects the shared, collaborative, and aural history of these stories; by writing creatively and autoethnographically to entice change in women’s lives. Marina Warner writes that fairy tales reflect “lived experi­ ence, with a slant towards the tribulations of women.”2 She tells us that these stories are “an historical source, or a fantasy of origin [that] gains credibility as a witness record of lives lived, of characters known.”3 In our experience, the power struggle they depict between men and women is as relatable as ever and we recognize their tropes in the power plays of higher education, and again in domestic expectations that we try to resist and DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-13

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challenge. Just as ancient women gave each other strength and support through shared narratives, both imagined and real, we use fairy tales as a way of exploring our lives and relationships as women academics who constantly feel pulled between maternal and professional responsibilities. We tell stories that imagine these struggles in a space where the magic we long for intervenes. In our modern academic world, “where staff struggle with excessive workloads, precarious contracts and a culture of workplace surveil­ lance,”4 we have tried to create much-needed space for reflection on and dialogue regarding our practice. We have used our collaborative writing – including this chapter – to legitimize our experiences as mothers and academics, share ideas, and offer each other solidarity in a way that fits around our busy schedules and produces work (peer-reviewed texts) that is valued by our institution as scholarly activity and research. To avoid the spaces that are synonymous with traditional academic work – white, heteronormative, male, and hierarchical5 – we choose to meet outside and beyond conventional meetings and offices, favoring conversations in our domestic spaces, online spaces, and outside spaces (walking) that we can fit around our working and domestic lives - valuing this time in the spirit of social change, to resist patriarchy. It is from here that we are able to discuss our personal experiences of academia, to be vulnerable, ask for advice, and critique the existing culture – via our conversations and the writing that emerges6 in a way that nourishes and enhances our creativity, builds our connection as friends/colleagues/collaborators, and restores our sense of self as academics/mothers/artists. It has also enabled us to publish academic work that is valued by our institution and enabled us to progress our academic careers whilst also juggling our domestic lives.7 Speaking about his life as an artist for an exhibition at the Tate Modern, William Kentridge suggests that a degree of self-reflection and an awareness of one’s privilege is a wholly necessary part of the creative process, from this perspective it is possible to contradict and critique narratives claiming certainty and construct new meanings,8 as well as acknowledge that the stories we share are not the whole picture. People of all genders, including non-binary people, are also marginalized in terms of race, class, sexuality, and disability. A recent study found that women and Black people are still likely to suffer prejudice in UK universities9 and that LGBTQ+ people are also at high risk of discrimination in education.10 This suggests that Higher Education (HE) is still not a welcoming space to women, Black, and LGBTQIA+ students and staff. People with disabilities and intersectional identities are even more at risk,11 this is further evidence of the tradition and convention that stifles higher education and why “a search for a better conversation in the face of all the barriers and boundaries”12 is so urgently needed. Not all women are mothers, but for

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us, this practice of storytelling, and specifically our method of collabora­ tive autoethnography that merges lived experience with a cultural critique of HE and the retelling of narratives where women are traditionally good or bad rather than doing their best, has enabled better conversations re­ garding the specific challenges presented by our personal circumstances of academic parenthood.13 We suggest that our work, whilst coming from a position of privilege, offers space for other ways of being in academia that actively resist dominant discourses, seeking instead to democratize rather than exclude people who have not historically been marginalized by academic work.14 We have a shared passion for literature and visual language, realized through creative research outputs like stories, poems, and textile artworks. In earlier work, we adapted our autobiographical experiences via estab­ lished fairy tales to create an original text where we could explore our roles as women academics and resist the dominant discourse in academia that is often male, heteronormative, objective, and expert.15 For example, we described ourselves as “Middling Witches” doing domestic and intensive labor in a land far, far away while the wizards lived in castles, feeling important but doing very little.16 We have also developed a method of collaborative autoethnography that critiques traditional patriarchal narra­ tives focused on control, competitiveness, and narrow, predominantly male experiences; storying ourselves to align with autoethnographic work that: • Is about women and can be used by women • Does not oppress women • Develops feminist perspectives that challenge dominant intellectual traditions and can be used to support a variety of intersectional struggles17 By working together to develop these research methods, which combine and expand upon our respective specialist research areas, we have built a relationship of trust, respect, and friendship in the spaces provided by our contracted research allowance, as well as a shared determination to ringfence time to do the work we love to do. This work, in contrast to certain patriarchal structures, is non-hierarchical, mutually beneficial, playful, imaginative, and fundamentally a space where we can better understand ourselves and our environments. But more than just play, our collabora­ tion enables us to write in a way that is inextricably linked to our well­ being18 and is carried out in a spirit of social justice. Donna Haraway considers the positively blurred boundaries between the activist/academic/ artist and advocates for others to do the same.19 In that spirit, we are using our writing practice to merge our academic/domestic lives, our disciplines of art/media/pedagogy, the real/lived/imaginary, and our experiences as

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colleagues/friends. This goes against traditional academic work, simulta­ neously exposing and repairing the cracks in standard hegemonic struc­ tures and workspaces, and inspiring creative/academic work that fulfills the criteria by which we are measured as academics (Research Excellence Framework20 and Staff Development Review).21 Creative Storytelling in Academic Research Autoethnography is a qualitative research methodology that values personal storytelling and autobiographical insights gathered through “research, writing, story and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political.”22 The process of telling and sharing stories can be transformational and empowering, allowing for a more ex­ pansive and liberated self. Autoethnography as a methodology often seeks to value creative and evocative storytelling in academic research, including stories about problematic life events and trauma.23 As Carolyn Ellis says in her methodological novel, The Ethnographic I, autoethnography is “research, writing, story [graphy], and method that connect the autobio­ graphical [auto] and personal to the cultural, social and political [ethno].”24 The forms used in autoethnography can include emotion, introspection, dialogue, story, scenes, and borrowed techniques from literary writing. In this way, autoethnography disrupts traditional academic writing traditions. Marylin Metta states that writing can act as a tool to speak out and resist “the many layers of silence and oppression associated with racism, sexism and domestic violence”25 and that “women’s autoethnographic writings provide critical spaces for women’s silenced experiences, voices, stories to be told, mapped and shared, and hence, contribute to the ways in which we make knowledge about the world and senses of our place in it.”26 Our approach has supported us to navigate our professional and personal lives and make sense of how we can resist feelings of being overwhelmed and inadequate: Shared reflection on the process that celebrates what we have learned and achieved. Allowing ourselves to fail as academics in manageable ways, much like Winnicott’s “good enough mother,” is a release from the pressure to get it right all the time. Creating Spaces Our work together pushes us into new research spaces, too; for example, when creating the huge Domestic Academic Quilt along with other women

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academics who also experienced the COVID-19 lockdowns,27 which en­ couraged Jess to sew, or whilst imagining our academic selves as ‘Middling Witches’, which developed Vanessa’s confidence in creative writing. We also enjoy returning to our imagined spaces because they embody us, especially the witch persona that we refer to by humorously texting ‘Middling Witch!’ (so-called because she is middle-aged and constantly in the middle of completing numerous tasks) to each other when we feel overworked. There is something about both motherhood and academia, and the attached jug­ gling of numerous responsibilities, that requires us to exist across a multi­ plicity of roles that converge within the same character – ourselves. Our consciousness is forever split, our existence liminal. This experience of being split between conflicting demands is unfortunately common for women across academia, and not limited to the UK, as discussed by contributors to publications such as Lived Experience of Women in Academia. The chapters that focus on the challenges of living up to both maternal and academic expectations mirror our own experi­ ences. For example, Livia Holden is repeatedly asked “what about the children?”28 as she travels the world as an academic and anthropologist; a question not thrown at her husband, who shares her research. Rachael Dyer and Libby Flynn write autoethnographically29 whilst wryly likening a uni­ versity to an “ivory tower … a place of unlimited opportunity,”30 reflecting the imagination that we enjoy bringing into our work. It is encouraging to see that we are not alone in our fantasies, although frustrating that our crazy, task-juggling lifestyle appears to be the norm. What is encouraging, however, is the increasing publication of these struggles in academic books and journals, and their acknowledgment as valid and valuable research outputs in the patriarchal land of targets and monitored accountability. Our women-centered approach is also inspired by writers like Angela Carter. As Daina Miniotaitė reflects regarding The Bloody Chamber, which retells fairy tales from a feminist perspective, Carter explores li­ minality through half-beings who represent two sides of a personality that are at odds with each other and do not make a harmonious whole. She notes that: “liminal human beings do not have one form of existence”31 they usually exist around other more clearly defined, spaces, periods, or identities. For us, these others are our children and our students, for whom we provide support and enable adventures, just like the mothers in fairy tales. The archetypal fairy tale mother serves as a narrative device that enables an adventure for the main protagonist. We rarely know her actual name, and when she is acknowledged she is often absent or dead, such as in Cinderella, or as an evil replacement Stepmother, as in Snow White. We are both mothers, and both stepmothers (not the evil variety), so this absent space provides us with an opportunity to imagine a new mothering myth where we are not side-lined or written out.

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The women and mothers that Catherine Orenstein refers to in Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale, told fairy tales whilst they too juggled the demands of domestic and work-based responsibilities; and so, we ask, where did they see them­ selves? It would not be unreasonable to suggest that they also existed in the spaces in between. By placing ourselves back into these stories, we align ourselves with those archetypal mothers, and as we also align our­ selves with Carter’s characters, we realize that we do not have one form of existence; that we are sometimes at odds with ourselves. This poses another question: can we capture ourselves in a single mother-like char­ acter just as these fairy tales have? Would capturing our own archetype bring a sense of belonging that we miss when split between two worlds? We realize that we must imagine somewhere that allows us to exist and thrive in-between identities. After a short, virtual conversation, we agree on the tale of Little Red Riding Hood as a narrative focus, with the fairy tale forest as a liminal space within which we will collaborate and explore the environments and identities we negotiate. Perhaps there is a path through the forest that can guide us, where we can share our state of inbetweenness, and our fantasies can co-exist, a space in between the trees, where magic can save us and we will find ourselves as Mythical Beings – part mother, part Academic, and maybe a new part of ourselves, too. Keen to get started, we arrange a walking meeting in a local forest, which we then must reschedule because our diaries are too full. Ever productive, and on our way to finding a new date that does not clash with meetings or children’s school holidays, we divvy up the writing and delve into research to find our way into the forest. Finding Spaces A recent article in the Guardian reported that four-fifths of staff in higher education are struggling with an increased workload and poor mental health.32 According to a survey by the University and College Union, more than half (57.5%) of staff surveyed in the UK said their workload had significantly increased, while more than a fifth (23.3%) claimed a need to work harder than ever. In earlier work,33 it was argued that the neoliberal agenda, through a quiet ruination and decay of academic freedom, has undermined and changed the way we work in higher education. Economic cuts and a management agenda have driven frameworks like the REF and the TEF, which measure an academic’s worth in a more competitive higher education environment that is simultaneously adjusting to the notion of students as customers following the introduction of fees.34 Like most academics, we joined with the utopian idea that teaching can and will make the world a better place.35 Instead, we find ourselves overwhelmed

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by the pressure to do much, much more for much, much less, and with a significant increase in bureaucracy and administration eating into time for research and pedagogy. And yet we both believe that what we do matters, that supporting and teaching students whilst developing our own research helps us contribute to a more creative, learned, optimistic world. To better support others, we strongly felt the need to first liberate ourselves from feeling close to burnout – as principal lecturers in a UK university (akin to Associate Professor roles elsewhere) and mothers. Alexandra Symonds suggests that “[h]elping a woman resolve her … fear of self-assertion, helping her to emerge with a more authentic identity to handle her hostility and the hostility of others, involves an additional layer of anxiety since she will differ from the expectations of the culture.”36 This method of collaborative writing enabled us to publish research that has been entered (by our institution) into the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the criteria by which research is judged in terms of value – one, two, three, four or five stars – in the UK.37 Rewriting fairy tales did confirm for us, however, that we viewed our roles in academia as being downtrodden and negatively domestic because we were drawn to tropes that saw us working incredibly hard and enabling ‘wizards’ who had the ultimate power. In 2013-14, the mean academic gender pay gap in the UK was 12.6% and in 2014/15 it was 12.3%. At the current rate of change, it will take another 40 years to close this gap.38 Our method of collaborative autoethnography39 helps us to navigate our personal and professional lives, helping us to feel more confident about our roles, our work and, ourselves. Our co-authored work40 will also contribute to the next REF and build our profile as researchers, which is part of our strategy to navigate HE on our terms without denying the personal, creative, and embodied experiences within our work. Academic writing is tradi­ tional, omnipotent, expert, male, hierarchical, and heteronormative41 but here – in our writing – we can present a story that is messy, multi-layered, and imaginative. We can also argue that working in this way helps us reimagine academic writing as feminist, personal, and lived – making it more pleasurable to write. Instead, our work aligns with an autoethno­ graphic approach that seeks to transform/heal authors of such texts and promote meaningful42 change by identifying experiences of joy and pleasure rather than just detailing the challenges we face in our academic lives and suggests that this is potentially beneficial to readers and writers of such texts. After all, we learn from experiences of happiness43 too, and this is no less valuable than the knowledge we derive from experiences of pain. As the culture in HE continues to put pressure on academics around the world, we believe that writing from experiences that inquire into, explore, and es­ tablish – or re-establish – academic joy have the potential to offer strategies for colleagues struggling in their roles to make academic life more enjoyable,

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thereby resisting a culture of doing more for less, causing more and more academics in the UK to rethink their careers and leave the profession.44 We have found that our collaboration and writing have increased our com­ mitment to academia, reminding us why what we do matters and increasing our belief in ourselves as academics. As autoethnographers, this is an opportunity to produce work in the spirit of social justice and spiritual freedom that offers a resistance to dominant oppressive structures, often synonymous with traditional aca­ demic work.45 As Celia Hunt argues, by fictionalizing autobiographical experiences, the writer can expand the possibilities for self, and that by storying the self, women are able to express themselves in a way that gives them permission to be different. We believe that this approach can help women to feel differently about work and gain a more empowered sense of self, capable of disrupting dominant narratives. Seeing Red: Jess’s Story Red Riding Hood has already evolved from the original tale by Charles Perrault in 1697 to titillate the court at Versailles, meaning that the original meaning is all but lost, as “We pass it down from one generation to the next, unaware of its history and its power.’’46 The many adaptations of Perrault’s story offer cultural and historical insights each time a new iteration emerges, from the coy little girl in the Grimm’s story to the sexually empowered Red in Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber, the story of Red Riding Hood visiting her Granny in the woods, only to be stalled by a wolf with (nearly always) improper intentions has been understood as multi-layered text, often pointing at women’s bodily experience of virginity, menstruation, sexual awakening, sexual maturity, birth, and death.47 For this reason, the fairy tale seems like an appropriate vehicle to tell of my own bodily experience with menopause. My perimenopause began during lockdown and so taking care of my family, supporting students, shifting to online teaching, and completing a book were all the more difficult as I started to experience night sweats, anxiety, aching bones, hormonal flux, and other symptoms including thinning hair, broken nails, and changes to my skin. As these shifts in my body occurred, I thought of the wolf in Red Riding Hood, who changes from a sexual predator, to Granny, to mother (after eating Red and Grandmother, the wolf is sliced open by the huntsman and the two women fall out of him)48 and lamented my own ‘change’ from young woman to mother to – now – granny? “Beast Feminism” has linked women and wolves; in Women Who Run with Wolves, Estes writes that: “Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates, their pack … Yet both have been hounded, harassed and falsely

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imputed to be devouring and devious.”49 The wolf would have perhaps been the ideal character to reimagine myself as – it is synonymous with hair (its pelt), sex, and presents itself as an older woman at the end of the story. These are all relevant to my lived experience of perimenopause, during which my testosterone levels have been affected because of medication, leading to downy facial hair, a shift in sex drive and – at forty-four – a sense that I was suddenly ageing before I was ready. Menopause is a complex time in any woman’s life, leading to both physical and emotional challenges.50 There is a limited understanding of lived experience and a lack of visible stories about menopause in literary texts and the arts51 and consequently, menopause as a stage in the life course remains obscured. Storying my own symptoms whilst simultaneously detailing my lived experience with aca­ demia can help me fulfill aspects of autoethnographic work as detailed by Holman Jones, Adams, and Ellis and also make menopause more visible. In this way I can offer an insight into how symptoms can make working life more challenging for women in menopause transition or post-menopause; and how, in turn, an academic working life might also make menopause symptoms worse.52 Much has been written about the symbolism of the wolf (Orenstein, 2002) so instead, I wanted to story a less prolific character from the text. Not ready to be Granny, I turned instead to the mother who is virtually invisible in nearly all iterations of the fairy tale, a plot device that instructs Red not to veer from the path that will keep her safe. When Red fails to heed her mother, she is put in mortal danger. So the message is clear: young women must do as we are told; if we want a happy ever after, we must obey. In an article for the Journal of Autoethnography, reporting on a community project concerned with the increase in gender-based violence during lock­ down, I detail my own experiences of learning to please and obey53 as well as the reasons why I do not want this to be the path my own daughter follows. So, in my reworking of this opaque character, her daughter tells her what to do and the mother is unsure of her own path and what direction to take as she struggles with menopause and patriarchy in HE. Orenstein has detailed how the wolf, Granny and Little Red are in fact, “multiple identities in the same body”54 and that is perhaps how we all experience our lives. For me, mother, academic, wife, daughter, writer all take up necessary space in the text I present below. By reinventing myself as a character, I am reminded of how we are all evolving and changing and that these processes are important and transformative. In this way, developing my story of the mother has helped me come to know and accept my body, and start to imagine that this might be okay. This is part of that story. At the time of writing, I am still not sure where it ends. But the act of writing has opened up a space of not knowing that is still not wholly familiar but no longer frightening. The ending is still mine to write.

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Jess’s Red: The Mother Once upon a time, it was Monday. Again. The mother always woke up before her family and set to work making coffee, loading sandwiches into school bags, and answering emails from the night before – messages sent in the witching hours when she slept and dreamed of work and what to do when she woke. Now, in her forties, the mother had become an early riser, content to be busy around the house and make things nice for those who slumbered in her home (and also in her working life). When they woke, the world was a little easier because of her. She had learned how to please people when she was just a little girl and knew that people liked to be pleased and so that is just what she did. In the bathroom mirror, she saw a woman she sort of knew but who was also unfamiliar, she watched curiously as this strange person wiped estrogen gel into her thighs and peered at hairs and lines that she swore she had not seen before. “Mother what big legs you have! All the better to go for long walks and raise that heart rate! Mother what grey, wild roots you have! All the better to protect the environment with no nasty dyes and sprays! Mother what downy cheeks you have! All the better to keep that chinny chin chin warm! Mother what deep wrinkles you have! All the better to show the world what a happy life you have lived!” “Mum? Are you alright?” The mother’s daughter had awakened and was edging into the bathroom. “And you missed one.” The beautiful young woman said, nodding at a sprouting white hair, “I’ll need picking up today, don’t forget?” “From Granny’s?” the mother asked, “Oh at last, thank you Scarlett!” The daughter looked bemused, “God no! From football! We’ve got a cup match.” She went to shut the bathroom door, “And don’t you dare try and make me feel bad for not seeing her! Get my brother to visit!” But he had already left for school far, far away. The mother smiled and rushed to get ready, putting on makeup and clothes she couldn’t really afford so that she looked relevant but not desperate (she hoped). Her husband kissed her goodbye and asked what time dinner would be. He would return like clockwork on the count of 7 pm, by which time the mother would have magically worked a full day, placated the children’s woes, and made the house spick and span with

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dinner on the table all so he could enjoy his evening while she finished weaving spells on her laptop and hearing about his day. Sometimes it frustrated the mother that she was tasked with managing the domestic lives of all her family, providing emotional support and ensuring they presented as having a fairy-tale life on social media. She dreamed of telling them all to fuck off and letting the house go to rack and ruin … “Oh do behave,” the mother’s cat glared at her, “who are you to moan about your life of plenty and privilege? You with your house by the sea and happy ever afters? Stop this nonsense and get on with it!” And she knew he was right but this story and this life still seemed to not quite fit. Was it too big or too small? She dismissed these thoughts and watched as the cat settled down to lick its ass on her side of the bed, gathering her papers and setting off to work with a fixed smile on her face. The mother worked at a university where she was a middling witch.55 Most of her work was creative and human but too often she had been thwarted by wizards with flowing gowns and lofty thoughts who believed themselves to be very magical indeed. One such wizard had told the mother that she wasn’t a real academic, that her work was not boring enough to be taken seriously. Although the mother knew he was just a pompous twat repressing feelings of inadequacy, largely a result of how little he had actually done and the fact that the mother had published more spell books and encouraged many more elves than he had, it pricked her fingers and her ego, echoing in her head like an omnipotent narrator she could not silence or shake. Today she was determined to ignore that voice and as she navigated the landscaped campus with wildflowers and Star bucks neatly side by side, she grew surer of her footing and the ideas for new work whizzing round her head. Vanessa: Research Methodologies Myths and fairy tales are powerful narratives that have joined women together in spaces of solidarity and understanding for millennia. Back in the days of oral storytelling, they were often told by women while they worked, as a means of making sense of the world around them. These women commonly worked with cloth whilst simultaneously tending to the demands of home and children56; a multitude of differing needs and responsibilities that I relate to as a busy working mother. My fascination with these stories has also inspired the way I work. The first step in my research methodology is often to pick up my needle rather than my laptop. Working creatively, predominantly with embroidery, opens my mind to a multitude of possibilities, creating a space for thinking in action that allows my mind to wander, free from the confines of the page. My creative writing follows a similarly open approach with ideas and poems

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initially recorded as notes on my phone when inspiration takes me, rarely at my desk. This work fits around mothering and my job as Principal Lecturer and Course Leader. It is only possible because it exists in the liminal spaces throughout my day that I claim for the creative work I love to do.57 There is something about creating a space for stitching, whilst framing it as research and academic labor, that is both liberating and authentic. I love to learn, to write, to read, to teach, and to explore ideas with students and colleagues (all so-called academic pursuits), but I love to stitch more than anything else. When stooped over my needle and thread, I feel the weight of my storytelling, cloth working, embroidering58 foremothers sitting and stitching behind me. When in the company of women engaged in the same work, there is the added weight of solidarity and community. Considering stitch to be academic research is a disruptive act that defies research databases such as PURE (where UK-based researchers log their outputs), where I am forced to categorize my outcomes as “other” because they do not fit pre-prescribed outcomes. I am other, as is my method. I am not male; I do not want to conform to a patriarchal ideal. I want to reflect women’s history, often unwritten, in the methods I choose. I want my stitch to tell the stories, too. The combination of fairy tales, stitching, and storytelling is something I reflected on in a body of work entitled “Promises and Expectations.” This collection of embroidered yellow dusting cloths helped to visualize the fairy tale promises made to women and girls, accompanied by poetry from the perspectives of seven nameless female fairy tale archetypes including The Mother, that challenged their nameless roles and gave them back their identities. This original work with the dusters has since expanded to a long-standing collaborative, arts-based research project that invites women to embroider their domestic experiences onto their own dusters, as well as other published work that explores my role as a domestic academic.59 When musing on this paper, I also reflected on a previous collection of embroidered vintage cloths that created for a publication called Normative Motherhood, where, with my needle, I explored notions of the saintly, fertile, and desirable mother.60 It struck me that the academic ideal of motherhood – in particular, the split between our two roles – is just as mythical and unachievable. Our frequently home-based post-pandemic working environment has blurred these boundaries even more, so I em­ broidered another cloth depicting a mythical mother with two heads. One Medusa-inspired head has snake-like arms reaching in every direction, while the other head is obscured by a smothering hand. Rather than having one represent motherhood, and the other not, I perceive them as interchangeable depending on the demands made at the time. I relate to this swapping of heads on an almost minute-by-minute basis in my daily

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life! A pair of childlike figures wrap themselves around her legs, rendering her stationary; a reminder that it is impossible to stride easily into pro­ fessorship when the dependant lives of others are wound so tightly around your own (Figure 12.1). “Embroidered Vintage Dressing tablecloth. Vanessa Marr, 2022.

Figure 12.1 The Mythical Mother.

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This double-headed, four-armed mother nurtures her children whilst reaching to hold up the sky.” To find my way through the forest with Jess, I also turned to books and reread Sara Maitland’s imagined fantasies, inspired by her exploration of the great forests of England in her book, Gossip from the Forest. I am struck by the mixture of anticipation and trepidation that she experiences when entering the forest, which I explore by swapping the location of my daily dog walk from the beach with the local woods. I also revisit the inspiration for an embroidered tablecloth I created for a symposium on Angela Carter and one of my favorite books – Emma Donoghue’s inter­ twined fairy tale women. The characters in these books are familiar sha­ peshifters, merging and transforming, recognizable one minute, then changing the next. I imagine them disappearing through the trees, visible then invisible, organic then human, both real and imagined. There is something tantalizing about being alone in the woods; an en­ vironment where you cannot see the horizon and where hidden spaces are plentiful. This is mirrored in the dangers of the forest that fairy tales suggest whilst also suggesting possibilities for adventure. The numerous dens that I encounter on my walks support the idea that people smaller than I have been enjoying imagining in this space, too. Jack Zipes writes of fairy tale characters that, “inevitably they find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great, and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the forest, but the forest pos­ sesses the power to change lives and alter destinies. In many ways, it is the supreme authority on earth and often the great provider.”61 Much like a mother perhaps? Much like an academic and her constant search for knowledge? I choose to follow Red Riding Hood into the forest; maybe here I will find the power to make a change, to lose and then find myself. The female characters in the Red Riding Hood tale each exist within me, to some extent. The innocent girl endangered by the wolf still sits deep within; the nameless Mother instructing her child to avoid the dangers of the forest is very much my present concern as the mother of my 15-yearold daughter; and as a new grandmother to my eldest child’s daughter, I am experiencing the circle of life as the mother of a mother for the first time. Simultaneously, my academic research career is progressing and within that, I see the possibilities of a more autonomous identity that is less tied to my role as someone else’s other. My youngest daughter’s growing independence has freed me from the daily bind of school picks-up and I am beginning to imagine exciting possibilities of traveling for work once she is at university. Alongside this progression, I have developed a new confidence to step into leadership roles and bid for research grants. In Little Red Riding Hood, the forest is sometimes interpreted as the space

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that must be traveled to take the girl from innocence to maturity and knowledge.62 This suggests that, upon reaching maturity, all is known; however, middle-age is also a lesser-known space to be traveled, especially for women. It is in the in-between states of womanhood, such as the menopause, that we also find ourselves in flux. It is often in this space of flux that we discover the possibilities. Venturing into this new part of the woods is both scary and exciting, but it is not the end of the story. Conclusion Feminist methodologies, such as those we employ, can often be charac­ terized by working within the situation at hand. The practicalities of the everyday lives we lead – for example delivering lectures with the impeding knowledge of a school pick-up to follow immediately afterward – do not easily allow for trips away to immerse ourselves in externally-facing research. Cook and Fonow tell us that: “feminist approaches to research are often characterized by an emphasis on creativity, spontaneity, and improvisation in the selection of both topic and method.” Feminist research often features aspects of everyday life whilst challenging aspects that “help sustain gender inequality.’’63 This is why we research the domestic and academic situations we exist within, as “active subjects” through a method “of exploration and discovery” that begins to “search for understandings that may contribute to the goals of liberation.”64 This process is, by its very nature, “open and critical”65 and requires a matriarchal approach of support and trust in order to thrive. Our research explores and explains what “actually happens”66 within a space and a narrative structure that is both familiar and challenging, whilst being open to subversion and re-imagination. We exist in a space where women are forced to earn access and meet demands for academic rigor because our outcomes are often alternative and challenging; where we frequently find ourselves proving our worth because we have learned through experience that we cannot assume acceptance. The growing acknowledgment of creative research methods helps us find the spaces where our stories can grow, and as auto­ ethnography expands its methodologies, there is evermore scope for walking and stitching and storying to belong in the wizard-led world we witches must navigate. The ancient fairy tales and imagined myths and legends continue to provide an endless source of inspiration for our col­ laborations, within which we grow as individuals, support each other, and aim to entice change in other women’s lives. In the spaces provided, we have found hope, creativity, and solidarity. There is certainly more space to be found.

Mothers and Myths Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Copyright, Vanessa Marr, 2022. Warner, xix. Ibid. Weale, 2019. Moriarty, 2014. Marr and Moriarty, 2021. Marr, 2022. Kentridge, 2018. Bhopal and Henderson, 2019. Formby, 2013; Kosciw et al., 2013; Harris et al., 2021. Olsen et al., 2020; Kendall, 2016. Ellis and Bochner, 748. Marr, 2022. Moriarty, 2019. Moriarty, 2014. Moriarty and Marr, 2019. Acker et al., 1991. Fancourt and Finn, 2019. Haraway, “It Matters.” REF, 2012. University of Brighton, 2023. Ellis, 2013. Moriarty, 2014. Ellis, 2004, xix. Metta, 32. University of Brighton, 2023. Metta, 32. Holden, 150. Flynn, 55–64. Ibid., 55. Miniotaitė, 46. Hall, 2021. Moriarty and Diab, 2021. Docherty, 2012. Priyadharshini and Robinson-Pant, 2003. Symonds, 301. REF, 2021. UCU Report, 2016. Chang et al., 2013. Marr and Moriarty, 2021. Moriarty, 2014. Tamas, 2012. Meyers, 2012. Fazackerly, 2017. Acker et al., 1991. Ornstein, 4. Ibid. Perrault. Estes, 4.

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de Salis et al., 2018. Dillaway and Wershler, 2021; Manguso, 2019; King, 2013. Atkinson et al., 2021. Parks and Moriarty, 2022. Orenstein, 241. Moriarty and Marr, 2019. Barber, 1996. Normative Motherhood, 2023. Parker, 1984. Marr, 2014. Marr, “Artwork – Upholding the Mother,” 2023. Zipes, 66. Orenstein, 2002. Cook and Fonow, 11. Ibid., 136. Ibid. Ibid., 135.

Works Cited Acker, Joan, Kate Barry, and Joke Esseveld. “Objectivity and Truth: Problems in Doing Feminist Research.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 6, no. 4, 1983, pp. 25–35. Atkinson, Carol, et al. “Menopause and the Workplace: New Directions in HRM Research and HR Rractice.” Human Resource Management Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 2021, pp. 49–64. Atkinson, Kym, and Kay E. Standing. “Changing the Culture? A Feminist Academic Activist Critique.” Violence against Women, vol. 25, no. 11, 2019, pp. 1331–51. Barber, Elizabeth. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996. Barker, Pat. The Silence of the Girls. London: Penguin, 2019. Bhopal, Kalwant, and Holly Henderson. “Competing Inequalities: Gender Versus Race in Higher Education Institutions in the UK.” Educational Review, vol. 73, no. 2, 2021, pp. 153–69. Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Vintage Routledge, 1979. Carter, Angela. “The Bloody Chamber.” In Reading Fiction: Opening the Text. London: Palgrave, 2001, pp. 152–57. Chang, Heewon, Faith Ngunjiri, and Kathy Ann Hernandez. Collaborative Autoethnography. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2013. Cook, Judith A., and Mary Margaret Fonow. “Knowledge and Women’s Interests: Issues of Epistemology and Methodology in Feminist Sociological Research.” Sociological Inquiry, vol. 56, no. 1, 1986, pp. 2–29. Cook, Judith A., and Mary Margaret Fonow. Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. de Salis, Isabel, et al. “Experiencing Menopause in the UK: The Interrelated Narratives of Normality, Distress, and Transformation." Journal of Women & Aging, vol. 30, no. 6, 2018, pp. 520–40.

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Dillaway, Heather, and Laura Wershle, eds. Musings on Perimenopause and Menopause: Identity, Experience, Transition. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2021. Docherty, Thomas. “Research by Numbers.” Index on Censorship, vol. 41, no. 3, 2012, pp. 56–65. Donoghue, Emma. Kissing the Witch. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur Bochner. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials (2nd edition), edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonne S. Lincoln, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000, pp. 199–258. Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I. Lanham: Altamera Press, 2004. Fancourt, Daisy, and Saoirse Finn."What Is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Well-being? A Scoping Review.” World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe, 2019. Formby, Eleanor. “Understanding and Responding to Homophobia and Bullying: Contrasting Staff and Young People’s Views within Community Settings in England.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy, vol. 10, 2013, pp. 302–16. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Little Red Cap, Kinder und Hausmarchen (1st Edition), Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1812. Haraway, Donna. “It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, 2019, pp. 565–75. Harris, Richard, Ann E. Wilson-Daily, and Georgina Fuller. “Exploring the Secondary School Experience of LGBT+ Youth: An Examination of School Culture and School Climate as Understood by Teachers and Experienced by LGBT+ Students.” Intercultural Education, vol. 32, no. 4, 2021, pp. 368–85. Holman Jones, Sophie, Tony. E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, eds. Handbook of Autoethnography. Thousand Oaks: Left Coast Press, 2013, pp. 281–99. Hunt, Celia. Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2000. Kendall, Lynne. “Higher Education and Disability: Exploring Student Experiences.” Cogent Education, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, pp. 125–42. Kentridge, William. “William Kentridge: ‘Art Must Defend the Uncertain’,” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/william-kentridge-2680/william-kentridgeart-must-defend-uncertain. Accessed 5 January 2023. King, Jeannette. Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible Woman. New York: Springer, 2012. Kosciw, Joseph G., et al. “The Effect of Negative School Climate on Academic Outcomes for LGBT Youth and the Role of In-School Supports.” Journal of School Violence, vol. 12, no. 1, 2013, pp. 45–63. Maitland, Sarah. Gossip from the Forest. London: Granta Books, 2012. Manguso, Sarah. “Where Are All the Books about Menopause?,” The New Yorker, 2019. Marr, Vanessa. “Promises and Expectations,” [Handmade poetry books and embroidered dusting cloths]. Private Collection, 2014. Marr, Vanessa. “Angela Carter: A Radical Precience?,” [Embroidered tablecloth]., Chichester University, March 2021.

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Marr, Vanessa. “The Domestic Academic Quilt: Collaborative Creation as Academic Research in the Global Pandemic: Personal Essay.” Give and Take: Motherhood and Creative Practice. Forthcoming,2024. Marr, Vanessa, et. al., Give and Take: Motherhood and Creative Practice, edited by Andrea O’Reilly, Toronto: Demeter. In Press, 2023. Marr, Vanessa. “Artwork – Upholding the Mother.” Normative Motherhood: Regulations, Representations, and Reclamations, edited by Andrea O’Reilly, Toronto: Demeter, 2023, pp. 131–4. Marr, Vanessa et al., “The Domestic Academic.” Storying the Self, edited by Jessica Moriarty, Bristol: Intellect Books, 2020. Marr, Vanessa. Finding Time to Write and Care: The Domestic Academic Quilt. University of Brighton, 2021. Accessed 16 September 2022. https://tda24. brighton.domains/domesticacademicquilt Marr, Vanessa, and Jessica Moriarty, “Reclaiming Stories: Invoking the Goddess.” Gramarye Journal, vol. 20, 2021. Metta, Marylin. Writing against, Alongside and Beyond Memory: Lifewriting as Reflexive, Poststructuralist Feminist Research Practice. Bristol: Peter Lang, 2010. Miller, Madeleine. Circe. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Miniotaitė, Daina, “Liminality in Angela Carter’s Collection of Stories: The Bloody Chamber. Man and the Word.” Foreign Languages, vol. 20, no. 3, 2018, pp. 46–59. Moriarty, Jess, and Susan Diab. “Spinning in Higher Education: An Autoethnography of Finding Space to be Human in Academic Life.” International Perspectives on Innovative Approaches towards Teaching and Learning: Humanizing Higher Education, edited by E. Kapur and P. Blessinger, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2021. Moriarty, Jess, and Vanessa Marr. “Reclaiming the Book of Spells: Storying the Self as a Form of Fesistance.” Autoethnographies from the Neoliberal Academy, edited by Jess Moriarty et al., London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 87–103. Moriarty, Jess. Autoethnographies from the Neoliberal Academy: Rewilding, Writing and Resistance in Higher Education. London: Routledge, 2019. Moriarty, Jess. Analytical Autoethnodrama: Autobiographed and Researched Experiences with Academic Writing. (Bold Visions in Educational Research). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2014. https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/ bookseries/bold-visions-in-educational-research/analytical-autoethnodrama/ 2014. Accessed 1 May 2023. Myers, W. Benjamin, ed. “Introduction to Writing Autoethnographic Joy.” Qualitative Communication Research, vol. 1, no. 2, 2012, pp. 157–62. Olsen, Jason, et al. “Reporting from the Margins: Disabled Academics Reflections on Higher Education.” Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, vol. 22, no. 1, 2020, pp. 265–74. Orenstein, Catherine. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch. London: I.B Tauris, 1985.

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Parks, Mel, and J. Moriarty, “Storying Autobiographical Experiences with Gender-Based Violence: A Collaborative Autoethnography.” Journal of Autoethnography, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 129–43. 10.1525/joae.2022.3.2 Perrault, Charles. Little Red Riding Hood. Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé. Paris: Claude Barbin, 1697. Phd, Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Women with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books, 1995. Priyadharshini, Esther, and Anna Robinson-Pant. “The Attractions of Teaching: An Investigation into Why People Change Careers to.” Journal of Education for Teaching, vol. 29, no. 2, 2003, pp. 95–112. Reading, Christina, and Jess Moriarty. Walking for Creative Recovery: A Handbook for Creatives with Insights and Ideas for Supporting Your Creative Life. Bridport: Triarchy Press, 2022. Research Excellence Framework. https://www.ref.ac.uk/. 2021. Accessed 23 February 2023. Symonds, Alexandra. “Gender issues and Horney Theory.” American Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 51, no. 3, 1991, pp. 301–12. Tamas, Sophie. Life after Leaving: The Remains of Spousal Abuse. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc., 2011. University of Brighton. Getting the Most Out of Your Staff Development Review (SDR), 2023. https://unibrightonac.sharepoint.com/sites/staffdev/SDR_Docs/ Forms/AllItems.aspx?id=%2Fsites%2Fstaffdev%2FSDR%5FDocs%2FGetting %20the%20most%20out%20of%20your%20SDR%20Guide%202023%2 Epdfandparent=%2Fsites%2Fstaffdev%2FSDR%5FDocs. Accessed 23 February 2023. University and College Union. The Gender Pay Gap in Higher Education, Gender Pay Gap Data REPORT 2015/16 (ucu.org.uk) 2016. Accessed 24 September 2021. Warner, M. Once Upon a Time. London: Oxford University Press, 2014. Winnicott, Donald. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession1.” The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Vol. 4, 1952–1955, edited by Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson, New York, 2016; online. December 2016. 10.1093/med:psych/9780190271367.003.0034./. Accessed 23 March 2023. Zipes, Jack. “The Enchanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm: New Modes of Approaching the Grimms Fairy Tales.” Germanic Review, vol. 62, no. 2, 1987, pp. 66–74.

13

Post-it as Praxis Counternarrating Non-linearity and Multiplicity in Academic Lives Elizabeth Rodrigues and Marion Wolfe

Introduction We, Marion and Liz, have been friends since we were both English majors at our undergraduate institution. Our lives share a similar outline. We completed bachelor’s degrees in English literature and were highly drawn to doctoral study. Yet, neither of us applied immediately. Instead, we moved for family or romantic relationships, got married and, to para­ phrase Lorrie Moore, first tried to be something, anything, other than a grad student.1 During this liminal period, we both struggled with the decision of whether to pursue doctoral study. Because of the realities of the academic job market in the United States in the early 2000s, it had been explicitly impressed upon us that completing a PhD in English would likely not lead to a tenured faculty position, which was implicitly im­ pressed upon us as the best professional outcome. The narrative of aca­ demic life was told to us as linear and singular, even while a linear path to tenure and a singular devotion to study and teaching were not viable professional paths for most people. The struggle to imagine our future selves in this linear, singularly fo­ cused narrative of success was additionally complicated by our simulta­ neous imaginings of ourselves as future mothers. In the introduction to Academic Motherhood in Post-Second Wave Contexts, Hallstein and O’Reilly describe how “[c]ontemporary women’s subjectivity … is split between newfound gains as unencumbered women (women without children) and old gendered expectations when women become mothers.”2 They add that, because of the unbounded nature of both academic work and mothering work, “academia reinforces rather than challenges wo­ men’s split subjectivity – whether intended or not – while also demanding that academic mothers adhere to the institutionalized unencumbered-byfamily-life norms that drive career-path success in academia.”3 Imagining ourselves as academics seemed to require internalizing this untenable split: you could either be scholar-not-mother or mother-not-scholar.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-14

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But we did, eventually, earn doctorates and do, currently, work in academic institutions, both in non-tenurable teaching and research roles adjacent to, but outside of, literary study. And we are mothers. In hind­ sight, we can see that our hesitations, our deliberations, and, ultimately, our claiming of roles outside the tenure track have been acts of what Hanna Meretoja has termed counternarration: “critical reinterpretations of dominant narrative models [that] typically question the power struc­ tures underlying master narratives and shed problematizing light on them.”4 As Meretoja argues, counternarratives, like all narratives, are inescapably dialogical “in that they always take shape in relation to cul­ turally mediated narrative models of sense-making, which they implicitly or explicitly draw on, perpetuate, or challenge. But instead of doing this automatically, they do this via the interpretative agency of human subjects who use, interpret, and reinterpret the narrative traditions in which they are enmeshed.”5 Pursuing an academic career as a woman, enmeshed in a master narrative in which the protagonist is “assumed to be unencumbered by caring responsibilities, and the ideal (masculine) subject succeeds as an individual within a managerialist-audit system of per­ formance measures, research outputs, impact metrics and funding tar­ gets,”6 makes one acutely aware of this ongoing process of positioning the self in relation to narrative models. Meretoja’s argument illuminates the power of critical reflection on our own interactions with internalized master narratives of the academic career. Renarrating what might be perceived as personal struggles and failings as processes of reinterpreting narratives that cannot encompass academic humanity is a critical act of social transformation. As we undertook the dialogue that led to this chapter, we realized that our counternarrations began with a form of academic life writing that, like our professional paths, would typically be excluded from the sanctioned formal repertoire due to its non-linearity and multiplicity: collecting and displaying quotations on Post-it notes: small, adhesive-backed, and sometimes colorful pieces of paper that can be quickly displayed, moved, and removed. Initially, this practice seemed too humble, too personal, and too fragmentary to consider. Yet, Lauren Fournier has identified citation, “the referencing of other people and texts as sources of influence and information,”7 as a mode of autotheory. Autotheory, which Fournier has defined as “a self-conscious way of engaging with theory – as a discourse, frame, or mode of thinking and practice – alongside lived experience and subjective embodiment,”8 is a powerful tool for counternarration in the context of academic selfhood that is “rooted in the tradition of misogyny itself in the ivory tower, and that, in turn, is rooted in the fear of our own organic, imperfect bodies.”9 Our Post-its, an assemblage of handtranscribed citations visually and materially set before ourselves, mark an

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agential shaping of the cognitive and physical spaces in which we work. They form a history and a practice of counternarration. As Fournier suggests, “Citation, placed next to memory, becomes a way of making one’s life intelligible.”10 In the essay that follows, we place citation next to memory by reading selected Post-its. We find that this private citational practice illuminates a web of citational practice underlying our more public documents, mapping a process of selfmaking as mothering academics. The essay is dialogical in two senses: in dialogue with each other, as friends and peers, we excavate what Meretoja would term dialogical interactions with the master narrative of the academic as unencumbered and singularly focused and the master narrative form of linear work and achievement. As Meretoja argues, our understanding of self and identity arises from “an ongoing dialogue with cultural models of narrative sense-making” in which we “position our­ selves in relation to them, deciding whether we align ourselves with dominant narratives or whether we want to challenge and resist them by finding alternative ways of narrating our experiences and identities.”11 Our academic lives become intelligible as counternarratives, challenging linearity and singularity as ideals through our claiming of non-linearity and multiplicity. Narrating Nonlinearity Marion

As I begin to reflect on the construction of my own, non-linear life nar­ rative, my first thought is of two quotations from popular nonfiction books that are prominently featured next to my desk in my home office (see Figure 13.1). The first is from David Epstein’s Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. I read Range in May 2020, when I was feeling discouraged about my own career path after losing my contingent faculty position as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the previous decade, I had finished an MA and then a PhD, given birth to two children, relocated to a new city for my husband’s job, and taught at three different institutions. Until March 2020, I had been hopeful that I would still have the opportunity to pursue a tenure-track position in my own field of Rhetoric and Composition, but the global shutdown meant that I instead spent the next year at home with my kids as they attended virtual school. In that environment, it came as such a relief to read Epstein’s words: “Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let everyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help.”12 I copied the sen­ tences and hung them next to my desk.

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Figure 13.1 Marion’s Post-it wall.

Epstein’s book pushes back against the received master narrative that specialization is the ideal in our technologically advanced world and that we must succeed while young and continuously build on that success. He proposes a counternarrative that, ultimately, generalists are more successful,

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both because they are best situated to adapt to changing circumstances and because their ability to make connections between disparate fields is a un­ ique and valuable skill. Bruce Feiler’s Life Is in the Transitions was released only a few months later and directly confronts the related master narrative that life is a sin­ gular journey with a predictable structure. Feiler argues that “Nonlinearity helps explain why we all feel so overwhelmed all the time. Trained to expect that our lives will unfold in a predictable series of stately life chapters, we’re confused when those chapters come faster and faster, frequently out of order, often on top of the other … and we’re not aberrations because of this; we’re just like everyone else.”13 This quota­ tion joined Epstein’s on my Post-it wall. My path in academia has certainly not been linear, and my research, scholarship, and teaching have not been particularly specialized. Yet this was not what I was trained to expect. Liz, you and I were encouraged as undergraduate English majors to think about our academic careers as a series of increasing specializations, leading to a final, singular destination, an ideal that was furthered in graduate school. And although this concept can be comforting, for most of us, it is a reassuring fiction. My Post-its serve as both a reminder and an example of nonlinearity. During a time when my life (for reasons beyond my control) seemed to be falling into the master narrative of mother-not-scholar, it was non-scholarly texts and genres that reminded me of my own multiplicity and reassured me that my split subjectivity could somehow be reconciled. Liz

Marion, your honing in on these two quotations calls to mind my own touchstone source for the idea of nonlinearity, and one that I encountered at a critical point of professional discernment: Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life. I first read it during a quiet Saturday morning shift at the university writing center, where I was employed as a graduate writing mentor, one of two jobs that I held while completing dual master’s degrees in information science and English/creative writing. I was on the verge of completing both, yet questioning whether I had made the right decision to opt out of doctoral study. Reading Bateson helped me see that part of my struggle was an inter­ nalized belief that successful academics would never have seemingly turned from the path in the first place. Bateson observes, “The model of an ordinary successful life that is held up for young people is one of early decision and commitment, often to an educational preparation that launches a single rising trajectory,”14 a quest whose narrative form echoes “a pattern deeply rooted in myth and folklore that recurs in biography … . The pursuit of a

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quest is a pilgrim’s progress in which it is essential to resist the transitory contentment of attractive way stations and side roads, in which obstacles are overcome because the goal is visible on the horizon, onward and up­ ward.”15 Bateson, however, challenges the career narrative as a hero’s quest, pointing out that it has almost never held for women in her and her mother’s generations and that it is increasingly untenable as a generalizable career narrative for men or women. In Meretoja’s terms, the hero’s quest operates as an implicit master narrative for professional success, and like all master narratives, it suggests “while certain things are possible for us – given our gender, race, class, age, looks – others are impossible or unlikely.”16 In this narrative model, the possibility of professional success is reserved for those who can commit early and unwaveringly. Bateson seeks a new way of narrating professional lives in part because she wants better models for young people who will enter a global economy and culture in which changing roles, in both professional and personal spaces, must be recognized as the norm. Perhaps Bateson (who died in 2021) would have been gratified to learn that I, a member of the gener­ ation she would have been writing about, found her work at a moment when I needed it. Composing a Life was so influential to my thinking that I cited it in the very first sentence of the personal statement that I submitted as part of my application to the doctoral program I eventually attended. The prompt for this statement was: “How have your background and life experiences, including cultural, geographical, financial, educational, or other opportunities or challenges, motivated your decision to pursue a graduate degree?” I was grateful to be asked this question and appre­ hensive at the thought of answering it honestly: were they really asking me to write directly about all the things that I had been taught to leave out? Would admitting that I had family and financial concerns about the career I longed to pursue out me as unserious? Despite these apprehensions, I decided to accept the invitation, and the resulting document marks a moment in which I began to not only rewrite my narrative but also challenge the form in which I believed I had to tell it. I began: In Composing a Life, Mary Catherine Bateson contrasts the responsive life, lived as an improvisation on necessity and circumstance, with the purposive life, lived in pursuit of achievement. Her model … was one to which I turned often as I debated whether or not to pursue the study of literature at the highest possible level. My decision to seek a doctoral degree is the result of a process of balancing the need to respond to circumstances with the sense of purpose that drives me to become a scholar. So much lies beneath these few sentences. This personal statement provided space for me to enunciate those things that go unrecorded in an

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undergraduate transcript. I go on to reference this document and its eli­ sions explicitly, writing, “My academic record during my final year at Kenyon College gives no hint of why I did not immediately continue to pursue educational opportunities.” These unrecorded reasons included a serious health crisis for my mother that ended in her retirement due to disability, a layoff and forced retirement for my father, and, in a preAffordable Care Act world, the reality that I had no way to pay for healthcare after graduation unless I found a full-time job. It left out the social transition I was unaware of making as I got married at age 23, from a young woman who had always been encouraged to work as hard as she could to a young wife who was, explicitly and implicitly, told that claiming her own sense of professional purpose was optional and perhaps even detrimental to her future family. All the more so if the field she hoped to enter offered little promise of financial stability. These are not uncommon or extreme hardships, but the narrative I was measuring myself against seemed not to include the kind of person who had to deal with them. Encountering Bateson was the first open acknowledgment I had seen of the differential expectations placed on women when it came to pursuing professional goals and the stifling parameters of the career narrative as a singular calling. Bateson’s insight foremothers the work of feminist aca­ demics challenging and rewriting academic career narrative norms, ex­ emplified by such collections as Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis’s Women Activating Agency in Academia and Lived Experiences of Women in Academia. However, my personal statement influenced the admissions and fellowships committees that reviewed it and it influenced me power­ fully in that it enabled me to imagine my path as a path rather than a divergence from a better one or a failure to be on one at all. It marks a moment in which I began to not only rewrite my narrative but also challenge the form in which I believed I had to tell it. Nonlinearity as Resilient Commitment Given our training as feminist scholars of life writing and rhetoric, it should hardly be surprising to us that human lives are not linear narra­ tives. But, as rhetorical and life writing studies also make clear, we rep­ resent and relate those lives in order to make sense of them and share them as cohesive, purposeful narratives. Our representations of self, like our representations of our research texts and subjects, inevitably draw on master narratives, in content and form. As our narratives reveal, it took external disruptions to the received master narrative of a singular, focused academic life to bring us to the realization of other possibilities. The popular success of Epstein’s and Feiler’s books, the enduring power of

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Bateson’s, and the emerging genre of the shadow CV17 speak to how rarely we see representations of non-linearity affirmed. Narrative form has consequences for lived experience. The ideal of academic life as a hero’s quest interferes with perception, projecting such a strong vision of what lives should be that we might not even see what they are. In our cases, the idealized master narrative overlooks the persistence and flexibility we demonstrated in pursuing our academic training and work while situated in familial contexts that demanded a wider scope of consideration. Our practices of citation allowed us to begin to shape a counternarrative that would restore our agency. The form of the hero’s quest would have us excise these human entanglements in order to perform an academic self that is unencumbered and therefore available for whatever demands academia, and the neoliberal framework of the contemporary university, would make. When we refuse to excise our human contexts, we rewrite the ideal of rigorous commitment as resilient commitment, a repeated choice to continue in whatever ways we can find. Conceiving of the aca­ demic life as iterative rather than progressive opens up a way of reading multiple paths to and through meaningful work, for many incorporating periods within and beyond those formally designated as academic. Multiplicity and Messiness Liz

Marion, your mention of Post-its makes me realize that I have them, too, and they are equally telling of the challenges I have faced in narrating my academic self (see Figure 13.2). They have long since lost their stickiness, so most of the time they kind of skitter around the base of my computer stand, but I have arranged them here to look nicer on a single page. The bottom two are quotations from Marie Ponsot, a twentieth-century poet who had seven children. Ponsot published her first collection in 1956 and her second in 1981. In between, she was childrearing as a divorced single mother, teaching at Queens College in contingent positions, and writing “10 minutes a day … . as if it were Commandment No. 1.”18 Her stance is humble yet uncompromising. While she exhorts, “There is always time to write one line of poetry,” she also emphasizes process over product, pushing oneself to practice the small faith of effort without guarantee of outcome: “Try. That’s my word: try.”19 I discovered Ponsot while reading an issue of Poetry that featured her work after she won the Ruth Lilly Prize in 2013. When I read the issue, it was the early days of my own life as a mother, shortly after my first child started daycare. To read that a woman with such a prolific and long career as a poet had done it while raising seven children utterly shattered the internalized narrative that my own work, creative and critical, would

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Figure 13.2 Liz’s Post-its.

necessarily be compromised by motherhood. Not simply for the time parenting would take, but for the lack of focus choosing it confirmed. The fact of having chosen to commit myself to the care of children in addition to pursuing scholarship meant that I had shirked the vocational

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responsibility of the scholar, in which “the entire focus of an academic’s being becomes their intellectual capacity and the products of this very narrow part of them.”20 In truth, it is not and has never been just parenting that has divided my commitments and my time. In a personal statement for a postundergraduate fellowship (that I did not get), I wrote, somewhat cheekily, “If I had to describe myself in one word, it would be ‘and.’” At my per­ forming arts high school, I majored in music while taking a full academic course load. As a college English major, I minored in Greek and concen­ trated on creative writing. Even after moving into spheres of professional training that typically indicate the decision to focus on a single area, I found myself looking for and finding opportunities to keep multiple intellectual interests in play. When the fellowship that funded my master’s in library science included funding for a second master’s, I chose to pursue an MFA in poetry because it included as many critically-focused courses as a master’s in English with the addition of creative writing workshops. Within my MLIS, I pursued technology-focused systems in librarian training and training in humanities reference and instruction. When I had passed through the sup­ posedly narrowing gate into doctoral studies in literature, I found a digital project side job, took as many digital humanities workshops as I could, and ultimately developed a dissertation topic with one foot in information studies. One summer, I found myself eligible for a more generous funding package simply because I was also a creative writer. With a dissertation topic that clearly demonstrated my ongoing interest in information studies, training as a humanities researcher and teacher, and technological facility, I found myself well-positioned for the emerging field of digital scholarship within library practice. The master academic life narrative would cast my insistence on culti­ vating multiple aspects of intellectual and professional practice as an inability to make a choice, but given the number of times I have found my multifaceted background to be a boon rather than a hindrance, I might also recognize it as a strategy, or just an equally valid choice. Put another way, I am embodied proof of Epstein’s argument in Range: by cultivating a generalist’s scope and agility, I have been able to find opportunities that bridge my desire to do scholarly research in a collaborative environment and meet my need for relative economic stability. Yet, the top Post-it in my photo hints at the part of my mind that still struggles to affirm the validity of multiple commitments and the frag­ mented time landscape they create. On the one hand, the “no rabbit holes” reminder is a sound piece of advice: the Internet is all too good at pro­ viding tidbits of seemingly urgent information to be consumed, on every conceivable topic. Gentle focus on a primary task is vital. On the other hand, “no rabbit holes” can also be the voice of insecurity. When I do a

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mental scan of my professional portfolio (often late at night, in the dark, detached from the real experience of any of these modes of work), I can begin to believe that I have constructed a life entirely out of rabbit holes. My work currently includes academic librarianship, digital humanities project work, literary scholarship, and teaching in multiple disciplines. In the context of a prevailing academic career narrative that prizes special­ ization and overriding commitment to a singular intellectual passion, some of these things must be distracting me from the one thing, the single thing I should be doing, if I only had the willpower or talent to do it. Marion

Liz, like you, I struggled to define my own path during graduate school and to balance the multiplicities of my academic and personal selves. Like you, I moved away from our original path in literary study, but in my case, it was to the related field of Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy. I derived great joy and fulfillment from my chosen field’s focus on pedagogy and the wide range of research possibilities. Yet I also felt adrift, unsure of how to pursue a research agenda and conflicted about the specialized future I was told should be my goal. At a time when my research felt stalled (coming back to my dissertation after a year of maternity leave), I found myself reading less about my actual topic of study and more about feminist historiographic research methods, as a way to reassure myself that my intended project was valid. Eventually, I created a single-page document for inspiration and support, a collection of quotations that hung next to my desk, in the place where Feiler’s and Epstein’s words hang now. As I struggled through my research and writing, I kept coming back to the words of archival researchers Mastrangelo and L’Eplattenier: “As we talk with scholars, we find that our stories – stumbling into archives, fascinated but untrained in historiographical methods – are not unique.”21 Similarly, rhetorical historian David Gold writes, “I felt clueless, a feeling I have since come to learn is at the heart of the scholarly process … . Archival research … is a bottom-up process and messy as hell.”22 Until I began reading about others’ research methods, especially others in my own interdisciplinary field, it had not occurred to me that messiness and “stumbling” might not be avoidable faults but instead essential, inevitable parts of one’s research process, and, in fact, one’s professional life. Looking back with hindsight, I can see the counternarrative that emerges; the ways in which my apparent straying from the singular path led to a better, more nuanced, understanding. Accepting messiness in my research process led to my recognizing the messiness of my research subjects as human beings. As I moved forward with my dissertation, I tried to acknowledge the complexities and paradoxes of historical women’s lives

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and rhetorics, rather than creating a singular narrative for or about them. I used the feminist rhetorical practices that Royster and Kirsch refer to as critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation to view my research subjects as full human beings, full of contradictions and with many gaps in their logic and self-told narratives. Feminist theory gave me permission to have a more subjective relationship with my research, to rely on my own assumptions and experiences to craft my argument about past women’s lives. And yet, a part of me felt that I had somehow done it wrong, that my messy life and messy project needed to be covered up by a neater, more linear narrative. I knew that the messiness was there in my life and my process, but I did not have the opportunity to share it in an official document as you did, Liz. Instead, it continued to exist primarily in that private space next to my desk, where my more complex selfperception was reflected in collages of Post-it notes. We all know on one level that the linear hero’s journey does not reflect the complex realities of our lives. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out that “Readers often conceive of autobiographical narrators as telling unified stories of their lives, as creating or discovering coherent selves. But both the unified story and the coherent self are myths of identity.”23 And yet we continue to perpetuate this myth in professional spaces, especially in job searches and applications. As I began looking for an academic position toward the end of my doctoral work, I struggled to shape my messy, cir­ cuitous life story into a logical, chronological narrative that I could tell on the job market. My CV became the symbol of this struggle. I was very conscious of how I massaged every detail, down to the margins, punctua­ tion, and ranges of dates, to conceal what I perceived as the gaps, in par­ ticular the time I had taken off when my children were born and the periods when I had chosen to spend more time on mothering than on academic work. In the American professional context, there was no opportunity to openly acknowledge periods of leave or family commitments.24 In their study on graduate student mothers, Huff, Hampton, and Tagliarina describe the advice their interviewees were given to not mention their parental status or to remove wedding rings while interviewing for academic jobs.25 They argue that “women are expected to hide their marital or parental status in order to demonstrate their commitment to their public, academic life.”26 Like these graduate student mothers, I felt the pressure to erase all of the messiness of life from the neat and tidy narrative I was telling of myself as an unencumbered, serious scholar and teacher. Of course, those gaps that I tried so hard to hide are not, in fact, empty. They are full of sleepless nights with a newborn, family vacations, books I read just for fun, evenings helping my kids with homework, and all of the other small joys and sorrows that I believe have made me not only a better mother or human, but also a better teacher, reader, and researcher. I am

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not alone in this sense that my differing roles enrich each other. In her study of academic mothers, Goodier writes that a “common theme that emerged in the narratives of my participants was the belief that, despite the occasional challenges, being a professor and a mother made them better in both roles.”27 Still, we are left with the question of how to integrate this complexity into our official narratives. In addition to the collections already mentioned, an important text for me was Women’s Professional Lives in Rhetoric and Composition: Choice, Change, and Serendipity, which focuses on the moments in academic women’s lives that do not fit the predetermined narrative but that often lead, in roundabout ways, to different kinds of success. In the Foreword, Brady describes how this collection works against the linear, and often toxic, narratives about professionally successful women: Regardless of where they work–in academic or nonacademic settings–such stories encourage women to view the challenges they face as “normal,” promising them an uncomplicated path to profes­ sional success if only they remain single-minded, self-sufficient, and determined. The strategies women use to negotiate these challenges are also normalized.28 Brady’s description made me newly appreciate the ways in which I have resisted these potentially problematic strategies, for example by taking all of my allowed maternity leave and not using that time to research or write. I could be in a different place in my career if I had remained single-mindedly focused on that “uncomplicated path to professional success,” but I believe that my more complicated counternarrative is the better story. So, instead of following a linear path here and moving on to the con­ clusion, let me circle back. Above, I described a time when my dissertation project felt stalled after a year of maternity leave and a move to a new city. With hindsight, I can see that the 15-month break I took, the biggest gap that I tried to hide in my CV, was absolutely essential to the final product. Before my leave, I had been trying too hard to fit my ideas into a particular mold. When I returned to my dissertation, the distance in both time and space provided the clarity I needed to throw away what I had previously written and start over, a process that began with reading about research methods and creating that list of quotations for my Post-it wall. I also found that my new role as a mother gave me a sense of clarity as my priorities shifted. Although the transition to parenthood certainly limited the time I had available for work, paradoxically, it made it easier for me to see a way forward. I knew for certain that completing a dissertation was no longer the most important thing in my life, but giving my research less emotional weight made it feel easier to complete. I found that with fewer

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hours to spend on my studies, I was more willing to allow my work to be ‘good enough’ and to consider other possible futures for myself, beyond a tenure-track faculty position. My increased openness and flexibility eventually led to my current full-time, contingent teaching position, which does not hold the status or stability of a tenure-track job, but gives me more time and freedom to commit to the parts of academic life that are most meaningful to me (teaching, collaborating with colleagues, exploring a variety of topics and disciplines) while removing the pressure to follow a singular research agenda. Embracing a Fuller Narrative Over time, we have both learned to tell fuller stories of our academic lives–not just because we have to, but because we want to. These fuller narratives may, at times, seem less narrative, in the Aristotelian sense of “a clear, temporally ordered plot with a dramatic complication that eventually is resolved,”29 a resolution produced in part by excluding ev­ erything that does not lead up to that end in a direct, causal chain. Aristotelian narrative aesthetics overlap with “the compulsory obligation to tell less than the truth”30 when narrating professional selves. For as much as the traditional academic career narrative would cast the seeming gaps in our stories as our deviations or deprivations, they may also be seen as our commitments and opportunities – and even our humanity. As Patterson incisively observes, “Academia holds up a mirror of life that is more than impoverished; it is distorted. It is un-whole. It is, too often, hostile to life itself.”31 As Marion points out, the gaps in our CVs are some of the fullest periods of our lives; it is only academic productivity that constructs the fullness of life as unfulfilled professional potential. Beginning to tell stories of our lives containing and benefiting from messiness and multiple commitments is an act of resistance to the “silence [that] surrounds discussions of family in the academy.” We affirm Huff, Hampton, and Tagliarina’s argument that “speaking through that silence is the first step in overcoming the public-private divide and supporting academic mothering.”32 Telling the story is a precursor to believing it, and sharing our stories with each other is a precursor to action. Sharing Our Stories When judged by the outline of the ‘traditional’ academic career narrative (a story in which all paths should lead to tenure), ours would be viewed as qualified successes. Wood explains that often, “women are shamed for non-tenure-track work, even if it is an ideal situation for them, as it often is for mothers. This position privileges the importance of academic work

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over caretaking work, reinforcing the dichotomy between academic work and mothering.”33 In telling our fuller, nonlinear counternarratives, we are following Papoulis’ advice to provide “The antidotes to academic shame,” demonstrating her argument that “connecting with others can allow us both to see that we’re in fact not alone in feeling shame, and to honor what we have achieved more than what we haven’t.”34 We believe that the paths we have chosen, and the roles we have taken on, are ful­ filling and rigorous, while allowing room for our own multiplicities. Wood argues for embracing “the freeing possibilities of non-tenure-track aca­ demic work as a form of resistance to the unreasonable demands and requirements of tenure-track academic positions.”35 We similarly desire to change the possible paths available to academic women, to broaden the view and add nuance to the stories we tell about our professional lives. Our Post-its, like our life stories, intervene in the master narrative of academic life at the level of both form and content. Formally, they are fragmentary and mobile, accrued and rearranged as needed, reflecting the lived experience of research as discovery and the distributed attention of relational, caregiving being. On the level of content, the citations we inscribe upon them are not, typically, the things we are writing about – they are the things that help us keep writing. We are moved to pause and transcribe because these citations resonate and re-orient, interjecting “new perspectives on our own world and on how we orient ourselves to our present and future possibilities.”36 These notes outline, perhaps, the spaces not provided by the documents we produce. These not-provided spaces are characterized by their affirmation of non-linearity, creative uncertainty, and multiplicity of commitment. Explicitly, they tie us to thinkers and practices that we hope to internalize as alternative narrative structures for academic life. Implicitly, they mark the doubts we have had to dispel in order to proceed, and the moments of recognition across time and text that enabled us to imagine that way forward. Notes 1 Moore, in her 1985 short story “How to Become a Writer,” begins: “First try to be something, anything, else.” 2 Hallstein and O’Reilly, 6. 3 Ibid., 10. 4 Meretoja, 34. We are indebted to the insights of our anonymous peer reviewers for pointing us to Meretoja. 5 Ibid., 31. 6 Bosanquet, 66. 7 Fournier, 135. 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Patterson, 102. 10 Fournier, 144.

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Meretoja, 36. Epstein, 290. Feiler, 51. Bateson, 5. Ibid. Meretoja, 36. See Looser. Taylor, n.p. Ibid., n.p. Wood, 235. Mastrangelo and L’Eplattenier, 163. Gold, 15, 18. Smith and Watson, 61. Outside of the United States context, these opportunities sometimes do exist. In this volume, for example, see Douglas and Käosaar. Huff, Hampton, and Tagliarina, 453–4. Ibid., 454. Goodier, 53. Brady, ix. Medved and Brockmeier, 19. Ortiz-Vilarelle, 57. Patterson, 103. Huff, Hampton, and Tagliarina, 459. Wood, 238. Papoulis, 216. Wood, 243. Meretoja, 32.

Works Cited Bateson, Mary Catherine. Composing a Life. New York: Grove Atlantic Monthly, 1989. Black, Alison L., and Susanne Garvis, eds. Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir (1st ed.). London: Routledge, 2018, 10.4324/9781315147451. Black, Alison L., and Susanne Garvis, eds. Lived Experiences of Women in Academia: Metaphors, Manifesto and Memoir, London: Routledge, 2018. Bosanquet, Agnes. “Motherhood and Academia: A Story of Bodily Fluids and Going with the Flow.” Lived Experiences of Women in Academia: Metaphors, Manifesto and Memoir, edited by Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 65–75. Brady, Ann M. “Foreword.” Women’s Professional Lives in Rhetoric and Composition: Choice, Chance, and Serendipity, edited by Elizabeth Flynn and Tiffany Bourelle, Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2018, pp. ix–xii. Epstein, David J. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019. Feiler, Bruce. Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. New York: Penguin Publishing, 2020.

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Flynn, Elizabeth A., and Tiffany Bourelle, eds. Women’s Professional Lives in Rhetoric and Composition: Choice, Chance, and Serendipity. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2018, 10.2307/j.ctv1d6q3xf. Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021. Gold, David. “The Accidental Archivist: Embracing Chance and Confusion in Historical Scholarship.” Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, edited by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2008, pp. 13–19. Hallstein, D. Lynn O’Brien, and Andrea O’Reilly, eds. Academic Motherhood in a Post-Second Wave Context: Challenges, Strategies, and Possibilities. Toronto: Demeter, 2012. Huff, Hampton, and Tagliarina. “Liberalism’s Leaky Legacy: Theory and the Narratives of Graduate Student Mothers.” Academic Motherhood in a PostSecond Wave Context: Challenges, Strategies, and Possibilities, edited by Lynn D. Hallstein and Andrea O’Reilly, Toronto: Demeter, 2012, pp. 442–460. Kirsch, Gesa E., and Liz Rohan. Beyond the Archives:Research as a Lived Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2008. Looser, Devoney, “Me and My Shadow CV.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 October 2015, https://www.chronicle.com/article/me-and-my-shadow-cv/. Accessed 11 October 2022. Mastrangelo, Lisa, and Barbara L’Eplattenier. “Stumbling in the Archives: A Tale of Two Novices.” Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, edited by Gesa E Kirsch and Liz Rohan, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2008, pp. 161–170. Medved, Maria, and Jens Brockmeier. “Weird Stories: Brain, Mind, and Self.” Beyond Narrative Coherence, edited by Matti Hyvärinen, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2010, pp. 17–32. Meretoja, Hanna. “A Dialogics of Counter-Narratives.” Routledge Handbook of Counter-Narratives, edited by Klarissa Lueg and Marianne Wolff Lumbholt, London: Taylor and Francis, 2020, pp. 30–42. 10.4324/9780429279713. Moore, Lorrie. “How to Become a Writer.” The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (6th ed.). New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2003, pp. 1016–21. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa. “Academic Career Construction: Personnel Documents as Personal Documents.” Career Construction Theory & Life Writing: Narrative and Autobiographical Thinking Across the Professions, edited by Hywel Rowland Dix, London: Routledge, 2021, pp. 59–71. Patterson, Serena. “‘You Can Slip One in between Your Thesis and Comps’: Unanticipated Consequences of Having a Baby in Graduate School.” Academic Motherhood in a Post-Second Wave Context: Challenges, Strategies, and Possibilities, edited by Lynn D. Hallstein and Andrea O’Reilly, Toronto: Demeter, 2012, pp. 97–107. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2012.

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Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Second Edition. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Taylor, Tess. “Marie Ponsot, Poet of Love, Divorce, and Family Dies at 98.” New York Times Online, 6 July 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/06/ obituaries/marie-ponsot-dead-poet.html. Accessed 11 October 2022. Wood, Jill M. “Non-Tenure-Track Academic Work: The ‘Mommy Track’ or a Strategy for Resistance?” Academic Motherhood in a Post-Second Wave Context: Challenges, Strategies, and Possibilities, edited by Lynn D. Hallstein and Andrea O’Reilly, Toronto: Demeter, 2012, pp. 231–52.

14

Dossiers in Crip Time Reclaiming a Space for Crazy in the Academy Ally Day

The main problem with academia is the way it still revolves around a Cartesian duality, a separation of mind and body that relies on a constant cleaving of the two to materialize this fiction. In other words, the academy is always trying to justify disembodiment for the sake of the work. Your body is a sacrifice to your mind. This is, of course, unless you write about and think through ideas of embodiment. Note to the Reader: Perhaps this should come in the endnotes or at the very beginning. I preferred to open with a brief statement about the problem; after all, complaining is invitational, a beloved pastime. In this chapter, I include several excerpts from my original tenure dossier as well as reflections on writing, academia, and mental illness written in 2022. Taken together, they are meant to convey a process of theorizing developed from intertextual dialogue with myself. The process of theorizing is also the theory. Excerpt from My Statement on Research and Professional Activity “As an interdisciplinary scholar, I aim to answer questions that cannot be addressed with one field’s methodology alone; I learned early on that the kinds of questions I like to ask can be best addressed through interdisciplinary praxis foundational to both Women’s and Gender Studies (my PhD field) and Disability Studies (my tenure field), both of which have an interdisciplinary approach to addressing concerns of social justice. For example, in my first book project, The Political Economy of Stigma, I ask the questions of how and why individualized disability narratives have circulated within the medical field and how this circulation relates to our understanding of deserving citizens. I address these questions through a case study of HIV narratives, doing ethnographic field research with women living with HIV and AIDS service workers to both collect DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-15

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contemporary narratives and interpret published narratives; conducting literary analysis to interpret published narratives, with the help of primary and secondary historical research; conducting life writing research to look at the intertextual circulation and economics of HIV narrative; investigating narrative medicine research and methodology to address how the medical field has recently utilized personal narrative; and interpreting political theory from the context of the social contract to make relationships between individual subjectivity, disability life writing, and liberal citizenship. What I have found by utilizing a broad interdisciplinary framework is a complex understanding of how disability narrative is utilized to reinforce stigma within medical practice and how this affects conceptualizations of deserving citizens. I propose that it is not just that disability narrative can be used to reinforce stigma within inequitable distributions of medical care, but that these narratives are central to maintaining a medical system reliant on personal responsibility and selfsurveillance to produce capital within a neoliberal economy.” On Autotheory Lauren Fournier tells us that autotheory is an emerging feminist practice across media. “In auto-theory, theorized personal anecdotes or embodied actions constellate with fragments from the history of philosophy to form potent analyses of gender, politics, academia, and contemporary art.”1 In other words, I get to think about my own experiences and from this thinking, create an idea. “Embodied experience becomes the primary material for generating theory, foregrounding disclosure and ambivalence as that which enhances critical rigour and relevance,” Fournier tells us.2 As an undergraduate, I thought of myself as a writer, someone who would set out to master the creative nonfiction essay, using my own personal experiences, however mundane, to weave beautiful narrative arcs. I no longer think of myself as a creative writer – that dream long lost to The Great Recession, illness, Foucault, and low self-esteem. But perhaps autotheory gives me an opportunity to combine my first love of creative writing with my second love, critical theory. 2022 I knew when I was hired that I was lucky. I also knew that my 2–3 teaching load was a middle-of-the-road assignment and that my class sizes of 30 students were reasonable for any institution, let alone a public one with a large first-generation college student enrollment rate. I felt confident that I could learn and adapt in my teaching to meet student needs; what was more surprising was the invisible service that left me often yearning for more time with students and their work. As a tenure-track, university professor in the United States, I am

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subject to review every year before tenure, submitting a dossier of teaching, research, and service statements in addition to published material and works-in-progress to be reviewed by my department, my dean, my provost, my president and finally, the board of trustees. It takes months each summer to compile these materials and the review process lasts from September through February. After all that waiting, it can feel anticlimactic to get one-sentence assessment letters. The time put in seems out of sync with the feedback returned. It is this being out of sync that makes the whole process feel non-normative. The review for my second year in my tenure-track job was shocking; not because it was overwhelmingly negative but because instead of a perfect score of 5 (teaching), 5 (scholarly activity), and 5 (service), I received one demarcation – in service. The university review committee suggested that I “get more involved” and “strengthen my service initiatives” as I moved toward tenure. It was at that moment that I crumpled, devastated. To those in my life not in academia, this seems like a perfectly acceptable job review; many of my family and friends would suggest that my panic and devastation were attributable to my neurodivergencies. I was, in other words, just being crazy. The problem was that I worked in a department that originally had four professors; our chair was on sabbatical and three of us were running a brand-new major that required heavy lifting in curriculum development, recruitment, and advising. In January, one of my colleagues was in an accident that left her unable to work for most of the semester. My interim chair and I picked up her classes; we were now running the fastest-growing major on campus at 50% capacity. And I was exhausted. This is just one example of how the review process for tenure and promotion can feel devastating, out-of-proportion to the simple numerical rubrics that make their way from college committee to university committee to provost office to board of trustees. At my public university, in the five years preceding tenure and promotion, we submit a complete dossier that includes evidence of all service, publications and teaching, in addition to 3 personal essays that explicate our philosophies, perspectives, and triumphs in each of these areas of professional work. It can take months to prepare and draft these statements and dossier materials; we wait six months for our materials to go through the various tenure and review panels until we finally receive a generic letter from the president telling us we can keep our jobs. A month or two after we receive this letter, we begin the dossier process again. It is not a normative process; it is a process that requires a fair amount of crip sensibility. In this essay, I use the term crip as it originates in disability studies to mean not just a misfitting of two timeclocks (crip time) rubbing up against one another, but also a way in which this misfitting creates

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expansive possibilities in the space between these timeclocks. In the example provided above, my crip sensibilities erased the expected disembodiment and professional entitlement, pushing me to speak back to the university about the invisible expectations of crip, queer femme people. Doing so, that innocuous 4 score became a platform for propelling my own crip sensibilities into mainstream academia, creating one of many ruptures. A Smart Perspective on Productivity What happens to the productivity of an academic writer who struggles to achieve the linear coherence that most academic writing demands? Or whose disability affects the many self-directed stages of writing and revising —initiation, organization, seeking and applying feedback, completion? Why, indeed, is coherence one of the most-often emphasized features of a thesis-driven academic argument; does the demonstration of coherence indicate a stronger mind?3 I first read Price’s book in the final month of my dissertation writing. At a conference shortly following, I ran into her in the hallway and awkwardly conveyed my appreciation, letting my breath out after years of holding it in. Statement of Teaching Philosophy “My pedagogy begins with the understanding that oppression and inequality exist and that it is part of the project of Disability Studies to address inequality through addressing ableism (the discrimination and oppression of disabled people) and its intersections with racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, islamophobia, and classism. In addressing oppression in both the content and form of my courses, students are learning to interrogate how power operates, developing a fundamental approach to the world that is centered around questions, and not certainty, as a form of knowledge-making. I also believe that in addressing oppression, we create a space where everyone can claim their education. Feminist writer and professor Adrienne Rich writes about how education is something you claim, not something you get – students are active participants in the process, not passive receptacles of information.4 She writes, “Taking responsibility for yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.”5 I believe that when students claim their education, and faculty members are held accountable for providing comprehensive background and up-to-date research in their fields of study in accessible and multi-methodological formats, then students and professors can understand themselves as partners in the process of education.

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On Queerness and Writing I think about embodiment all the time. I think about my own positionality in relation to oppression and privilege probably more than many folks because of my teaching and research. I am a queer, disabled white feminist with a lot of student loan debt. Does any of this matter when I write? Writing is not color-blind or class-blind; it is inherently embodied with desires and abilities that seep from the writer’s own experience. Sometimes the forms that have been created – those normative genres developed by those in a position of privilege (able-bodied, masculine, white, cis-hetero) – don’t work for trying to contain or carry one’s experience. Anna Poletti writes, “The critical project of accounting for life narration often involves thinking this tension between the hegemonic function of selfnarration and its potential for empowerment and progressive social impact.”6 Can we choose, as writers, an alternative aesthetic that can still be readable for a broad audience but convey our distaste of normative genres? Poletti recounts how the past few decades of scholars have insisted that through writing of the self, the self is not only narrated but created and rendered important by its proximity to intelligibility.7 Poletti proposes that to claim a queer tradition in life writing, one that captures the alternative kinds of living that value failure, questions, and hopeful futurity we can break a genre to pieces.8 “The potential of collage puts assumptions about representation under pressure, making it a powerful technique for life writers who aim to perform to life narrative while responding to the normative ideas about life that underpin the autobiographical speaking position.”9 Through collage, we are forced to pay attention to form and aesthetics, to citational practice, and to authorial choices as part of the theory of life making, of what gets counted as a life. In essence, through collage, we pay attention to the container that has been broken. Making sense of the pieces. 2022 I was grateful to be teaching a summer course, the extra income being a salve for the high student loan debt I am carrying. The summer course was an online, asynchronous course introducing students to key concepts in disability studies. As a six-week accelerated course, I expected students to produce writing of some kind four days a week and included an untimed final essay exam to cap off the material. I had done my best to follow a universal design for learning and create late assignment accommodations, alternative assignment options, and multiple formats for learning material (from reading essays to listening to podcasts). Because I have just one course in the summer and relief from hours of service meetings, I value the time (even if asynchronous) getting to know my summer students – their summer jobs, their family work, and their plans for after graduation.

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Following the submission of final grades, I was working in my office when a student’s voice came barreling in through my open door. “Are you Ms. Day?” I always cringed at how students so easily drop the Dr. or Professor when addressing their femme professors. “Yes, can I help?” The student told me her name, explaining that she was in my summer course and had not known the final exam had already passed. Could I please open the exam so that she could complete the course? I had no relationship with this student, like many in the summer class who were taking my course to fulfill their university diversity course requirement. She had missed many assignments and risked failing even if she did well on the final. “I’m sorry,” I told her, “I cannot open the exam for you without an official accommodation.” She begins pleading and crying. I again wonder how many of my masculine colleagues endure student tears in their offices; I have had dozens over the course of my eight years of teaching and I know I am not alone as a femmepresenting professor; studies show that femme-presenting professors more often have to perform emotional labor than their masculine-presenting colleagues.10 Of course it is also true that as a white professor, I am not subject to some of the emotional labor my female colleagues of color endure. When I insist that I am following the course guidelines as laid out in the syllabus (a syllabus on which I quizzed them in the first week of the class). Her tears turn to anger as she shouts, “I need to see your supervisor!” I explained where my department chair was and off she stormed down the hall, yelling behind her “You are such a fucking cunt!” The interaction left me shaken. One angry student out of thirty; yet the use of “cunt” seemed especially harsh, a representation of female genitalia meant to invoke the nasty. While feminist scholars have written in-depth critiques about the word “cunt” and, in some ways, been insistent on reclaiming it, this student’s proclamation seemed only intent on harming and shocking me; there was no feminist solidarity as she marched down the empty hallway. And as I write this, I wonder if I am reinforcing a stereotype of an angry Black woman. I am reminded of Michael Rothberg’s work on being an implicated subject. As he tells us in a recent interview, “Implicated subjects are those subjects who play a crucial but indirect role in systems of domination and histories of harm. They are also the subjects that inherit the benefits of such systems and histories.”11 Academia is, in a Foucaultian sense at the very least, a system of domination. Domination of knowledge. Of professionalism. Through my whiteness, I have inherited the privilege of expecting this system to work for me, or at least bend for me as a neurodivergent working-class college student myself. My mentor-colleague who was working next door immediately came to my office offering me solace, having heard every word of the interaction. Later that day, I received a call from my department chair, who had gotten a call from our dean, who had received an office visit from this

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student. I explained the interaction from earlier in the day. I am in the car, on my way home from a late afternoon hike in a metro park. He insists we need to hold some students to different standards because they have not had the same privileges as other students. He insists that because this student is Black, I need to open the exam. I resist this. And perhaps, in retrospect, my resistance is muddled with pride. Perhaps I should look past this student’s work (or lack of) in my class and her behavior toward me earlier that day. But I am not given time to think or consider. He tells me in no uncertain terms that if I do not open the exam, he will open it and grade it himself. I open the exam. The student passes the course with a D-. Later, my department chair will review my dossier and despite overwhelmingly positive student evaluations, write that I have “power and control issues with students.” I am crushed. There is a rock so dense in my throat that it stays there for weeks after I talk to faculty mentors, my union representative, and my partner. They all tell me the line is minor, and that I should ignore it, not to draw attention to it. I follow their advice. But I take on the bad habit of CrossFit (harsh cardio, Olympic lifting) that will stay with me until I am granted tenure years later. My body is sore. Statement of Teaching Philosophy Continued “I also believe there is a distinction between getting a degree and getting an education. Getting a degree is a series of check marks you complete – class requirements you fulfill, certification tests you pass, and hours you spend in the field learning from other professionals. These things are important because they set a minimum standard for what it means to be prepared to do a particular job – certainly, we would not want a surgeon without any knowledge of the heart’s chambers or any experience with a scalpel performing a triple bypass. While degrees are meant to reflect a standard of preparation (you need to be able to answer: what do you do in x situation?), they do not say much about your skills and ability to interpret the world as an individual. An education is about learning to think; this includes developing a critical consciousness (Why do you do what you do? How do you do what you do? Why do others do what they do?) toward the world as a whole. An education is about curiosity. You major in a field because it provides an opportunity for you to develop the kinds of critical thinking skills that satisfy things you are curious about and because it inspires new questions and approaches to the world for you. In inspiring curiosity, you can disrupt the foundations of inequality that we experience all around us.

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As a professor, I believe I have two major tasks in relation to teaching: helping students stay on track to complete the degree for which they came to the university; as well as providing students with an education that inspires on-going curiosity. I do not believe these two tasks are binaries of one another, nor do I believe that they are entirely separate, but I do believe that holding onto both tasks is important for approaching my students with compassion, realism, and high expectations. A student may take my writing course in their final semester as a checkmark to complete their degree in engineering; they already have a summer internship lined up and May graduation is on their minds. Being compassionate with these students about where they are in their lives (a major transition approaching, exciting opportunities but a lot of open-ended questions as well), realistic about how much time they will spend with my course material, and clear about what the standards are in the grading scheme in my course will help us both work together to strategize how to complete the degree requirement and find time for creative and rigorous thinking that may inspire a new orientation to the world. As educational philosopher Paulo Freire writes: The teacher has to teach, to experience, to demonstrate authority and the student has to experience freedom in relation to the teacher’s authority. I began to see that the authority of the teacher was absolutely necessary for the development of the freedom of the students, but if the authority of the teacher goes beyond the limits authority has to have in relation to the freedom of the students, then we no longer have authority. We no longer have a freedom.12 For Freire, students cannot be free unless they have confidence in the expertise and authority of their instructor. My authority and expertise in my course come through well-designed assignments and rubrics, clear deadlines, and a willingness to work one-on-one to meet student needs and interests.” A Side Bar about Teaching Expectations I do not know if this is a surprise to any non-academics, but professors in the United States, for the most part, are not taught how to teach. It is merely assumed that we would know because we spend so many years in the classroom ourselves. The problem, of course, is that most of us succeed as academics because the system worked for us, regardless of how well an individual taught. No one is taught about addressing neurodivergencies in the classroom, addressing implicit bias in curriculum or classroom facilitation, or creating meaningful, scaffolded assessment projects.

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When I was hired, I was given a set of elaborations that provided some detail about the benchmarks I was to meet to reach tenure. It said nothing about how to teach; only that I would. Five courses a year. 2022 As a neurodivergent person who continues to feel feedback through a crip sensibility, by which I mean disproportionate to the stakes of a neuronormative procedural process, I find myself consistently questioning whether I chose the right kind of profession. Katie Rose Guest Pryal writes of her experience as a neurodivergent person in the academy; “But academia isn’t an easy place to be if your brain isn’t quite right. Contrary to what a lot of people think, there is no magic spark between mental illness and creativity.”13 In interviewing other academics about their choice of whether or not to disclose their psychiatric disabilities, Pryal quotes an academic who chooses to remain anonymous: “Although this stigma [of mental illness] is common everywhere, she told me, ‘in academia, one’s brain is supposed to be the most essential asset one has.’”14 Early in my graduate career, I read the memoirs and essay collections of Susan Wendell, Nancy Mairs, and Mary Festiner, all of whom are white cis-gendered baby boomer women, writing about their experiences as Humanities professors with visible physical disabilities. They write beautifully about their impairments, all of which increase over time, and the creative accommodations their universities provide (half-time hours and salary, note-takers, choice of class times).15 In reading their work, I became hopeful about disclosing my own neurodivergencies in my academic life. But there is a difference when it comes to psychiatric illnesses, especially ones that build on one another and become hard to pin down through diagnosis and medical evaluation. I question what to disclose, to whom, and for what purpose. As Pryal writes, “If your mind doesn’t work properly, how can you work properly?”16 And perhaps this is also why I said yes to every request for service (against every feminist mentor’s better advice); I assumed that at some point in time, my capacity would be diminished (even if only temporarily), I would be in a psych ward or otherwise receiving care and need my colleagues to understand I was worth keeping around. That my labor, despite my mind’s creative or intellectual capacity, was salvageable. I did even the most menial tasks. Need someone to collate the faculty senate election ballots? Margaret Price, in her groundbreaking book Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, writes that among the most common topoi, a term used by rhetoricians to describe a commonplace belief, in academia are rationality, criticality, coherence, and Truth. “Academic discourse operates not just to omit, but to abhor mental disability – to reject it, stifle and expel it,” Price writes.17 Expounding from a

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host of disability studies scholar-activists, including Catherine Prendergast, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Nirmalla Erevelles, Price reminds us how to lack rationality, reason and coherence, particularly within the liberal humanism that academia embodies (pun intended), is to lack personhood.18 As such, even though we may provide accommodations for students with disabilities, which even as Price reminds us, can be ambiguous at best, we do not do the same for professors.19 In her essay “Rough Accommodations,” Pryal writes about how applying for psychiatric accommodations as a faculty member is a fraught process, beginning with the invisibility of faculty resources down to the ways in which a faculty member must sign a medical release for HR to comb through their medical records – they simply cannot take a single statement from a medical professional or the actual faculty member themselves.20 In addition to the obfuscation of privacy, Pryal, Brueggemann and other Disability Studies scholars have written about the deep stigmatization that can be caused by coming out with a disability, particularly a psychiatric one where the accommodations are vague at best.21 In a recent study surveying 400 disabled faculty around the country, Margaret Price and Stephanie Kerschbaum found that nearly 45% of respondents were not familiar at all with available accommodations for psychiatric disability; another quarter of respondents said they were only slightly familiar; Price and Kerschbaum write, “In other words, accommodations for those with psychiatric disabilities are both hard to imagine and hard to locate.”22 To rectify this and create change in academic environments for faculty with disabilities, Price and Kerschbaum authored a 29-page report based on their survey data, consisting of recommendations at every level of academia and every phase of academic life, building a model of academia that does not simply react to neurodivergence but anticipates and welcomes it. A Brief Excerpt from My Statement of Professional Service “I am fundamentally committed to providing students with affordable and competitive higher education; this means not just protecting but raising the status of research and teaching at public universities. To do so, I work with fantastic colleagues in my program, college, and university to ensure students’ needs are being met inside and outside the classroom; to ensure creative and productive research time for faculty and opportunities to share that research internationally through conferencing and publishing; and to build alliances in the local community to ensure we are providing education opportunities particular to this region but applicable internationally. Much of the service all faculty do is informal (meeting with prospective students, attending community events, guest lecturing for a colleague who is ill, driving guest speakers to and from the airport) yet all

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is essential to build the comradery, spirit, and reputation of university programs, student success, and faculty accomplishments. Service is the backbone of an intellectual community.” Statement of Teaching Philosophy Continued (Again) “I believe that providing the opportunity for students to both claim an education and attain a degree begins with the process of course development and syllabus design. In my time here, I have developed several new courses and adapted pre-existing courses to reflect both my own ongoing teaching and research interests and my students’ unique needs and interests; for example, in our Introduction to Disability Studies course, I include a unit on reproductive justice because of both my background in feminist health and HIV research and the fast-growing fields of assisted reproductive technologies. There is no shortage of legislation, bioethical news, personal anecdotes, and popular culture representations that my students and I work through together; every semester, the material changes while the underlying method of interrogation – disability justice – does not. My students going into the medical fields (the majority in most of my Intro classes) always provide cogent and provocative interpretations that will affect their future professional lives. All of the courses we develop within disability studies have the responsibility of drawing students in by demonstrating the importance of the material in real-world applications through the inclusion of several different voices and perspectives (in creating a social justice approach to education, I work to center the voices of scholars from marginalized and oppressed communities) while also drawing deeply on humanities and social science praxis so that the application itself is just the beginning. Syllabi are living documents, negotiated each semester with each new group of students. It is not just the content of the syllabi that is important, but also the format. In practicing a universal design to education, I anticipate many bodyminds in my classroom and consistently work to create assignments that are reflexive, rigorous, and clear. I strive to make all my readings screen-reader accessible and affordable; all of my classroom activities accessible for both hearing impaired and vision-impaired, as well as for students with a variety of learning styles; I provide opportunities for students to request alternative deadlines for assignments as needed; when I do require exams, I make them untimed and essay-driven in a take-home format. In my upper-level classes, I also provide students the opportunity to develop their own final assignments and work with me to create grading rubrics for those assignments. Every semester, I seek new opportunities to improve my universal design pedagogy knowing that the second I think I have it mastered is the second I have lost the praxis.”

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A Statement on Dossier Statements I have other statements too – the usual ones about research and professional activity and about university service. I revised them several times. When my patriarchal chair stepped down and a feminist colleague stepped in, she informed me that my statements “sucked,” that they had become merely a list of committees and publications with nary a philosophy behind them. In my first year, these statements had been thoughtful and perhaps even optimistic but as I got recruited into more voluntary obligations, I gave up. Coming up with something new to say every year seemed futile. When it came to my official tenure application, I needed to start over. As mentors reviewed my materials, I was advised not to say anything too personal – these dossiers are not autobiographical so much as they are autophilosophical. I wanted to include something from Bell Hooks about teaching from pain and navigating institutionalized sexism in the academy23 but thought better of it. The Conclusion of My First Article Publication “I begin to theorize what a feminist reading of the disability memoir might look like and how it might contribute to our understandings of disability. Using the work of Marya Hornbacher, I argue that it is the intentional moves of intertextual referencing in Madness that produce a feminist intervention in reading Disability Life Writing. Central to a feminist reading of disability memoir, then, are the ways in which a text provides a means by which essentializing the narrator becomes an impossibility; for Hornbacher, intertextuality provides multiple narrator/author identities that leave the reader unsettled. This intertextuality, however, does something even more than providing a kind of authorial dialogism: it provides room for absence in the construction of a linear story. It is these moments of absence that are essential for reading both the colonized subject and the producer of traumatic testimony – with which the disabled narrator can be identified. These spaces provide literal and metaphorical moments for the reader to ethically engage with the disability memoir. In addition to providing a means for self-reflection, I want to suggest that the attention to the space between narrative productions expands our concepts of time and our ethical engagement with disability.”24 Good advice for your Statement of Research and Professional Activity: Cite yourself.

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On Earning Tenure When the World Is Grieving When I received my own congratulatory letter from the Board of Trustees via email, the country was in lockdown. The world around me was grieving as thousands of people died daily from a novel virus. Thousands in the service industry (by some estimates, 57%) including my own two sisters, lost their jobs.25 Meanwhile, I taught my classes from a closet in my basement, just a few feet from the cat’s litter box. I felt relief and sadness until another news story broke nearly simultaneous with my tenure letter: my university’s hospital was deeply in debt, board members were being investigated by the FBI for criminal misconduct, and deep cuts were expected across campus.26 Was my university even going to make it? Did I just get a seat on a sinking ship? Is it not (additionally) ironic that it is the emergency COVID-19 relief funds that will save our university hospital even while questions still percolate about the hospital’s financial viability in the face of administrative salaries? 2022 “I came to theory because I was hurting,” Bell Hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress. “I saw in theory then a location for healing.”27 When I was first introduced to academic theory, I, too, felt liberated. Given a language. And I wanted to share this. It feels strange to work in a profession that continues to disappoint me. Public universities came about in the last two decades of the 18th century, expanding slowly over the next centuries, as a project of democracy and equity. They expanded significantly after WWII, when returning soldiers were offered support for obtaining a college degree through the Veteran’s Administration and when baby boomers came of age.28 According to a recent study by the Pew Research Trust, individual states funded more of their public universities than the federal government; in 1990, 140% more. Over two decades, state support has shrunk, exacerbated by the Great Recession, so that states fund only 12% more than the federal government.29 The Federal government prefers to fund individual students (such as Pell Grants, which can be spent at any university, not just public ones) and research projects as opposed to university infrastructure and operating expenses.30 I believe there should be free access to higher education so that students do not end up with an average of $27,000 of debt with a bachelor’s degree from a public institution.31 This coincidentally is the debt I graduated with in 2005 from a public university; obtaining 7 more years of graduate education left me with $118,000. As we are shrinking public support for higher education, we are, of course, saddling students with debt. I am both subject to the crisis and part of it. Because of this trend in defunding public universities, the teaching faculty is not only

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shrinking but, in many cases, being replaced by part-time adjunct faculty who are paid only for their hours in the classroom (not for prep or grading), denied healthcare benefits, and are often hired at a last-minute basis with no job security from semester to semester. According to the American Federation of Teachers in an April 2020 report, 25% of adjuncts rely on federal support and 40% have trouble paying for basic household needs.32 In December of 2019, just a few short months before the world of higher education would change drastically to online learning in the face of a global pandemic, Doug Leder wrote of the trend that just a little more than 50% of faculty in the United States are full-time.33 While the trend has reversed itself slightly since 2013, at four-year public universities like the one where I work, the percentage of full-time faculty is dropping.34 According to The New Faculty Majority website, 75.5% of faculty have no access to tenure, despite full-time teaching loads within the adjunct market.35 According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), it is not an economic necessity to cut faculty positions; many of these cuts have happened during economically robust periods.36 My partner and some of my closest friends continue through this job market, succumbing year after year to exploitation and uncertainty. Why? Because if they reach the dangling carrot, that tenure-track job, they are promised a life of the mind. As Pryal cites in recent studies, “contingency is rarely good for your mental health.”37 And if you enter the academy with a pre-existing psychiatric condition, disclosure is not just unsettling for contingent faculty, but unsafe. One current full-time professor, who said they would only disclose their psychiatric conditions “under subpoena” tells Pryal that contingent and junior faculty don’t have “the luxury to volunteer stigmatizing personal information.”38 As I witness talented faculty, often people of color and women, leave academia once and for all, my muscles contract, tightening behind my shoulder blades so that I cannot move my neck for days at a time. How many are leaving because of compacted (mental) health issues caused by/accelerated by the toxicity of academic dualism and lack of health insurance? Every time in yoga when I draw my nose to my chin and make a circle with my neck, I hear audible pops. And even while my body tells me to loosen up, and take the time to enjoy the privileges of success, my mind tells me to work harder. The academy is in a state of crisis. “We snap. We snap under the weight; things break. A manifesto is written out of feminist snap. A manifesto is feminist snap.”39 I think I have survivor’s guilt. Or perhaps, as some will say, I am just being crazy.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Fournier, n.p. Ibid. Price, 6. Rich, “Claiming an Education.” Ibid., 610. Poletti, 360. Ibid., 362–8. Ibid., 367–8. Ibid., 362. Bellas; Harlow; El-Alayli et al. Knittel and Forchieri, 8. Horton and Friere, 61–2; italics in original. Pryal, xvii. Ibid., 8. Mairs, Felstiner, Wendell. Ibid., 8. Price, 5. Ibid., 25–7. Ibid., 57–8. Pryal, 45–9. Pryal, 53–7. Price and Kerschbaum, 16; emphasis theirs. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 59–75. Day https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v31i2.1591. Brookings Institute ( https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-pandemic-hurt-lowwage-workers-the-most-and-so-far-the-recovery-has-helped-them-the-least/#1) Vasquez. Hooks, 59. Snyder, 61–75. Pew Research Trust ( https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issuebriefs/2019/10/two-decades-of-change-in-federal-and-state-higher-educationfunding) Ibid. Education Data Initiative ( https://educationdata.org/average-debt-for-a-bachelorsdegree) American Federation of Teachers ( https://www.aft.org/news/report-showsalarming-poverty-among-adjunct-faculty) Leder ( https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/27/federal-data-showproportion-instructors-who-work-full-time-rising) Ibid. New Faculty Majority ( https://www.newfacultymajority.info/facts-aboutadjuncts) American Association of University Professors ( https://www.aaup.org/issues/ contingency/background-facts) Pryal, 5. Ibid., 7. Ahmed, 255.

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Works Cited American Association of University Professors. https://www.aaup.org/issues/ contingency/background-facts. Accessed 5 August 2022. American Federation of Teachers. https://www.aft.org/news/aft-report-pandemicintensified-job-insecurity-adjuncts. 2/24/22. Accessed 27 February 2022. Bellas, M. L. “Emotional Labor in Academia: The Case of Professors.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 561, no. 1, 1999, 96–110. Brookings Institute. https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-pandemic-hurt-lowwage-workers-the-most-and-so-far-the-recovery-has-helped-them-the-least/#1. Accessed 1 September 2022. Day, Ally. “Toward a Feminist Reading of the Disability Memoir? The Critical Necessity for Intertextuality in Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted and Madness.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011. 10.18061/dsq.v31i2.1591. Accessed 1 September. Education Data Initiative. https://educationdata.org/average-debt-for-a-bachelorsdegree. Accessed 5 August 2022. El-Alayli, A., Hansen-Brown, A. A., & Ceynar, M., “Dancing Backwards in High Heels: Female Professors Experience More Work Demands and Special Favor Requests, Particularly from Academically Entitled Students.” Sex Roles, vol. 79, 2018, pp. 136–50. Fournier, Lauren. Auto-theory: As an Emerging Mode of Feminist Practice across Media. 2017. Toronto: York University. PhD Dissertation. https://yorkspace. library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/33700. Accessed 14 February 2023. Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal. Out of Joint: A Private & Public Story of Arthritis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska, 2005. Harlow, Roxanna. “‘Race Doesn’t Matter, but …’: The Effect of Race on Professors’ Experiences and Emotion Management in the Undergraduate College Classroom.” Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 4, 2003, pp. 348–63. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. 1994. Horton, Myles, and Paulo Friere. “We Make This Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change.” We Make This Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, edited by Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters. Philadelphia: Temple U P, 1990, pp. 3–8. Knittel, S. C., & Forchieri, S. “Navigating Implication: An Interview with Michael Rothberg.” Journal of Perpetrator Research, vol. 3, no. 1, 2020, pp. 6–19. Leder, Doug. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/27/federal-datashow-proportion-instructors-who-work-full-time-rising. Inside Higher Ed. Accessed 5 August 2022. Mairs, Nancy. Waist-High in the World: A Life among the Nondisabled. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. New Faculty Majority. https://www.newfacultymajority.info/facts-about-adjuncts/. Accessed 5 August 2022.

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Pew Research Trust. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issuebriefs/2019/10/two-decades-of-change-in-federal-and-state-higher-educationfunding. Accessed 5 August 2022. Poletti, A. “Periperformative Life Narrative: Queer Collages.” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, Durham: Duke UP, 2016, pp. 359–79. Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. Price, Margaret, & Stephanie Kerschbaum. Promoting Supportive Academic Environments for Faculty with Mental Illness: Resource Guide and Suggestions for Practice. Philadelphia: Temple University Collaborative, January 2017. https:// www.tucollaborative.org/sdm_downloads/supportive-academic-environments-forfaculty-with-mental-illnesses/. Accessed 1 September 2022. Pryal, Katie Rose Guest. The Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education. Chapel Hill: Blue Crow Books, 2017. Rich, Adrienne. “Claiming an Education (1977).” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. WW Norton & Company, 1995, pp. 231–36. Snyder, Thomas. Higher Education in 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait, National Center of Education Statistics. National Center for Education Statistics, 1993. Vasquez, Michael. “How a University Hospital Ended up on Life Support.” Chronicle of Higher Education. 5 May 2020. https://www.chronicle.com/article/ How-an-Academic-Hospital/248704. Accessed 1 September 2022. Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge, 2013.

15

The Same Self/ie Blurring Academic, Creative, and Personal Identity through the Taking and Sharing of Self-Portraits Marina Deller

Setting Up the Shot Some researchers carefully demarcate the boundaries between their aca­ demic, creative, and personal lives and selves. This may be for protection, privacy, or professionalism. After all, while networks are essential to academic connection, being consistently available both online and offline is tiresome. Sharyn McDonald concurs, arguing the “fluid nature” of social media presents “complexities” for academics “attempting to culti­ vate and manage an online professional persona distinct from their private self.”1 But what of those who aim to blur the distinction between their professional personas and private selves? During my recent PhD candidature, I found myself intentionally blur­ ring the lines between personal/professional selves. I did so for the sake of creative experimentation, autobiographical research, and a desire to be the same self regardless of context. Jane Kroger and Vivienne Adair describe an “optimal sense of identity” as “a subjective sense of sameness and continuity across time and space … [providing] feelings of well-being, of being at home in one’s body and in one’s psychological and social worlds.”2 As a researcher/practitioner in the discipline of life writing, I blur the lines between my professional and private lives (and selves) fre­ quently. Researching emotionally complex topics like grief and trauma intensifies this as I often disclose deeply personal narratives and beliefs as part of my work. As Iris Graziele da Silva and Daniel Kupermann argue, in an age of digital selves, “all personalities are called upon to show them­ selves.”3 This is true across all facets of the lives we lead; personal and professional. As a queer person, with a lived experience of womanhood, I also feel a broader pressure to be visible, particularly for my successes. As visual media can be produced on mobile phones, selfies are an accessible and widely recognized format for such visibility. Teresa Bruś states that selfies are the “most frequent type of image taken today”4 and Kate Douglas describes selfies as “a ubiquitous part of everyday culture, a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-16

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performance of identity, often for interpersonal exchange.”5 More than everyday sharing, or even visibility, selfies can be taken and shared in the pursuit of activism. Cornelia Brantner et al. describe how “women re­ searchers from all over the world used selfies and self-representations as playful and funny forms of visual ‘self-mediation’” as well as the means of activist responses to sexist or otherwise limiting academic beliefs about how researchers look and act.6 Despite this, most people I know who take and share selfies have not done so in a professional capacity. Since I have never had a firm boundary between my personal and professional life, I have taken and shared selfies – a form of documenting and sharing my life since my early teen years – across all facets of my life, at times with and without question or reflection. When I entered academic circles (online) during my PhD, I realized I was not alone and saw selfies used frequently as a tool of academic narrative sharing, especially among other early career researchers (ECRs). In my experience, more established academics (even those who are still ECRs themselves) often mentor PhD candidates through academic work but also through the formation and maintenance of an academic identity. Katerina Clidlinska, et al. define academic identities as “narratives of academic selves”7 which are constructed, revised, and maintained over time. Online personas, and specifically the posts academics choose to share regarding their academic lives, help build public-facing aspects of this narrative, and thus public academic identities. In their work on digital storytelling, Glynda A. Hull and Mira-Lisa Katz argue that people can “develop agentive selves” using “the unique rep­ ertoire of tools, resources … that are available at particular historical moments in particular social and cultural contexts.”8 Since their work was published in 2006, selfies have become increasingly prevalent as a tool for identity formation and sharing. For me, selfies are a way for creative and personal facets of self to emerge in academic spaces. Over my PhD can­ didature, I have taken and shared selfies to mark milestones, find a sense of playfulness during periods of isolation, connect to community, and bring my authentic personal and creative self to academic spheres. I realize there is a privilege inherent in pursuing a feeling of ‘sameness’ across my personal and professional lives. Self-disclosure and self-image sharing come somewhat naturally to me; I grew up with it as the norm. I am young, white, and able-bodied, and I am used to sharing visual ele­ ments of my life in publicly-facing creative work. While I am queer and have faced various vulnerabilities in my young adulthood (such as homelessness), I am privileged by the ways I have been taught to think of and chronicle these experiences, to consider my audience, and to protect myself in different contexts. Even so, it is a complex experience to put the best face forward within and across academic and creative contexts.

The Same Self/ie 239 In this work, I seek to unpack the complexity of striving for selfunderstanding and identity coherence through selfies as an ECR. I do so by presenting a series of selfies taken and shared during my PhD candidature, a gallery of sorts. Hywel Dix describes how a career can be read as an “artefact” with “certain material properties” which can be read and ana­ lyzed.9 Therefore, consider my selfies as career “documents” rich with inherent and potential uses, professionally and personally, as a life writing scholar and practitioner. From a tearful selfie in an official thesis presen­ tation to smiles plastered across social media, I argue that selfies I have shared in online academic spaces have represented, enforced, and subverted my idea of a same selfie in useful but also potentially detrimental ways. Much of my PhD was undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic. I worked largely from home, including presenting research and teaching virtually. Both tasks required headshots – professional images to be used for branding and visibility. This meant social media presence, websites, and media engagement. My peers and I were told that in our professional lives we would need to be seen to build a brand. This is perhaps a unique early-career pressure for those entering academia in the 21st century. As Emma Maguire asserts, self-branding, even and especially on social media sites, is “an increasingly important skill for young professionals who, at every turn, are encouraged to develop their self-brand in order to com­ municate themselves to target audiences such as potential employers or clients.”10 However, as McDonald highlights, the pressure to self-brand may also be imposed upon more established academics who are not as equipped to create or manage an online persona.11 To make matters even more confusing, regardless of tech capability, those of us coming up in an Australian university sector built on colonial and capitalist structures are often handed contradictory instructions. For instance, my peers and I were told to brand ourselves, assert our specialness and creativity, and claim our space and stakes in academic communities via online sharing. Simultaneously, we were cautioned about over-disclosure and individu­ ality, and reminded that anything we post is a matter of public record. We learned that to be too ourselves could have both personal and professional consequences. Cidlinska et al. describe such contradictions as a “conflict over values” inherent to the neoliberal university model, noting that these conflicts include “increasing competition, individualism, precarity, and productivity pressure.”12 Alongside contradictory instructions on self-branding, my peers and I found that traditional academic career rules and trajectories seemed to be at odds with the fluid and creative nature of the works we were creating in our own time. It was a paradox within which it was uncomfortable to exist and, in many ways, still is. Yet, we began the process of branding the crossover of our creative and academic selves; we created professional

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social media profiles. We discussed the ways we wanted audiences and potential employers to view us and fretted over which images we might share to put our best selves forward. Many of us chose selfies out of necessity, a desire for control, or perhaps both. Toni Eagar and Stephen Dann describe selfies as a “human-branding technique”13 and Figure 15.1 was taken with a brand in mind. I took it with the explicit purpose of sharing it with students and peers. I reasoned that in the pursuit of professionalism, in the pursuit of being seen and available, I needed to have an image of myself that was recent, clear, and inviting. I did not want to use my previous headshot for my presentations and for the university website because, in the years since it had been taken, my visual appearance had changed markedly. Taking another selfie was the easiest option. I did not have the income to spring for professional

Figure 15.1 The Subject Celebrating a Milestone. Posted to LinkedIn.

The Same Self/ie 241 photography at the time and, while my partner might have taken the image, I wanted to control it. I wanted to take several options, reassess angles, and perfect the shot. I stood in the sunny corner of my lounge room, extending my arm as far as it could reach and snapping several images. I turned my head this way and that, somewhat unnaturally trying to capture the most naturallooking expression and angle. I wanted to look the most like myself but, as a new teacher, I was also conscious of being an authority figure for per­ haps the first time ever. I wanted to appear approachable, friendly, authoritative, and authentic. My selfie showed a white person pictured from the chest up with pale skin, freckles, blue eyes, and shoulder-length red hair. I am wearing gold-rimmed glasses, round gold earrings, a striped turtleneck, and red lipstick with lips curving in a slight smile. The back­ ground of the image is white. In the introduction to Authenticity as Performativity on Social Media, Allan S. Taylor argues that, “Authenticity, or the desire for it” is “a cultural trend that cannot be ignored”14 later stating that, “Authenticity is achieved where individual self-expression and cultural relevance merge.”15 I wanted to achieve authenticity through the merging of a personal and professional image. After gentle editing (upping the contrast, cropping the edges) I uploaded the photo to my institution’s learning system. I refreshed my profile to check how it looked as part of my staff profile and was happy with the outcome. I liked the decision to wear my reading glasses (which I often wear while teaching) and the friendly tilt of my closed-mouth smile. The striped turtleneck top seemed to strike a necessary balance between casual and formal, between effort and ease. I felt both recognizable as a teacher, and as my every day, social self. Reflecting on the construction of that selfie, I am struck by the effort and depth of thought that went into an image, which was, ultimately, a very small cluster of pixels on a screen or poster. The energies do not seem proportional to the outcome. However, it was both an unavoidable and enjoyable task. It also set the tone for the academic year because each time I saw my small, pixelated head in the corner of a Zoom screen, I recognized myself as the teacher – a consistent face for students to know and relate to. This selfie was retired halfway through my PhD candidature when I paid for professional headshots to be taken. When replacing it with a professional photo, I felt a surge of professional growth; my image and brand were made more legitimate. This legitimacy is complicated by my realization, now, that those first selfie headshots were under my control and creative direction. They therefore feel more representational of an authentic self than an image posed, taken, and edited by a professional. Perhaps I shall return to the selfie form for my next headshot, just to see how it feels.

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“This year I am teaching creative writing workshops to high school students who are getting a taste of uni life. Recently, I presented the workshops in the first lecture theatre I studied creative writing in as an undergrad here at Flinders University. What a lovely thing!”16 I learned early on in my PhD candidature that branding oneself across social media is a seemingly endless task. I was not only urged to have a website, a Twitter account, and an Instagram profile, but to maintain them consistently. Additionally, senior academics advised me to create a LinkedIn page. LinkedIn is a social media platform specifically built for professional self-promotion and interaction. What was intended to be a digital networking space replete with resume-like detail and interactivity has been described as the “dorky social media cousin of all the platforms” and I hear it mocked often in my social circles. Setting up and maintaining a LinkedIn profile does feel somewhat of a chore and posting to LinkedIn feels inauthentic compared to the other social media platforms I engage with in academic and creative ways (largely Twitter and Instagram).17 This is perhaps due to its express purpose of career narrative building. Sharing achievements on other social media often feels organic, exciting, and part of community building; LinkedIn feels like doing laundry. Just as laundry and other housework are often overlooked as a (gendered) form of labor, there is something to be said about the unpaid and unacknowledged nature of academic media maintenance as work. In my experience, using sites such as LinkedIn, updating profiles, sharing mile­ stones, achievements, and successes, and responding to those of others is expected, but afforded little to no allocated time or resources from institu­ tions. This is despite the “mounting pressures” to keep up with academic personas across rapidly changing technologies.18 McDonald explains how “there are many pressures and expectations facing the academic that may remain unseen or un-detected to the outside observer”19 and that maintaining a professional persona via social media risks adding unreasonable weight to the workload of academics who already struggle with work-life balance. Pressures of self-branding and maintenance do not emanate from LinkedIn’s affordances, but from institutional pressures, and a perception of the users (academic communities) on the platform. While LinkedIn does purport to facilitate professional connections, it is the users them­ selves who help shape and inform one another’s engagement, disclosure, and presentation on the site. It does not surprise me that the academics who have specifically, or inadvertently, encouraged me to “make my mark” through online engagement rather than research alone have often been women. Jennifer Mills et al. state that “Women, in particular, have been found to upload photos to social media more frequently than do men, and tend to spend more time updating, managing, and maintaining their personal profiles.”20 Perhaps, in academic contexts, this is a result of

The Same Self/ie 243 working within a system that often works against us. Our efforts of visi­ bility and self-celebration may be heightened by an attempt to assert our successes in an industry in which it sometimes feels we are set up to fail (or at least struggle profusely). It is not all doom and gloom. Although I might not have created a LinkedIn profile if not for the urging of academics who I admire and trust, I have found that selfies are a way to use LinkedIn’s networking affor­ dances in a playful, community-building manner. Selfies are front-facing in nature and have the capacity for personal flair. Laura Grindstaff and Gabriella Torres Valencia describe selfies as “a gesture that spirals out­ ward, connecting sender and receiver in a linked network,”21 and it is here that I see the value in sharing and circulating selfies on professional sites such as LinkedIn. They are a visual, embodied way to mark achievements and notable moments in a career narrative. I did not take Figure 15.1 with LinkedIn specifically in mind, but I did take it with the intention of marking a milestone. da Silva and Kupermann propose that selfies might act as “symbols of celebrations and ceremonial milestones” and even as “a new form of toast.”22 It is important to note that I put my face at the front of the image, situating myself in the space, rather than asking another to take my photo or simply photographing an empty room. I captured my face and its “openness to the experience.”23 As Brantner et al. explain, selfies “represent a particular form of selfdepiction, as no one else is required for taking the picture” and that they “thus represent a deliberate choice of how individuals depict themselves.”24 I chose to depict myself as an excited, reflective, educator, acknowledging previous career stages (undergraduate study) on the path to my current stage. I located myself, my body, in a space that held meaning not only academically but creatively and personally. The space I taught from was the space I once learned in. I could see the strands of my own narrative – both academic and creative – threaded across an invisible timeline. Taylor describes selfies within meaningful spaces as “anchoring” the self to a place, arguing that such images are a way of asserting presence.25 Michael Koliska and Jessica Roberts describe it as “locative media”26 and argue that the “selfie-taker says not only something about the place but also something about themselves and the assertion they are making about themselves being in that place.”27 This was the case for Figure 15.1; I saw, and felt, that presenting in that particular room was not only a career narrative milestone, but a continuity of self, the same self, crossing boundaries of professional and personal life. I felt I should document it for a sense of personal achievement but also wanted to share it on LinkedIn to capitalize on the corporate and academic potential of such a narrative thread. The two pursuits – a creative view of the self across time and space – and the mar­ keting and sharing of one’s self for academic purposes seem to be at odds.

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But, as evidenced by selfies such as Figure 15.1, they exist alongside and within one another. This is something I am striving to understand and reconcile while still being an active participant on such sites. Just like Figure 15.1, place is central to the context and meaningmaking of Figure 15.2. I took these images at home, after presenting at an online conference presented over Zoom. Pursuing my PhD during the pandemic meant that I participated in online-only conferences for most of my candidature. Although academics conversed lightly via chat between presentations, networking and socializing were limited. This improved with time as we adapted to the setting and organizers became inventive in encouraging connection, however, those first conferences left me lonely at times. Isolated and confined to my home for creative practice and work, I turned to interactive platforms like Twitter. Twitter has a unique property; it draws in academics like bees to flowers. As McDonald notes, “social media provides an increasing number of academics, regardless of discipline, the opportunity to communicate directly with both academic and non-academic publics.”28 It is a natural meeting and sharing place. While not without its issues, Twitter allows us to not only discuss

Figure 15.2 The Subject Searching for Connection. Posted to Twitter. “What Zoom sees/what I’m actually wearing”.

The Same Self/ie 245 research (and achievements) but also socialize, commemorate, and commis­ erate. I frequently see academic themed selfies – at desks with papers strewn about, on daily walks where captions indicate they are taking a break from research. Selfies capture everyday and extraordinary moments with the subject situated firmly within. The sharing of these images invites discussion and response. As Douglas suggests, “The selfie has become a much-practiced mode for community building and gaining the acceptance of peers.”29 Through selfies on Twitter, I have forged several academic friendships which have been valuable not only to my work and research practice, but to my self-concept as an early career researcher. For queer people, and women in particular, I have noticed the capacity for solidarity, encouragement, and support. By sharing selfies such as Figure 15.2, I engage in community and contribute to the blurring of professional and private selves modeled by those I admire and those I wish to connect to. As Taylor argues, social media platforms can be seen as “identity performance platforms” that mediate users’ own senses of identity with the “identity bestowed upon them” by communities.30 By sharing their own, multi-faceted, selves online – often via selfie form – my peers have not only emboldened me to do the same but have directly shaped the form that my selfies take. For example, throughout the pandemic, I have seen peers share selfies in their own bed­ rooms, offices, and with other intimate home spaces visible in the back­ ground. This sense of home and intimacy is conveyed in Figure 15.2 not via a background, but through the presence of comfortable, non-workappropriate shoes juxtaposed with a professional outfit. During a time when we worked from home and adapted to our spaces as sites of both work and home, these selfies indicated a wish to be more ‘real’ via Twitter, and cheekily implying a lack of realness inherent in the Zoom conference. Mills et al. describe how “women tend to be more motivated to create a positive self-presentation on their social media profiles”31 so perhaps these kinds of posts are driven by such a desire to be positive, particularly in the face of difficult or unideal circumstances like a pandemic. This is not the only reason to post in humorous ways, though. Selfies are a way to break the ice, to reach out across digital spaces, and to continue discussions beyond and outside of official channels. da Silva and Kupermann found that selfies can thus act as a “strategic tool” to connect with others and even combat aloneness.32 Additionally, Eagar and Dann’s research suggests that “most selfie-ers do not speak to mass audiences as much as personal networks of mutual recognition.”33 My desire for visi­ bility here therefore was not driven by a desire for career-based gain but rather an attempt to reach a “network of mutual recognition.” I wanted to know that, while our interactions were relegated to screens, the peers I had connected with through conferences did not only exist within virtual presentation walls. In the solitude of my small home office and with only a

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camera phone in hand, I felt that I could connect with others beyond only the traditional structures offered to me by institutions and organizations. I did not take Figure 15.3 with the intention of sharing publicly. These selfies were taken while I unpacked a personal archive – a memory box filled with childhood memorabilia and objects associated with the losses of my mother and my childhood best friend. These objects are the foundation of my PhD research. In the PhD presentation, when this slide flashed onscreen to an audience of academics, peers, and those assessing my work, I stated: Writing this memoir and undertaking this research … is clearly an intense project to be pursuing, never mind the enormity of tackling a PhD … this process is emotional. In fact, my partner sent me a message saying “I hope you’re okay, this stuff is heavy” when he knew I was unpacking the box, and I replied with these [selfies]. Luckily, he understands my sense of humor. When I sent these selfies to my partner, I was attempting to convey simultaneous upset and okayness. I was also attempting to use selfies as da Silva and Kupermann state they might be used, to “not only testify, but also organize and give reality to the lived experience.”34 I decided to include the selfies as a way to communicate the emotional turmoil present in my work, but also reassure my supervisors and audience that I took it in my stride, prepared for the emotional work, found playfulness even in harder moments, and was ready to respond critically and reflectively.

Figure 15.3 The Subject Crying. Presented as a slide in an official and compulsory PhD presentation.

The Same Self/ie 247 In her research on selfies taken at memorials and other sites of trauma, Douglas describes how “It may be thought that selfies cannot be acts of witness because a selfie involves looking away rather than looking at the traumascape.”35 In my case, the traumascape was my own grief-stricken memories, and thus the selfie was not only taken at the site of trauma but of the site of trauma; my own body. While I looked away from the camera, I was facing my own experiences head-on. Upon reflection, I realize that though I had the best intentions in sharing these selfies, there is also potential for such images to be harmful and perform commodification inappropriate to such a personal moment. I turned to humor in the face of grief-based storytelling and experimented with the boundaries of a box-checking milestone presentation in order to entertain and be creative, however, I also made myself vulnerable by doing so. I shared emotional, intimate, moments as part of academic work where I was being assessed as part of my PhD. Due to the nature of my research, I have always known I would share intimate parts of my life in academic contexts, but just because this is inherent to my practice, it does not mean it should lie unquestioned. While I succeeded in blurring the lines of academic and personal selves through the sharing of these selfies, my at­ tempts at levity in an otherwise quite emotional presentation risked inadvertently harming me or undermining the importance of my narrative and research. To say that I only shared images of myself crying to blur the lines of personal and professional personhood and to draw attention to the complexity of grief writing research in clever ways would be a lie. I also did it to help the audience relax. Does placating audiences like this come at a cost? Does it undermine the complexity of such work, or does it support it? While striving to be real am I also being unreal? The presentation where I shared these selfies was three years ago. Although I have not come to concrete conclusions about the ethicality or harm potential of sharing such selfies, I am grateful for the chance to reflect. I am undecided on whether sharing these images was revolutionary and instrumental in intentionally blurring my personal/professional lives, or potentially harmful in its capacity to make me vulnerable and reductive regarding my own trauma. The images still make me laugh and I think of that period fondly. When I share images of myself, particularly as part of emotional life narration, I now ask myself: am I sharing this to tell the story I want to tell, the way I want to tell it, or for some other, murkier reason? How will I take care of myself in the sharing of these stories? I may not have the answers just yet, but these questions are a start. “Learning to be more flexible, more adaptable, to allow myself cre­ ativity and warmth. Also – wearing cute earrings to boost my mood almost every day [sparkle emoji]”.

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Eagar and Dann describe how Instagram’s “public/private nature presents an ideal setting for the exploration of the selfie.”36 It is not as simple as just posting an image, however. As Maguire explains, “young women’s self-presentation on the platform is shaped by complex flows of identity commodification and audience expectations of authenticity.”37 Equal (and potentially further) thought and construction go into per­ sonal selfies compared to professional ones. In the caption of Figure 15.4, I mention flexibility, adaptability, creativity, and warmth; things I wanted to afford myself more of and things relevant to both my academic and personal life. Although I did not explicitly say so, my desire to reengage with these attributes was in response to a self-concept which was, at the time, dominated by my PhD. I was researching my own life and family and spending a lot of time thinking about how I could share research and market myself. I found myself longing for creative output which was not directly related to my research or to the pursuit of creating a marketable academic self. However, as Lisa OrtizVilarelle so pertinently states, “Careers and lives are not mutually ex­ clusive.”38 My writing, research, and identity, were a tangle. I could not switch off from my academic self because it was largely the same as my private, personal self. If I wanted space for flexibility and creativity, I was going to have to carve it intentionally.

Figure 15.4 The Subject’s Unintended Headshot. Originally shared to Instagram, later embedded in a presentation to a cohort of undergraduate students.

The Same Self/ie 249 Soon after I shared this selfie to Instagram, I began teaching a new undergraduate course. The class contained one hundred and forty students and the cohort was mostly students I had not taught before. In the first seminar – being run by my much-admired colleague – Figure 15.4 flashed up on the screen. My colleague wanted to introduce me to the cohort, including those online or missing class and, as she explained afterwards, did not have time to seek a headshot from me. Instead, she used the most clear and friendly photograph available on my public profile at the time. Her choice is understandable. The profile, and thus the images on the profile, can be interpreted as academic. The selfie is also a nice photo that shows the facets of self that I want students to see; I look friendly as well as authoritative. When I originally posted the selfie, my sister even com­ mented, “this is like the profesh shot you’d find in the author profile at the back of a book.” With a film-like filter and mysterious smile, the image does give off writerly vibes. Despite this, I was shocked when the image appeared on the big screen of the lecture hall. Selfies provide a sense of autonomy and agency as they are being taken, and often as they are being shared. However, once images are shared, they are no longer only ours. Here, the image was used appropriately, but was also a reminder that selfies may be used for purposes beyond those we originally intended. As a writer, I know that creating and sharing some­ thing means that it will exist outside of me, but this is more difficult to swallow when we share things that feel like fragments of us. I realized that although I was striving to be the same self across different contexts, I still demarcated representations of self as belonging to different selves. I post academic selfies, and personal selfies, to the same social media. I am the only one who feels the difference inherently; to any follower or passerby, all are part of my self-image, and all are part of my academic self. I was surprised by the appearance of my personal self in a public context, and then further surprised by that initial surprise. This is because a key tenet of my teaching practice has been acknowledging and harnes­ sing my own status as a student and creative writer. I am clear with my students that I am also learning and developing a creative practice, and I use examples from my own life and work as an accessible point of entry into discussions of industry and output. I have even recently published research on this, alongside my teaching team at Flinders University, where I write, “As a teacher, I hold knowledge and authority, while as a creative writer, I am dealing with the same issues and challenges as my students. By linking the subject’s content to my own creative endeavors, I aimed to show students that they can inform their creative and personal lives through their academic lives, too.”39 I am someone who endeavors to blur academic and personal lives in productive and creative ways, yet I was confronted by seeing a selfie in a place I did not expect. It ultimately led me

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to consider who gets a choice of how they are represented, and in which contexts, when those images have been made public from the outset. Selfportraiture being shared without knowledge or consent can be an incredibly fraught issue inside and outside of academia and, while it will not stop me from sharing more personal (or at least non-academic) selfies in the future, it will lead me to consider their life beyond and outside of the spaces I intend them for. Packing Down Undertaking this work has allowed me to examine that which was going unexamined, and dive into the complexity of selfies within academe, and within my own various selves. I am also exposing things that I may have once thought of as embarrassing; there is a potentially blush-worthy level of thought that goes into taking photos of the self, in trying to connect with others, and with building an academic self alongside and within a creative self. My perceived embarrassment may be driven by cultural at­ titudes towards selfies as narcissistic as well as a fear of backlash against queer people and women’s assertions of achievement. However, knowing this is part of what has allowed me to overcome self-consciousness and dive into these discussions. I am able to find joy and humanness in taking and sharing selfies as well as satisfaction in the retrospective unpicking of such images and the motivations behind their existence and circulation. Through this research, I have determined that ultimately selfies are tools. They can be used as headshots and profile photos, are used to celebrate milestones in sincere and less-sincere ways alike, and can facilitate con­ nections and community building inside and outside of traditional academic structures. Selfies can be used to communicate emotional impact – even in official channels like PhD presentations – but require considerations of vulnerability, risk, and unacknowledged labor. Finally, while selfies are inherently made by and of the self, their dissemination may be beyond our control once shared online. Through all of these uses, the taking and sharing of selfies in academic contexts undoubtedly blurs the lines between aca­ demic and creative selves. They do so in productive but also potentially fraught ways. Knowing this paves the way for future discussions of the way people – women, queer people, and other minority groups in particular – carve spaces for themselves through selfies in and beyond academic spheres. Notes 1 2 3 4

McDonald, 59. Kroger and Adair, 6. da Silva and Kupermann, 2. Bruś, 98.

The Same Self/ie 251 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Douglas, 385. Brantner et al., 690. Cidlinska, 142. Hull and Katz, 48. Dix, 2. Maguire, Girls, 182–3. McDonald, 55. Cidlinska et al., 142 Eagar and Dann, 1386. Taylor, vi. Ibid., 53. All images in this work are my own. Mann. McDonald, 57. Ibid., 54. Mills et al., 86. Grindstaff and Torres Valencia, 734. da Silva and Kupermann, 6. Mills et al., 87. Brantner et al., 684. Taylor, 63. Koliska and Roberts, 2. Ibid., 6. McDonald, 55. Douglas, 390. Taylor, 53. Mills et al., 87. Ibid. Eagar and Dann, 1842. da Silva and Kupermann, 7. Douglas, 387. Eagar and Dann, 1840. Maguire, 179. Ortiz-Vilarelle, 47. Douglas et al., 6.

Works Cited Brantner, Cornelia et al. “Memes against Sexism? A Multi-Method Analysis of the Feminist Protest Hashtag #Distractinglysexy and Its Resonance in the Mainstream News Media.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 26, no 3, 2020, pp. 674–96. Bruś, Teresa. “Recent Zones of Portraiture: The Selfie.” The European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 6, 2017, pp. 87–100. Cidlinska, Katerina et al. “‘Why I Don’t Want to Be an Academic Anymore?’ When Academic Identity Contributes to Academic Career Attrition.” Higher Education, vol. 85, no. 1, 2023, pp. 141–56. da Silva, Iris Graziele and Daniel Kupermann. “Selfie Narratives Made by Young People.” Developmental Psychology, vol. 31, 2021, pp. 1–10.

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Dix, Hywel. “Career Construction Theory and Life Writing.” Life Writing, vol. 17, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–7. Douglas, Kate. “Youth, Trauma and Memorialisation the Selfie as Witnessing.” Memory Studies, vol. 13, no. 4, 2020, pp. 384–99. Douglas, Kate et al. “Reading Objects, Watching YouTube, Writing Biography, and Teaching Life Writing: Student Engagement When Learning Online during Covid-19.” Life Writing, vol. 20, no. 2, 2022, pp. 1–16. Eagar, Toni and Stephen Dann. “Classifying the Narrated #Selfie: Genre Typing Human-Branding Activity.” European Journal of Marketing, vol. 50, no. 9/10, 2016, pp. 1835–57. Grindstaff, Laura and Gabriella Torres Valencia. “The Filtered Self: Selfies and Gendered Media Production.” Information, Communication & Society, vol. 24, no. 5, 2021, 733–50. Hull, Glynda A. and Mira-Lisa Katz. “Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Storytelling.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 41, no. 1, 2006, pp. 43–81. Koliska, Michael and Jessica Roberts. “Space, Place, and the Self: Reimagining Selfies as Thirdspace.” Social Media + Society, vol. 7, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1–10. Kroger, Jane and Vivienne Adair. “Symbolic Meanings of Valued Personal Objects in Identity Transitions of Late Adulthood.” Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 5–24. 10.1080/15283480701 787251. Mann, Madeline. “Christine Vs. Work: What’s the Point of LinkedIn, Anyway?” Interview by Christine Liu, Harvard Business Review, 2021. Maguire, Emma. Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. McDonald, Sharyn. “Responsible Management of Online Academic Reputations.” Persona Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015, pp. 54–63. Mills, Jennifer S. et al. “‘Selfie’ Harm: Effects on Mood and Body Image in Young Women.” Body Image, vol. 27, 2018, pp. 86–92. Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa. “Academic Career Construction: Personnel Documents as Personal Documents.” Life Writing, vol. 17, no. 1, 2020, pp. 45–57. Taylor, Allan S. Authenticity as Performativity on Social Media. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2022.

16

Spilling Out of the Spaces Provided How Occupying the Academic Office Becomes an Autobiographical Act Laura Beard and Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

In Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, she notes that “Every research project has a story, which is the story of an arrival.” In her introduction to On Being Included, she recalls working on her doctoral thesis and searching for an example to ground the chapter she was writing: “I can recall actually looking around the room as if an object, one that I might find lying around, could become my subject. At this moment of looking around, I recalled an experience, one that I had ‘for­ gotten.’ It came to me as if it were reaching out from the past.”1 Ahmed’s particular example is of an unsettling experience of racism and how the act of writing about it was a “reorientation,” affecting not just what she was writing but what she was thinking and feeling at the time.2 We start with this story both to underscore the importance of the objects around us in the spaces we occupy – and the significance of the stories they carry to us – and to connect our discussions here with those of Ahmed’s work on inclusion. While Ahmed’s story was not, in the end, one of an object, we do look here in part to the objects in our spaces as ones that help us occupy those spaces; ones that help us survive what many experience as the administrative and structural violence of university settings. Ahmed’s critical exploration of who is included and when, within institutional settings, some bodies “become understood as the rightful occupants of certain spaces”3 underlies the conversations that led to this chapter. Which spaces are open to which bodies? How do our life stories spill out of the spaces provided for us? How do we insert ourselves and our stories into spaces that do not always welcome us? How do we signal welcome to others through the items we display in our offices, on our desks, our walls, our doors, and our bodies? When do we spill out of those institutionally-provided office spaces entirely and perform our work in other spaces? Which are the objects that we can see, lying around in our offices and the other rooms we occupy when doing our work, that allow us DOI: 10.4324/9781003240501-17

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to recall experiences we have ‘forgotten’? What experiences reach out to us (and to others) from the past through the objects around us? We might even ask what experiences come back to us when we see the objects that surround others when we enter the office spaces of our colleagues/teachers/ mentors/supervisors, but that, perhaps, would be another essay. We come to this essay as life writing scholars, both from the field of literary and cultural studies. We bring our understandings of life stories and the related fields of performance, place, space, culture, and gender to bear as we read the objects in our own workspaces in order to speak to location and constructions of identity, remembering that “place-based identities are constructed and temporal.”4 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson remind us that “Autobiographical acts are inescapably material and em­ bodied,”5 so focusing on these material matters in our workplaces also helps reveal what autobiographical acts academics are able to perform. In focusing on the question of space from an autobiographical perspective, we also want to recognize that there has been work at the intersections of autobiography studies and other academic disciplines (see Pamela Moss’s Placing Autobiography in Geography, for just one example). We write as differently-located women scholars in the North American academy. Our intersectional identities are multi-layered and complex, with some overlaps between our identities. We are both professors, ten­ ured, multi-lingual, mothers, daughters, sisters, aunties, researchers, homework supervisors, bakers, and dog walkers. One of us does more teaching; one is now a full-time senior administrator, so that the spaces we occupy in our university structures differ. We recognize tensions both within our identities and within the spaces we are encouraged to occupy within those university structures. In our work as editors, together and separately, we have prioritized opening scholarly spaces for scholars whose work is less often included in print, taking deliberate steps to bring in more voices and to make our disciplines more diverse and inclusive. These acts of editorial leadership necessitate creating spaces in scholarship for women to share acts of witness to their own personhood in their careers. With this essay, we collaborate – an often underestimated and overlooked mode of scholarship in the humanities – to promote spaces for the autotheoretical examination of ourselves and our stories within our academic work. Our work often has us spilling out of the boundaries of standard sites and genres. Autoethnographic stories are “stories of/about the self, told through the lens of culture.”6 Autoethnographic narratives confront “the tension between insider and outsider perspectives, between social practice and social constraint.”7 As feminist life writing scholars in the academy, we live and work in spaces fraught with tension between insider and outsider perspectives, between social practice and social constraint, always

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observing inequities and irregularities in the policies, practices, and lived realities of our work (and life) spaces, having things to say that others often do not want to hear, and working through the complex realities of when, how, where, and to whom to speak which realities. Figuring out how much of the autobiographical one can or should reveal in an aca­ demic context has always been an issue for women, scholars of color, Indigenous scholars, LGBTQ2S+, and scholars with disabilities. In spite of the appeal of autobiography as a genre to so many, others have noted the contradictions between autobiography and academia itself: “It is difficult to reconcile such a nimble, flexible, enterprising, entrepreneurial, ethically challenged, un-law-abiding genre [autobiography] with the rigors, cir­ cumscriptions, demands and regulations that rule in academia.”8 As Ahmed has pointed out, “Institutional habits refer not only to what an institution does or tends to do but also how certain people become habituated within institutions – how they occupy spaces that have already been given to them.”9 Institutions institutionalize us, disciplines discipline us; how and when, then, are we able to spill out of those spaces provided or stretch those spaces into other forms and shapes to allow space for other bodies, other ways of knowing and being? Our colleagues in this volume have explored space in material, intel­ lectual, emotional, epistemic, and institutional forms. For many, it has been their containment within those spaces rather than their “spilling out” that prompts an autotheoretical consideration of how they self-construct in their academic careers. With this, the final essay in the collection, we wish to examine a number of ways in which we have occupied career spaces as academic women, as well as how we have constructed our workspaces in order to extend ourselves beyond the sites typically deter­ mined to be suitable or customary for academic work. As life writing scholars, our specialization affords us the opportunity to turn the lenses of auto/biographical studies toward ourselves and consider how our offices and other relatively ordinary locations where we work are vital to how we identify as academic women. How we choose and respond to specific sites, how we arrange and engage with the possessions displayed there, and how we use both spaces and things to resist or welcome certain values are all acts of auto/biographical self-construction. Laura’s Spaces: What Must Be Resilient to Survive (Figure 16.1) Over my career at different institutions, my research and writing spaces have changed. In my graduate school years, I cycled between a small carrel in the library of my research university, a shared graduate student space in the humanities building where I could use a computer but not leave any

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Figure 16.1 Interruptions, Slightly Suspect, Hung in the Cracks.

materials, and a homemade desk in my walk-up apartment (put together from the lid of an upright piano my parents had scavenged from a dis­ carded antique piano from the 1909 Alaska–Yukon-Pacific Exhibition, stretched out across two oak filing cabinets – true grad student chic!). Not having an office in graduate school meant never having any personal materials around me, except at home. Only on that desk in my walk-up flat, the top floor of an unairconditioned row house from the 1880s, would there have been any personal items on my desk signaling identity. On my desk at home now, where I worked throughout most of the COVID19 period, I keep more personal items – favorite photos of my child in kin­ dergarten, a photo with my mother and sister, a small ceramic croft house that is reminiscent of the one my ancestors would have occupied in northern Scotland, and some rocks and fossils collected on camping trips. These are literal and figurative touchstones, worry stones to play with during chal­ lenging conversations, colorful photos that ground me when stress levels rise. In contrast, at the various public universities in both the United States and Canada where I have had faculty and administrative positions and thus my own offices, the spaces provided mostly have been quite institutional in nature, usually in older buildings, with older, often handme-down furniture and computers, but in each space I have had that opportunity to surround myself with my own books, colorful posters and postcards, pieces brought home from research trips to Latin America, gifts from students, and posters from conferences and art exhibits organized or attended. A college dean once remarked how much she loved visiting my

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department because the faculty there had the most colorful and interesting offices. The building was old, and the walls needed new paint, but I covered mine with a patchwork quilt of memories, political and artistic statements, and connections to other places that allowed me to place myself into that drab space. Now in the senior administration of my current university, my office space is newer, but still institutional in nature. My interventions in the room are more limited. Colorful cards cover a small bulletin board that covers a low space between the bookshelves and a back table, and select framed photos and posters hang from the walls, hanging from the set-in hooks carefully placed into the crack in the manufactured wall that allows one to hang items. Here, I would not be so bold as to tape posters or postcards all over the walls. But in a way, the very construction of these office cubicles signals the ways in which my interventions must spill out of the spaces provided. Just like the weeds that can only grow in the cracks in the side­ walk, my framed pieces can only be hung from the cracks in the constructed cubicle walls. The office environment is not meant to encourage individu­ ality or personality. Expressions of personal interest or color are interrup­ tions, slightly suspect (if not toxic) weeds and must be resilient to survive. Physical workspaces are built to house and facilitate certain labor processes and are constructed with certain kinds of bodies in mind. At my university, I work in a building that now houses the offices of the President, Provost, and various Vice President portfolios, but started as an Engineering building. I have been told many times that it was built without women’s bathrooms. That only certain bodies were ever intended to inhabit that building remains on my mind as I work now in the admin­ istration and as I work towards the equity, diversity, and inclusion goals of the university. Workspaces support or obstruct the work we attempt to do; they also give out messages to occupants and visitors about the degree of control we have over our working environment – how much can we control “visual and auditory privacy, personally satisfactory levels of heating, lighting or air quality,” ever more important in these COVIDtimes, or how much we can reconfigure such things as desks, chairs, cabinets, even paint walls.10 While there are many aspects of the academic workspace that impact the level of comfort scholars feel, in this paper, we are choosing to focus not so much on the configuration of the office itself as on the objects we display within those offices, and the ways in which we allow or do not allow aspects of our own intersectional selves to spill out of the spaces provided. Lisa’s Spaces: “This Is Not a Classroom” (Figure 16.2)

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Figure 16.2 This Is Not a Classroom.

This is my on-campus office – the workspace provided by my employer. It is where I mentor students and review the work they do in my seminars. Although not a classroom, one can see that, on the inside, my office is very much a space for celebrating student success: of projects painted, sculpted, and stitched by many tactile and visual learners; of t-shirts from student organizations purchased or gifted as a sign of mutual support for campus leadership; of bookshelves that serve as a lending library with a designated shelf for books that do not need to be returned. At my small liberal arts college in the Northeastern United States, teaching excellence is para­ mount. Oddly, the sign outside my door declares, “This is not a classroom”- an effort to keep students from confusing office with class­ rooms of the same number. For at least a decade, staff have continued to hang these signs in front of several offices in the building to make up for the duplication. One neighbor has replaced their sign with a print of Belgian artist René Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images. This famous image of a tobacco pipe captioned “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” French for “This is not a pipe,” draws attention to the humor in the axiomatic message of these signs. But is the intended use of a professor’s office really so self-evident? In What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use, Ahmed considers the concept of use and how spaces and objects are valued and defined by

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both actual use and intended use. Ahmed says “use does not necessarily correspond to an intended function” – but it is important to know that it can.11 A user can change a space. Ahmed contrasts what she calls a “Who change” of occupied intent with a “What change” of what is happening there.12 Ahmed reminds us that “Just because something comes to exist for a purpose, we should not confuse what it was intended for with what it is or can be.”13 Use is only a partial account of the existence or potential of any space. When I leave my campus office, I sometimes work in my car and other non-office sites like those that Liz Podnieks describes in her essay “Basketball, Skating, and Scholarship: or, How to do Research from the Bench, the Rink, and the Car.” As the parent of teen athletes I, too, have employed basketball arenas and ice-skating rinks as ‘offices’ as well. At least once a week, I am immersed in life writing scholarship while sitting in these make-shift workstations. Unlike in my campus office, no book­ shelves of life writing studies are within reach, and there is no inspiring print collage of contemplative facial expressions titled “Autobiography” on loan from the campus art gallery. These locations are marked by space and time created rather than provided. Instead of imagining academic mothering occurring across demarcations of space, Podnieks asks us to see this seeming ‘spilling out’ of designated spaces as a reclamation of time and a rejection of the gender-biased nature of prioritizing work in only certain spaces.14 Podnieks suggests that choosing “To do it all” – to be a good mother and a good scholar – may be to connect the focus of one’s work to the time and space needed to achieve it.15 To reframe the seeming lack of control in the practice of ‘spilling out’ of institutionallyprovided offices is to reclaim autonomy over where and when we perform certain work. The deliberate recovery of work space that resists as­ sumptions that spilling out signals the absence of boundaries rather their permeability. When used as a workspace that spills out of what is ex­ pected and provided for the professoriate, a car can be a space for the strategic, site-specific performance of working parenthood. Rather than viewing my working in the car as a mark of failure, I propose reading it as a sign that I am thriving as a mother-scholar who can exercise the power to reconfigure the spaces where I work, I enact both the “who change” and the “what change” of Ahmed’s reasoning.16 My acknowledgment of who I am when I work is an autotheoretical act emblematic of the con­ nection between what I do and where I do it that Podnieks asserts as a win for academic mothers who refuse to equate where they work with what they value.17 To be sure, there is not much difference between squeezing in and spilling out when it comes to the damaging culture of busyness and its unsustainable model of productivity to which we subscribe when we

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schedule work into every available time slot. However, the unlikely sites of productivity that we claim can disrupt assumptions of what academic labor looks like and where it takes place – private campus offices, lecture halls, libraries, and seminar tables. They respond to the hostile architecture of a patriarchal academy by remaking workspaces and working hours that were not established with working motherhood in mind. Mothers are as intrin­ sically motivated as any other academic to access times/spaces for scholar­ ship and this may require mean eliminating unnecessary travel from their day. Simply put, I can be more efficient with my time if I personalize and respatialize it against the constraints of office space/time. Rather than drive home to a desk in my home office, I save an hour of round-trip travel time by drafting a manuscript on my lap while in my car. This reterritorialization of academic workspace undermines the assumption that academic labor is precious and occurs only in the privileged and ceremonious isolation of the ivory tower rather than in the less venerated and more fully enmeshed spaces of lived experience. Rather than a chaotic overextension of working ev­ erywhere, it is an adaptability that permits me to work anywhere – not something all women must do, or even can do. I am very privileged in my ability to work from home: I am a Full Professor who is well-compensated and has a safe and stable home I can call my own. These are things that many women cannot say. As a first-generation scholar, I am among those women who are least expected to inhabit home or institutional offices. My ability to not only access but create these spaces makes me what Victoria Reyes calls an “academic outsider,” one who “made it” despite lacking the cultural and economic capital of generational wealth and education.18 This truth – that the most subversive space I can occupy as a first-generation woman of color is the space of being an academic – is not lost on me each time I enter my own workspace. Far less frequently, I work in other, more comfortable spaces. These are provided only partially by my employer as part of paid time for research conferences, professional development, and retreats focused on collabo­ rating with colleagues. Laura and I first began thinking about our work together for this essay in one such location, the Banff Centre, in the breathtaking mountains of Alberta, Canada where we relished having made time to meet in a shared space of mutual excitement over a life writing project. This trip is one of many in which we have left our offices and joined with our colleagues for academic conferences and fellowships over the years. In these spaces, routine grading, lesson planning, and administration do not intrude on the performance of scholarly and cre­ ative pursuit. But the experience of escaping one’s campus for new, tem­ porary workspaces is more than time/space management; it is one of compartmentalization, as if our work selves perform only in the gaps of life, a part of ourselves that gets stored away when the conferences and

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writing retreats are over. In their essay, “Mothers, Scholars, and Feminists: Inside and Outside the Australian System,” Petra Bueskens and Kim Toffoletti point out that the problem is the language of intrusion and its ideological frame centering work time as the primary time. When all else happens “after work,” academic mothers are sequestered to what they call the “temporal book ends of life” from which they need to “retreat” or “escape” in order to get back to work.19 They suggest that academic mothers must move from operating as “subjects who are interrupted” to “subjects who interrupt” by rethinking their workspaces to have permeable borders upon which there can be no intrusion and from which they never need to leave because of time.20 Working in the car and working in a mountain retreat center are not the same; however, what they share is the autobiographical portrait they paint of academic women managing time in spaces that are less immediate to and less regulated by their institutions. They eagerly spill into these spaces where they are not so easily accessible to others who make demands on their time. Until the 2020 pandemic, my home office – the workspace not provided by my employer – was my Tuesday/Friday space in which to work when not teaching. It has also been a sabbatical office – time provided by my institution spent in a space of my own. There, I have thrived in my roles as a writer, researcher, editor, and co-author. There is a lock on the door – but it is never used. I am often still parenting while working at home and access to this space is thankfully regulated by relationships of mutual respect and trust with my teenagers. While the often-open door may seem to signal a lack of boundaries, has been a carefully negotiated border and a defining characteristic of my identity as a working parent – until recently. Throughout the pandemic, all the workspaces of my life merged here at a remote teaching desk, a conference/fellowship/professional development center, and a hub of co-writing and editorial production. It also became a locus of parenting during remote learning days and evenings scheduled with my children’s overlapping activities like online figure skating chore­ ography and sports academies held over Zoom. Objects arranged on the desk reflect my personhood in other, broader ways. Tucked into the desk blotter are postcards from friends and col­ leagues, including Laura. There are framed pictures of myself with friends, mentors, family – and the mentors who have become friends like family. Other items, both ordinary and extraordinary, private and shared/public, functional and treasured, are material objects that tell a story about who I am when I am in these spaces. They ground me in a material world of everyday being and doing in the social network of meanings, functions, and relationships that concretize my academic career. Each one represents what Glenn Adamson recognizes to be the “irreducible thingness” of itself as an object whose presence in my workspace evokes the presence of

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people, times, and places that are most significant to the work I do.21 In an age when so much of life is experienced virtually, it is easy to take for granted our reliance on digital tools to bring people together in their work. The power derived from an object whose concrete presence is rich in si­ tuatedness and positionality on one’s desk, is something experienced in the physical world. Its existence in that space to the right of the computer and near the coffee mug or cup of tea fills a certain void of academic work in which we so often work in isolation. Objects carry emotions. Yet, the things we cherish as conduits of lived experience tend to be dismissed as little more than emotional knick-knacks thought to signal excess and unnecessary clutter that interfere with the efficiency of life. The pleasure of “things” seems wholly unacademic, like the yellow, pineapple-shaped notepad on which I jot down my writing goals (I like pineapples and I also like my work). This relationship between work and pleasure is characterized by Sherry Turkle’s work on how a physical object “brings together intellect and emotion.”22 In her intro­ duction to Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Turkle describes her goal for gathering autobiographical essays by artists, and intellectuals contemplating the emotionally evocative objects that nurture their thinking. She says that collections and tokens are considered distractions from “canonical” understandings of thought, discovery, and knowledge. It is precisely because these pursuits are hallmarks of academic labor that we must examine how the objects which are our companions in academic work are the things through which we, in fact, think as emotional and rational beings. In that vein, when we engage in the rituals and routines of setting aside times and spaces for academic work, we are rational beings whose behaviors can still be motivated by emotional connections to the objects in our midst.23 On my desk, there is also a bowl of multi-colored sea glass. It is the object of my writing meditation; a reminder that an object – like my writing – can start out used, empty, and discarded, but if it tumbles around in the surf long enough, it gains new purpose and is worth keeping. These gems collected from the ocean’s edge during a 2018 aca­ demic women’s writing retreat in Puerto Rico, signify a shift in the thoughts and behaviors around my academic career. It was during morning walks that I collected them and quietly declared my writing goals for each day. Returning to the house shared with the other participants, my mind was full of intentions and my pockets were full of smooth, surfpolished fragments of what used to be seafoam-colored Coca-Cola bottles, yellow-green UV reflective glass manufactured in the 1800s, and deeply opaque cobalt Noxema skins cream jars and Milk of Magnesia containers. As an avid beachcomber and sea glass collector, knowing the origins of these finds only further anchors me in my writing. Sea glass enables my

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understanding not just in cognitive and emotional, but also tactile and visual ways, that navigating a career in the academy – an institution that can seem as immensely overpowering as an ocean – can produce an impressive patina. Even, and perhaps most especially, the shards left behind by events fraught with failure and conflict can become powerful tokens of accountability, wisdom, and strength. An object that starts out broken can become a treasured thing. Like writing, it can be reclaimed and put to good use when shared with others. Like an academic career, sea glass takes time to evolve before it can emerge as a fine gem.24 The bowl and its placement just to the left of my computer comprise the symbolic, spatial, and material signs of a decades-long journey of career personhood. If academic scholarship is a behavior, then it occurs ritually in this grounding space where affect and intellect are mutually constitu­ tive. In her essay, “Autotopographies,” Jennifer Gonzalez asserts that the items with which we surround ourselves constitute a “private-yet-material landscape” which she attributes to our human tendency to curate collec­ tions of objects through which we express ourselves intimately.25 Imbued with energy personal possessions “form a syntagmatic array of physical signs in a spatial representation of identity” which Gonzalez has termed “autotopography.”26 As “physical extensions of the psyche” the objects that make the most meaning for our lives are autobiographical objects in “museums of the self.”27 The bowl not only centers a “material memory landscape” of my career in my workspaces, but it also bears a totemic source of persistence that guides the work performed in that space and motivates me to return to my scholarship as often as I can.28 The Broader Context Is Not Always a Capacious Space Scholarship has underscored both the ways in which academia can be a hostile environment for individuals and groups not seen as fitting within the dominant norms and the ways in which academics who face exclusion work to develop their own ‘safe spaces.’29 Research has shown that many spaces in the academy remain less open to women and to visible minorities (with less research done on other intersectional identities). A 2019 study of leadership diversity at top Canadian universities, for example, confirmed that those in the president role were 80% white and 86.7% male, while those in the Provost and VP (Academic) roles were 100% white and 66.7% male. Deans across the U15 Universities were reported as 92.2% white, 32% female, and only 7.7% Indigenous or other visible minority of any gender.30 A 2022 study on Women’s Power Gap at Elite Universities in the United States showed similar distressing statistics: while women earn 55% of PhDs, they hold only 22% of the President positions; women of color earn 19% of the PhDs and hold only 5% of the President positions.31 Of

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course, these statistics vary by discipline as well. Only 21% of engineering majors and 19% of computer science majors are women.32 In breaking down the data more, one finds that equity-denied groups such as Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic women make up just 2 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in mechanical and engineering degrees in 2013 in the US, again showing certain spaces that have not been welcoming to certain bodies. For that to change, the spaces provided need to change and all of us can be part of pushing for those changes and dismantling the structural barriers. Sometimes working outside of the spaces provided – either pulling out of institutional spaces or bringing treasured objects into those spaces – feels like the only way to make work lives bearable. In this essay, through which we turn our work in life writing studies toward our own stories, we reflect on how our work spills out of the workspaces assigned to us just as our lives, commitments, and values struggle to flourish (or even sometimes exist) within those spaces. Continuing to make space for these conversa­ tions within the academy is an important step towards the deeper, sys­ temic institutional changes needed to make these academic spaces ones where all bodies can do their work and thrive. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Ahmed, On Being Included, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Powell, 13. Smith and Watson, 11. Adams, Johns and Ellis, 1. Ibid. Lim, The Troubled, 303. On Being Included, 123. Baldry and Barnes; Eco. Ahmed, What’s the Use?, 24. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 35. Podnieks, 395. Ibid., 396. Ahmed, What’s the Use?, 35. Podnieks, 396. Reyes. Bueskens and Toffoletti, 19. Ibid. Adamson, 3. Turkle, 6. Ibid., 5. I wrote a portion of this essay from a spot on the sand of a local beach where nothing intrudes, is borrowed, or is provided in the strictest of senses. This workspace is not characterized by the objects brought into the space but by a

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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change in surroundings that evokes happy memories of a writing retreat‐like zone of productivity that scholars hope for when they write. Gonzales, 5. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 133–4. Ibid., 134. Bhopal; Davis et al. https://uofaawa.wordpress.com/2019/06/20/u15-leadership-remains-largelywhite-and-male-despite-33-years-of-equity-initiatives/ https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/power-gap-top-earners-eliteuniversities/ https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/the-stem-gap/

Works Cited Academic Women’s Association of the University of Alberta. “U15 Leadership Remains Largely White and Male Despite 33 Years of Equity Initiatives.” https://uofaawa.wordpress.com/2019/06/20/u15-leadership-remains-largelywhite-and-male-despite-33-years-of-equity-initiatives/ Blogpost, Accessed June 20, 2019. Adamson, Glenn. Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Adams, T. E., & Ellis, C. “Trekking through Autoethnography.” Qualitative Research: An Introduction to Designs and Methods, edited by S. D. Lapan, M. T. Quartaroli, and F. J. Riemer, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 189–212. Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use. Durham: Duke UP, 2019. American Association of University Women. “The Stem Gap: Women and Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.” https://www.aauw.org/ resources/research/the-stem-gap/ Accessed March 8, 2023. Baldry, Chris, and Alison Barnes. “The Open-Plan Academy: Space, Control and the Undermining of Professional Identity.” Work, Employment and Society, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012, pp. 228–45. Bhopal, Kalwant. “Academics of Color in Elite Universities in the UK and the USA: The ‘Unspoken System of Exclusion’.” Studies in Higher Education, vol. 47, no. 11, 2022, pp. 1–11. Bueskens, Petra, and Kim Toffoletti. “Mothers, Scholars, and Feminists: Inside and Outside the Australian System.” Lived Experiences of Women in Academia, edited by Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 13–22. Corbett, Christianne, and Catharine Hill. Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women’s Success in Engineering and Computing. Washington, DC: American Association of University Women, 2015. Davis, Sharde M., et al. “Writing Ourselves into Existence: Black Women Researchers’ Collaborative Autoethnographic Reflections on Addressing Exclusion in Academia.” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, vol. 10, no. 1, 2021, pp. 4–27.

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Eco, Umberto. “Functions and Signs: The Semiotics of Architecture.” Signs, Symbols and Architecture , edited by Jencks Bunt, Chichester: John Wiley, 1980, pp. 213–32. Gonzalez, Jennifer. “Autotopographies.” Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies, edited by Gabriel Brahm, Boulder: Westview, 1995, pp. 133–50. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “The Troubled and Troubling Genre: Life On-Going Writing or On-Going Life Writing.” Prose Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2009, pp. 300–15. Moss, Pamela, ed. Placing Autobiogaphy in Geography. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Podnieks, Liz. “Basketball, Skating, and Scholarship: How to do Research from the Bench, the Rink, and the Car.” Academic Motherhood in a Post-SecondWave Context, edited by O’Brien Hallstein and O’Reilly, Bradford: Demeter, 2012, pp. 394–413. Powell, Katrina M. “Performative Autobiography.” Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography, edited by Victoria Boynton and Jo Malin, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007, pp. 456–58. Reyes, Victoria. Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2022. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/ Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Turkle, Sherry. “Introduction.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011, pp. 3–11.

Index

Aavik, Kadri 128 Absolon, Kathy 66 Acker, Joan 198 Adair, Vivienne 237, 252 Adamson, Glenn 261, 265 Ahmed, Sara 3, 10, 16, 20, 23, 33, 83, 253, 265 Aisenberg, Nadya 27, 33 Antino, Anthony, R. 128 Anzaldúa, Gloria 34 Ardener, Shirley 158 Atkinson, Kym 198 Aziz, Sahar F. 158 Baines, Donna 66 Baker, Kelly J. 83 Baldry, Chris 265 Ball, Stephen J. 52, 127 Barber, Elizabeth 198 Barbour, Kim 38, 52 Barker, Michelle 104, 114 Barker, Pat 198 Baril, Charles P. 99 Barnes, Alison 265 Barnoff, Lisa 66 Barry, Kate 198 Bateson, Mary Catherine 206–07, 217 Beard, Laura 14, 253–54, 256, 258, 260, 262, 264, 266 Behar, Ruth 180 Bellas, M. L. 235 Benke, Jr., Ralph L. 99 Berdahl, Loleen 83 Bereano, Nancy K. 181 Berg, Maggie 21, 33

Berlant, Lauren 4, 8, 16, 21, 33, 37, 40, 51–2, 101, 114 Bertraux, Daniel 127 Bhopal, Kalwant 198, 265 Bird, Sharon R. 98 Black, Alison L. 5, 16, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82–84, 106, 114, 127–28, 142, 180, 217, 265 Bochner, Arthur 199 Bond, Candis 6, 14, 16, 85–86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98 Bone, Kate Daisy 52 Bosanquet, Agnes 5, 16, 108, 114, 217 Bottrell, Dorothy 83 Bourdieu, Pierre 52, 66, 139 Bourelle, Tiffany 217–18 Brabazon, Tara 83 Bradford, S. 157–58 Brady, Ann M. 217 Brand, Dionne 180 Brockmeier, Jens 218 Brostoff, Alex 66 Brown, Rachel H. 67 Bruś, Teresa 237, 251 Bueskens, Petra 7, 16, 103, 114, 127, 261, 265 Burg, Damon 98 Butler, Judith 52, 102, 144, 158 Cage, Timothy 83 Capecci, John 83 Cardell, Kylie 180 Carter, Angela 186, 189, 195, 198–200 Caterine, Christopher L. 52 Cavarero, Adriana 124, 127, 128 Ceynar, M. 235

268

Index

Chandler, Mielle 66 Chang, Heewon 198 Chang, Julia 148, 158 Clare, Eli 176, 180 Clifton, Lucille 162, 166–67 Coletu, Ebony 16, 17, 21, 34, 134 Cook, Judith A. 198; Cooper, Brittney 10, 17 Cooppan, Vilashini 66 Corbett, Christianne 265 Cronshaw, Richard 127 da Silva, Iris Graziele 237, 251 Dalton, Mary 180 Damian Martin, Diana 181 Dann, Stephen 240, 252 Day, Ally 13, 220, 222, 224, 226, 228, 230, 232, 234–36 de Salis, Isabel 198 Deller, Marina 13, 237–38, 240, 242, 244, 246, 248, 250, 252 Denker, Katherine J. 98 Devlin, Marcia 83 Diab, Susan 200 Dias, Giselle 66 Dillaway, Heather 199 Dix, Hywel 16–17, 83, 239, 252 Donoghue, Emma 195, 199 Douglas, Kate 7, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 237, 252 Duffy, Brooke Erin 52 Dupont, Madeleine 52 Dwyer, Rachael 83 Eagar, Toni 240, 252 Eakin, Paul John 66, 124, 128 Eco, Umberto 266 Egan, Susanna 67 El-Alayli, A. 235 Ellis, Carolyn 86, 98, 185, 199, 265 Elsom, Sandra 5, 68, 74 Epstein, David J. 217 Esseveld, Joke 198 Fancourt, Daisy 199 Feiler, Bruce 206, 217 Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal 235 Ferdinandt Stolley, Amy 98 Finn, Saoirse 199 Flores Niemann, Yolanda 6, 158 Flynn, Elizabeth A. 217–18

Fonow, Mary Margaret 198 Forchieri, S. 235 Foucault, Michel 52, 102 Fournier, Lauren 1, 17, 52, 66, 114, 123, 128, 218, 203, 221, 235 Franke, Helena 52 Franklin, Cynthia 153, 158 Freedman Aviva 86, 98 Fricker, Miranda 91, 98 Friedman, May 4, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66 Friere, Paulo 235 Fuller, Georgina 199 Gabriella Torres Valencia 243, 252 Gannaway, Deanne 104, 114 Garvis, Susanne 6, 16–17, 83, 114, 127–28, 142, 180, 208, 217, 265 Gewin, Virginia 52 Gil-Juárez, Adriana 52 Gill, Rosalind 83 Gilmore, Leigh 95, 98, 128 Gold, David 212, 218 Gonçalves, Kellie 180 Gonzalez, Jennifer 14, 17, 263, 266 Goodier, Bethany Crandell 128 Graeber, David 25, 34 Grainger, Peter 84 Green, Wendy 104, 113–14 Grimm, Jacob 199 Grimm, Wilhelm 199 Grindstaff, Laura 243, 252 Guarino, Cassandra M. 98 Guest, Rose 228, 236 Gullestad, Marianne 128 Haggis, Jane 180 Hallett, Vicki 168, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180 Hansen-Brown, A. 235 Haraway, Donna 184, 199 Harju-Luukkainen, Heidi 139, 142 Harlow, Roxanna 235 Harrington, Mona 33 Harris, Christopher Paul 67 Harris, Richard 199 Hass, Marjorie 94, 98 Hawley, Katherine 34 Hays, Sharon 128 Helmes, Svenja 17, 53

Index Helms, Gesa 52 Henderson, Holly 198 Henderson, Linda 6, 17, 83, 128 Hernandez, Kathy Ann 198 Hey, V. 157–58 Highmore, Ben 125, 128 Hill, Catharine 265 Holman Jones, Sophie 86, 98, 199 Hooks, Bell 231–32, 235 Horton, Myles 235 Huff, Cynthia 10, 144–45, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157–59 Hull, Glynda A. 238, 252 Hunt, Celia 189, 199 Jolly, Margaretta 170, 178, 180 Jordan, Katy 52 Kadar, Marlene 2, 17, 67, 155, 159 Kahlert, Heike 128 Karpinski, Eva 9 Katz, Mira-Lisa 238, 252 Kendall, Lynne 199 Kennedy, Ümit 53 Kentridge, William 183, 199 Kerschbaum, Stephanie 229, 236 Kilian, Eveline 141–42 King, Jeannette 199 Kirsch, Gesa 144, 148, 151, 154, 158, 218 Knittel, S. C. 235 Kohler Riessman, Catherine 132 Koliska, Michael 243, 252 Kondo, Marie 61, 67 Kottmann, Paul 128 Kroger, Jane 237, 252 Kross, Jaan 116, 128 Kupermann Daniel 237, 251 Kuttainen, Victoria 53 L’Eplattenier, Barbara 218 LaFrance, Michelle 88, 98 Laszloffy, Tracey 5, 18 Leavy, Patricia 53 Leder, Doug 233, 235 Lee, Katja 106, 114, 143, 173, 180 Lee, Valerie 10–11, 17, 160–67 Lejeune, Philippe 8, 17, 117, 128 Leydesdorff, Selma 127 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin 266

269

Lipton, Briony 53, 111, 114 Litt, Jacquelyn S. 98 Looser, Devoney 218 Lorde, Audre 33, 158, 173, 180–81 Low, Katherine 181 Luźon, María-José 53 Macfarlane, Bruce 98 Maguire, Emma 3, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52–53, 239, 252 Maitra, Keya 180 Mairs, Nancy 228, 235 Maisuria, Alpesh 17, 53 Maitland, Sarah 199 Manathunga, Catherine 83 Manguso, Sarah 199 Mann, Madeline 252 Maqnakil, Jane 6, 18 Marin, Mara 67 Marling, Raili 128 Marr, Vanessa 11, 182, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196–98, 199–200 Marshall, David 52 Mastrangelo, Lisa 218 Matthew, Patricia 99 Mattson, Christopher 128 Mayes, Eve 128 McBride, Stephen 66 McDonald, Sharyn 237, 252 McMillan Cottom, Tressie 33–34 Medved, Maria 218 Medway, Peter 86, 98 Meretoja, Hanna 203, 218 Metta, Marylin 185, 200 Miller, Carolyn R. 99 Miller, Madeleine 200 Mills, Jennifer 252 Miniotaitė, Daina 186, 200 Mintz, Susannah B. 181 Moffatt, Ken 66 Moore, Lorrie 202, 218 Moraga, Cherríe 34 Moriarty, Jessica 3, 158, 200 Morrison, Aimée 48, 53 Morrison, Toni 162–63, 166–67 Morse, Nicole Erin 13, 17 Moss, Pamela 254, 266 Myers, W. Benjamin 200

270

Index

Nancy, Jean-Luc 124, 128 Neuman, Michelle 6, 18 Ngunjiri, Faith 198 Noble, J. Bobby 181 Novotney, Amy 53 Nzinga-Johnson, Sekile 6, 17 Olsen, Jason 200 O’Reilly, Andrea 6, 66, 128–29, 200, 218–19 Orenstein, Catherine 187, 200 Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa 1–2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 46, 84, 87, 99, 105, 114, 121, 128, 134, 143, 179, 181, 218, 252–54, 256, 258, 260, 262, 264, 266 Panitch, Melanie 66 Park, Shelley M. 99 Parker, Rozsika 200 Parks, Mel 201 Patterson, Serena 218 Pearce, Ruth 139, 143 Perrault, Charles 189, 201 Perrault, Jeanne 159 Peters, Michael 67 Pickard-Smith, Kelly 6 Pinkola Estés, Clarissa 201 Plummer, Ken 47, 126, 129 Podnieks, Liz 259, 266 Poletti, Anna 47, 49, 51, 53, 224 Poole, Jennifer 4, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66 Pooley, Jefferson D. 52 Pope-Ruark, Rebecca 84 Porter, Michelle 175, 181 Powell, Katrina M. 266 Pressland, Amy 158–59 Price, Margaret 228–29, 236 Priyadharshini, Esther 201 Pryal, Katie 236 Reading, Christina 201 Res-Sisters 157, 159 Rich, Adrienne 223, 236 Richardson, Julia 138, 143 Ricoeur, Paul 177, 181 Riessman, Catherine Kohler 143; Roach, Rebecca 23, 31, 34

Roberts, Jessica 243, 252 Robinson-Pant, Anna 201 Rockquemore, Kerry Ann 5, 18 Rohan, Liz 218 Ronkley-Pavia, Michelle 6, 18 Rotkirch, Anna 127 Royster, Jacqueline Jones 218 Sadowski-Smith, Claudia 143 Schriever, Vicki 5, 68, 75, 84 Seeber, Barbara Karolina 33 Seltzer, Rena 5, 18 Shahjahan, Riyad A. 67 Sims, M. 84 Smith, Dorothy 132, 143 Smith, Linda Tuhuwai 67 Smith, Sidonie 1, 9, 17–18, 47, 53, 87, 101, 99, 114, 129, 131, 143, 181, 254, 219, 266 Snyder, Thomas 236 Standing, Kay E. 198 Stanley, Liz 170, 180 Stavans, Ilan 13 Street, Donna L. 99 Syedullah, Jasmine 67 Symonds, Alexandra 188, 201 Tamas, Sophie 201 Taylor, Allan 252 Taylor, Tess 219 Thelwall, Mike 53 Thompson, Paul 127 Thouaille, Marie-Alix 53 Threadcraft, Shatema 67 Thwaites, Rachel 158–59 Ticktin, Miriam 67 Todd, Sarah 66 Toffoletti, Kim 7, 16, 103, 114, 127, 261, 265 Tokumitsu, Miya 28, 35 Tuck, Eve 67 Turkle, Sherry 262, 266 Van Valkenburgh, Shawn P. 181 Vasquez, Michael 236 Vishmidt, Marina 52 Walker, Alice 162, 166, 167 Wang, Yong 98 Ward, Kelly 99 Ware, Syrus Marcus 67

Index Warley, Linda 67 Watson, Julia 9, 11, 14, 17–18, 47, 53, 87, 99, 101, 114, 127, 129, 131, 143, 160–64, 166,181, 219, 254, 266 Webster-Wright, Ann 104, 114 Wendell, Susan 228, 236 Wershle, Laura 199 Whitlock, Gillian 47, 53

271

Winnicott, D. W. 201 Wolf, Hope 141–42 Wolfe, Marion 12, 202, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216, 218 Wood, Jill M. 219 Woodly, Deva 67 Zikic, Jelena 138, 143 Zipes, Jack 195, 201