Abstract
This chapter utilises allegory to tell an autoethnography of changing academic identity from disillusionment to hope. The critical, embodied autoethnography, utilised as a tool of creative resistance, draws on the discourses of the author’s career including Renaissance dramas and autopsy literature to create a visceral, authentic story of living out experience at a fictitious Australian university situated at the intersection of endgame neoliberalism and extreme workplace toxicity, wilfully destructive to academic identities and communities. Characters from the fourteenth century play, The Castle of Perseverance allegorise and re-embody the autoethnography, fashioning an ethical, counter-discursive methodology of narrative repositioning. It offers the space of the ‘paraversity’ as reflective, safe, identity-affirmative place for reclaiming the value and integrity of the practical and collective work of knowledge and resistance.
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Notes
- 1.
Stephen C. Ward, “From E Pluribus Unum to Caveat Emptor: How Neoliberal Policies are Capturing and Dismantling the Liberal University,” New Political Science 36 (2014) 459.
- 2.
Cris Shore, “Beyond the Multiversity: Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Schizophrenic University,” Social Anthropology 18 (2010) 15.
- 3.
Henry A. Giroux, “Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University,” in Qualitative Inquiry Outside the Academy, ed. Norman K. Denzin & Michael D. Giardina (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2014), 35.
- 4.
Richard Hil, Whakademia: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University (Sydney, NSW: University of Sydney Press, 2012).
- 5.
Ruth Barcan, Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013).
- 6.
Bronwyn Davies and Susan Gannon, “The Practices of Collective Biography,” in Doing Collective Biography: Investigating the Production of Subjectivity, ed. Bronwyn Davies and Susan Gannon (Berkshire: Open University, 2006), 1.
- 7.
David N. Klausner, “Introduction,” in Anonymous (C15), The Castle of Perseverance, ed. David N. Klausner (Robbins Digital Library Projects: University of Rochester, 2010).
- 8.
Stephen J. Ball, “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity,” Journal of Education Policy 18 (2010): 215.
- 9.
Henry A. Giroux, “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Public Sphere,” Harvard Educational Review 72 (2002) 425; 429.
- 10.
Bronwyn Davies, “The (Im)possibility of Intellectual Work in Neoliberal Regimes,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 25, no. 1 (2010): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596300500039310
- 11.
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 188.
- 12.
Henry A. Giroux, “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Public Sphere” 425.
- 13.
Chris Lorenz, “‘If You’re So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance’? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management,” Critical Enquiry 38 (2012) 599; 600.
- 14.
Davies and Gannon, “The Practices of Collective Biography”, 3.
- 15.
Deborah Withers and Alex Wardrop, “Reclaiming what has been Devastated”, in The Para-Academic Handbook: A Toolkit for Making-Learning-Creating-Acting, ed. Alex Wardrop and Deborah Withers (Bristol, UK: HammerOn Press, 2014) 6; 6.
- 16.
Carolin Kreber, “Academics’ Teacher Identities, Authenticity and Pedagogy”, Studies in Higher Education, 35 (2009), 171–194.
- 17.
Dean Barker, “Ninjas, Zombies and Nervous Wrecks? Academics in the Neoliberal World of Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy”, Sport, Education and Society, 22, no. 1 (December, 2016): 87–104, https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2016.1195360
- 18.
Russell Craig, Joel Amernic and Dennis Tourish, “Perverse Audit Culture and the Modern Public University”, Financial Accountability and Management, vol. 30 (February, 2014): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1111/faam.12025
- 19.
Stephen J. Ball “Performativity, Commodification and Commitment: an I-spy Guide to the Neoliberal University”, British Journal of Educational Studies, 60, no. 1, (February, 2012): 17–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2011.650940
- 20.
Ball “Performativity, Commodification and Commitment”; Craig, Amernic and Tourish, “Perverse Audit Culture”; Lorenz, “‘If You’re So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance’?”.
- 21.
Davies, “The (Im)possibility of Intellectual Work in Neoliberal Regimes”.
- 22.
Heewon Chang, Autoethnography as Method (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008), 43.
- 23.
Andrew C. Sparkes, “Autoethnography Comes of Age: Consequences, Comforts, and Concerns,” in Handbook of Ethnography of Education, ed. Dennis Beach, Carl Bagley and Sophia Marques da Silva (London: Wiley, 2018); 493.
- 24.
Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner, “Autobiography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd Edition), ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonne S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000): 742.
- 25.
Carolyn Ellis, “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others,” Qualitative Inquiry 13 (2007) 3–29.
- 26.
Martin Tolich, “A Critique of Current Practice: Ten Foundational Guidelines for Autoethnographers,” Qualitative Health Research 20 (2010) 1599.
- 27.
Vera Caine, M. Shaun Murphy, Andrew Estefan, D. Jean Clandinin, Pamela Steeves, and Janice Huber “Exploring the Purposes of Fictionalisation in Narrative Inquiry,” Qualitative Inquiry 23 (2016) 1–7.
- 28.
Carolyn Ellis, “Autoethnography: An Overview”, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12 (2007), para. 34. http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095
- 29.
Michael Kusy and Elizabeth Holloway, Toxic Workplace! Managing Toxic Personalities and Their Systems of Power (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass): 2.
- 30.
Gary Chapman, Paul E. White, and Harold Myra. Rising Above a Toxic Workplace: Taking Care of Yourself in an Unhealthy Environment (Bel Air, CA: Northfield Publishing, 2014).
- 31.
Chapman and White, Rising Above a Toxic Workplace.
- 32.
Anonymous, The Castle of Perseverance (C15), ed. David N. Klausner (Robbins Digital Library Projects: University of Rochester, 2010), http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/klausner-castle-of-perseverance
- 33.
Ball, “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity”.
- 34.
Anonymous, The Castle of Perseverance, ll. 2208–9.
- 35.
XXXX is an Australian beer brand by Castlemaine and the subject of a Trans-Tasman joke about Australians’ inability to spell ‘beer’.
- 36.
William S. Burroughs, “William S. Burroughs – On Writing” (Jack Kerouac Conference, Naropa University, Bolder Colorado, July 23, 1982), https://archive.org/stream/WilliamS.BurroughsOnWriting/BurroughsJackKerouaf63e9_djvu.txt
- 37.
Anonymous, The Castle of Perseverance, ll. 3645–8.
- 38.
John Morrissey, “Regimes of Performance: Practices of the Normalised Self in the Neoliberal University,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 36 (2013) 614.
- 39.
Suzanne Ryan, “Academic Zombies: A Failure of Resistance or a Means of Survival?” Australian Universities Review, 54 (2012) 3.
- 40.
Ninetta Santoro, “Measuring the ‘Quality’ of Educational Research: Reflections on the Australian Experience,” Scottish Educational Review, 46 (2014) 4, http://www.scotedreview.org.uk/media/scottish-educational-review/articles/2014/2014_46-2_Nov_02_Santoro.pdf
- 41.
Caroline A. Clarke and David Knights, “Careering through Academia: Securing Identities or Engaging Subjectivities?” Human Relations, 68 (2015) 1865–1888.
- 42.
Santoro, “Measuring the ‘Quality’ of Educational Research”, 15.
- 43.
Katerina Zabrodski, Sheridan Linnell, Cath Laws and Bronwyn Davies, “Bullying as an Intra-active Process in Neoliberal Universities,” Qualitative Inquiry, 17 (2011) 709. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800411420668
- 44.
Chris Holligan, Michael Wilson and Walter Humes, “Research Cultures in English and Scottish University Education Departments: An Exploratory Study of Academic Staff Perceptions”, British Educational Research Journal 37 (2011) 713.
- 45.
Ryan, “Academic Zombies”, 3–11.
- 46.
Cris Shore and Susan Wright, “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education,” in Audit cultures: Anthropological studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy, ed. Marilyn Strathern (London: Routledge, 2000), 57.
- 47.
The irony of Iago in Othello fashioning himself as ‘honest’ but in fact being a villain (“I am not who I am”) is the core of this reference.
- 48.
Zabrodski, et al., “Bullying as an Intra-active Process in Neoliberal Universities”.
- 49.
Andrew C. Sparkes, “Embodiment, Academics, and the Audit Culture: A story Seeking Consideration,” Qualitative Research 7 (2007) 528.
- 50.
Ryan, “Academic Zombies”, 6.
- 51.
Kate Maclean, “Sanity, ‘Madness’ and the Academy,” The Canadian Geographer/Le Geographe Canadien, 60 (2016) 181–191.
- 52.
Maggie O’Neill, “The Slow University: Work, Time and Well-Being,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research Sozialforschung, 15, art. 4 (September, 2014), http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/2226/3696
- 53.
Barker, “Ninjas, Zombies and Nervous Wrecks?”, 87.
- 54.
Ryan, “Academic Zombies”.
- 55.
Laurence D. Berg, Edward H. Huijbens and Henrik Gutzon Larson, “Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University”, The Canadian Geographer/Le Geographe Canadien, 60 (2016) 168.
- 56.
Ruth Barcan, “Universities Need to Plan for a Dark Future if Academics Prefer Their Own Plan B,” Times Higher Education (June 13, 2017), https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/universities-need-to-plan-for-dark-future-if-academics-prefer-their-own-plan-b
- 57.
Shore, “Beyond the Multiversity”.
- 58.
Berg, Huijbens and Larson, “Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University”.
- 59.
Lorenz, “‘If You’re So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance?’,” 627.
- 60.
Barcan, Academic Life and Labour in the New University, 7.
- 61.
David R. Lea, Neoliberalism, the Security State, and the Quantification of Reality (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2017).
- 62.
Berg, et al.
- 63.
Barker, “Ninjas, Zombies and Nervous Wrecks?”.
- 64.
Rosalind Gill, “Breaking the Silence: The Hidden Injuries of the Neoliberal University”, in Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, ed. Roisin Flood and Rosalind Gill (London: Routledge, 2009): 228.
- 65.
Stephen J. Ball and Antonio Olmedo, “Care of the Self, Resistance and Subjectivity under Neoliberal Governmentalities”, Critical Studies in Education, 54 (2012) 85.
- 66.
O’Neill, “The Slow University”.
- 67.
Barcan, Academic Life and Labour in the New University.
- 68.
Gary Rolfe, “We Are All Para-academics Now”. In The para-academic handbook: A toolkit for making-learning-creating-acting, ed. Alex Wardrop and Deborah Withers (Bristol, UK: HammerOn Press).
- 69.
Withers and Wardrop, “Reclaiming what has been devastated,” 7.
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Andrew, M. (2019). Double Negative: When the Neoliberal Meets the Toxic. In: Bottrell, D., Manathunga, C. (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume I. Palgrave Critical University Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95942-9_3
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