Women and the Politics of Writing

Abstract

This chapter reveals much of the interests and motivations behind the writing of this book. It seeks to stimulate a discussion on the forces that come to play when talking about the production of knowledge in universities understood as international identities particularly through the act of writing. As I have laid out along the book, contemporary ways to reason universities as international institutions have important effects on the configuration of knowledge, academic subjectivities, and their relations. As expected, such new configurations or ways to frame international practices and discourses for universities require a close examination. Discourses of internationalization of higher education that use institutional arrangements to promote specific practices in order to name themselves as successfully international (such as international networks and circuits to publish academic work, designing and implementing international collaborative research, high level of indexed publications, and so on) produce the idea that all these are the “natural” institutional outcomes and aspirations for professors. New ways to push universities to be part of the “knowledge society” discourse are deployed in particular and invisible practices of regulation that assume and promote specific academic identities.

These ideas were presented at the XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology, Yokohama, Japan 2014. The title of the paper was “Academic Writing as a Contesting Territory for Women.”