The emotional knots of academicity: a collective biography of academic subjectivities and spaces

ABSTRACT

The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded ‘knowledge economy optimism’. Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises of the knowledge economy on its knowledge workers. We extend previous analyses of the discursive constitution of academic subjectivity through the figuration of ‘emotional knots’ as we explore three stories of the constitution of academic subjectivities in institutional spaces. These stories were composed in a collective biography workshop, where participants constructed accounts of the physical, social, material and imaginative dimensions of subjectivities in the ‘academic-city’ of higher education spaces. Identifying moments of ‘perturbation’ in these stories, this paper considers the micro-contexts of ‘becoming academic’: how bodies, affects and relations become knotted in precise times and places. The figuration of ‘knots’ provides an analytical strategy for unravelling how subjects affectively invest in the promises of spaces saturated with knowledge economy discourses, and moments of impasse where these promises ring hollow. We examine the affective bargains made in order to flourish in the corporate university and identify spaces of possibility where optimistic projections of alternative futures might be formed. These stories and their analysis complicate the metanarrative of ‘knowledge economy optimism’ that is currently driving higher education reform in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Academicity affect
• collective biography
• knowledge economy
• space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jennifer Charteris http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1554-6730

Susanne Gannon http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2182-3615

Adele Nye http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1603-2643

Notes

1. From the larger group of workshop participants, only people who opted to co-author a paper and contribute their written stories continued through to this paper. The stories we selected were those that were explicitly about spaces of higher education. We thank AARE for organising the Theory Workshop and providing the opportunity for us to begin thinking through our collective experiences of academicity.