‘The spirit of research has changed’: reverberations from researcher identities in managerial times

Abstract

Five poetic transcriptions lie at the heart of this article. We intend that they will convey something of what it means and feels like to be an academic researcher in neoliberal universities such that we begin to notice this condition and its effects more acutely. Our poetic texts began their existence as fast-written prose responses to the question: ‘If you say to yourself, “I am a researcher”, how do you feel, what do you think about and what associations do you make?’ In this article, we foreground an exploration of the poetic mode of representing research data through example and exegesis. We argue this kind of interpretive work is effective because it strikes a different kind of relationship between empirical data and reader, one that encourages ‘reverberation’ – a resounding way of noticing that draws upon our bodily and emotional reactions to a text as well as our intellectual ones. Hence, a methodology of poetic transcriptions may be especially capable of evoking for the reader some of the problematic, although variable, effects of the Anglo-Western neoliberal – or ‘managerialist’ – university on the hearts and minds of its beleaguered academic subjects.

Keywords:

• academic researchers
• emotions
• managerialism
• poetic transcriptions
• research methodologies

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the contribution made by our colleagues to this paper in the form of their original pieces of writing, as well as their generosity in permitting us to draw on them as data for this project.

Notes

Because our translation process stayed close to the original texts and so was transcription-like, we have adopted Glesne's term. Others refer to the same practice as ‘ethnopoetry’ (Coffey, 2002; Kendall & Murray, 2005) or ‘data poems’ (Lahman et al., 2009). For a discussion of the variety of uses of poetry in research, see Faulkner (2007) and Lahman et al. (2009).

In light of Piirto's (2002) prescriptions that those who write poetry for ‘high-stakes’ projects must have had literary training, Glesne's claim is an important one. It suggests the need to apply different evaluative criteria to poetic transcriptions of research data, which are constrained by participants' words, from those applied to autoethnographic or self-reflexive poems written by researchers, which are not constrained in this manner. For a discussion of the appropriate criteria to apply to poetic transcriptions, see Faulkner (2007), Poindexter (2002), Richardson (1993, 2002a), Sparkes et al. (2003) and Sparkes & Douglas (2007).