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

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.

Post: 9/11: hidden pedagogy: the positional forces of pedagogy in Victoria, Australia

This qualitative study charts the lived narratives of twelve participants, six teachers and six students from urban and rural Victoria, Australia. The study examines in detail the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’. 9/11 has become accepted shorthand for September 11th 2001, in which terrorist attacks took place in the United States of America. The attacks heralded a ‘post- 9/11 world, [in which] threats are defined more by the fault lines within societies than by the territorial boundaries between them’ (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 2011, p. 361). The study is embedded in the values that have come to the fore in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the ideological shifts that have occurred globally. These values and ideologies are reflected via issues of culture and consumption. In education this is particularly visible through pedagogy. The research employs a multimethodological (Esteban-Guitart, 2012) form of inquiry through the use of bricolage (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004) which is comprised at the intersectional points of critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2008b), public pedagogy (Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010b) and cultural studies (Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1992). This study adopts a critical ontological perspective, and is grounded in qualitative research approaches (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). The methods of photo elicitation, artefact analysis, video observation and semi-structured interviews are used to critically examine the ways in which teacher and student identities are shaped by the pedagogies of contemporary schooling, and how they form common sense understandings of the world and themselves, charting possibilities between accepted common sense beliefs and 21st century neoliberal capitalism. The research is presented through a prototypical form of literary journalism and intertextuality which examines the interrelationship between teaching and social worlds exposing the hidden influence of enculturation and addressing the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’