1st Edition
Autoethnographies from the Neoliberal Academy Rewilding, Writing and Resistance in Higher Education
The shift to a neoliberal agenda has, for many academics, intensified the pressure and undermined the pleasure that their work can and does bring. This book contains stories from a range of autoethnographers seeking to challenge traditional academic discourse by providing personal and evocative writings that detail moments of profound transformation and change.
The book focuses on the experiences of one academic and the stories that her dialogues with other autoethnographers generated in response to the neoliberal shift in higher education. Chapters use a variety of genres to provide an innovative text that identifies strategies to challenge neoliberal governance. Autoethnography is as a methodology that can be used as form of resistance to this cultural shift by exploring effects on individual academic and personal lives. The stories are necessarily emotional, personal, important. It is hoped that they will promote other ways of navigating higher education that do not align with neoliberalism and instead, offer more holistic and human ways of being an academic.
This book highlights the impact of neoliberalism on academics’ freedom to teach and think freely. With 40% of academics in the UK considering other forms of employment, this book will be of interest to existing and future academics who want to survive the new environment and maintain their motivation and passion for academic life.
List of Figures
Author Biographies
Acknowledgements
Introduction. All the Voices in My Head Jess Moriarty
Scene 1 Jess Moriarty
Chapter 1. The Mourning Stone and What Am I Grieving For? Jess Moriarty And Jane Fox
Chapter 2. I Found My Mum in a Box: Permission to Be Vulnerable in Higher Education Mike Hayler and Jess Moriarty
Chapter 3. Walking and Mapping Our Creative Recovery: An Interdisciplinary Method Christina Reading and Jess Moriarty
Chapter 4. Supporting Our Inner Compass: An Autoethnographic Cartography Christina Reading and Jess Moriarty
Scene 2. Jess Moriarty
Chapter 5. Reclaiming the Book of Spells: Storying the Self as a Form of Resistance Jess Moriarty And Vanessa Marr
Chapter 6. Rise Up: Women Sharing Personal and Shared Stories to Resist and Heal Jess Moriarty And Nicola Ashmore
Scene 3. Jess Moriarty
Chapter 7. Writing to Resist; Writing to Survive: Conversational Autoethnography, Mentoring, And the New Public Management Academy Trude Klevan, Bengt Karlsson And Alec Grant
Chapter 8. I Found My Mentor in A Toilet Jackie Goode And Jess Moriarty
Chapter 9. Insecurity Pre, Post and During the Ph.D.: An Autoethnography Of Mutual Support Jess Moriarty And Bryn Tales
Chapter 10. The Art of Hula: An Autoethnography Of Academic Life Jess Moriarty And Susan Diab
Scene 4. Jess Moriarty
Chapter 11. Reaching Forward and Back: Learning from Our Past as Pedagogy in Undergraduate Creative Writing Teaching Jess Moriarty And Ross Adamson
Conclusion: Redondo Jess Moriarty
Scene 5. Jess Moriarty
Biography
Jess Moriarty is a principal lecturer at the University of Brighton, where she is course leader on the Creative Writing MA. Jess works on engaging students in community projects and using innovative and personal writing to challenge traditional academic discourse. She is focused on developing her students’ confidence with their creativity and writing.
Autoethnographies from the Neoliberal Academy is a supremely timely book on how to work in and against neoliberal universities from within the academy. Utilising radical dazzling story-telling techniques across a variety of media to problematise conventional academic discourses, this book points the way for future academic writing and knowledge as modally and spatially liberatory - more impactful and more relevant than conventional academic discourse - story-telling should be the twenty-first century’s version of the ‘Idea of the University’.
Dr Kate Aughterson, Principal Lecturer in Literature, University of Brighton
