Becoming Postacademics Inside the Neoliberal Academy: Collective Biography as a Method of Resistance

• In Event: Roundtable Session 54
  In Roundtable Session: (Re)storying in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Academic spaces are notoriously undemocratic for women, perhaps particularly for emerging scholars. By adapting the collective biography method to include various online components, we disrupt and resist the academy’s production of individual rational subjects to make space for unbounded, messy, and multiple subjectivities. In this paper, we describe how we worked the collective biography method to explore how Despite our differences, we have common experiences of being produced as academic subjects in particular gendered and raced ways, which often interfere with our ability to be recognized as legitimate, competent scholars. In this project, we disrupt notions of ourselves and others in order to imagine new ways to engage academic spaces and to re-configure our academic lives.

Authors

• Laura Elizabeth Smithers, University of Oregon

• Emily Mathis, University of Oregon

• Courtney L. Rath, Universty of Oregon

• Spirit Brooks, University of Oregon

• Allyson Dean, University of Oregon

• Asilia K Franklin-Phipps, University of Oregon

• Nadia Raza, Lane Community College

• Krystal Sundstrom, University of Oregon