Becoming-academic in the neoliberal academy: A collective biography

As evidenced by the collection of articles in Gender and Education’s July 2015 issue and various articles that have circulated recently on social media [American Council on Education. 2016. “New report looks at the status of women in higher education.” January 15. http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/New-Report-Looks-at-the-Status-of-Women-in-Higher-Education.aspx; Donald, A. 2016. “Women are too often actively sidelined against their will.” Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/women-are-too-often-actively-sidelined-against-their-will; Higher Education Network. 2016. “How should we cope with sexism? That’s the wrong question.” The Guardian. April 15. https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/apr/15/how-should-we-cope-with-sexism-thats-the-wrong-question], the topic of gender in higher education is of concern to many in both academic and non-academic thought-spaces. In this collective biography, we explore entrance into the fraught and contested space of the neoliberal academy by considering our experiences as women graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. We use various digital collaborative tools to adapt the collective biography method to our needs, making the project accessible across distance and time and inside the financial constraints of graduate school. Here we describe the project, excerpt two of the entangled data-stories we produced, and use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space and Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity to help us think through our becoming-academic.