Eva Bendix Petersen

The ambivalent practices of reflexivity

Reflexivity involves turning one’s reflexive gaze on discourse—turning language back on itself to see the work it does in constituting the world. The subject/researcher sees simultaneously the object of her or his gaze and the means by which the object (which may include oneself as subject) is being constituted. The consciousness of self that reflexive writing sometimes entails may be seen to slip inadvertently into constituting the very (real) self that seems to contradict a focus on the constitutive power of discourse. This article explores this site of slippage and of ambivalence. In a collective biography on the topic of reflexivity, the authors tell and write stories about reflexivity and in a doubled reflexive arc, examine themselves at work during the workshop. Examining their own memories and reflexive practices, they explore this place of slippage and provide theoretical and practical insight into “what is going on” in reflexive research and writing.

Negotiating academicity: postgraduate research supervision as category boundary work

While doctoral education and postgraduate supervision might be heavily researched in the context of ‘effective supervision’, this is still an acutely under‐theorised field. This article responds to the call for more explicit theorising of postgraduate supervision by exploring doctoral education as academic subjectification, and supervision as a process of ‘category boundary work’. It is argued that postgraduate supervision entails a relationship in which the boundaries around what constitutes culturally intelligible academic performativity, ‘academicity’, are negotiated, maintained, challenged and reconstructed. The concept of category boundary work is put to work in a brief analysis of the ways in which it is performed by, respectively, a supervisor and supervisee within the social sciences. The article aims to provide a perspective and an analytical tool which can be applied in context‐sensitive ways, across disciplinary, institutional, biographic and national settings, to produce significant insight into how academic cultures and subjectivities are re/produced.

The ‘good life’ and the ‘rich portfolio’: young women, schooling and neoliberal subjectification

This paper explores the ways two young women, living in Australia, make sense of themselves, their activities, and futures. The two young women come from two different schooling contexts—a prestigious private school and a government school. We analyse their self‐narratives in relation to neoliberal discourse, and consider how, and with what effects, their school contexts privilege and make available neoliberal discourses, and work to produce different subjectivities and notions of ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good’ lives. Conceptualising schools as sites of subjection, we analyse the discourses that their respective schools make available to the young women, and how they have appropriated them. We suggest that the different exposure and access to neoliberal discourses position the women very differently in terms of future possibilities and work‐life scenarios in the neoliberal economy. In that way, the article seeks to make a contribution towards understanding schools as implicated in social (re)production and in the (re)production of classed subjectivities.

Resistance and enrolment in the enterprise university: an ethno‐drama in three acts, with appended reading

We are now at a point in higher education policy studies where we know that neoliberal discursive rationalities and practices are prevalent in the contemporary enterprise university, and we are beginning to get a sense of their impact on academic work and subjectivities. The article asserts that a more pressing question is how to powerfully and effectively resist neoliberalisation. The article investigates the conditions of possibility for resistance by exploring how resistance is struggled over in everyday academic work practices. The article presents an ethno‐drama, based on materials collected through participant observation in several Australian universities, and offers a reading of the drama which focuses on what in Actor–Network Theory is called ‘enrolment’. It is argued that a better understanding of how academics, collectively and as individuals, are vulnerable to the enrolment practices in the enterprise university is necessary for the enactment of effective resistance.

A Day at the Office at the University of Borderville: An Ethnographic Short Story.

This paper offers a narrative, an ethnographic short story, which the author created from material that she generated through extensive fieldwork and interviews with Australian and Danish researchers in the social sciences and humanities. The material was generated as part of the author’s doctoral study. Inspired by the detailed descriptions of everyday life in the (natural) science laboratory, she offers an ethnographic narrative of a (possible) day in the social science and humanities ‘laboratory’. She follows an actor through an ‘ordinary day’ to explore how ‘academicity’, that is, culturally intelligible academic subject positions and practices, comes into existence through everyday interaction and activities. The story explores the ways in which the constructions of what it means to be ‘the right kind of person’ in an academic context work invisibly, insidiously, insistently, in everything academics do, say and feel.

Complicating "Student Behaviour": Exploring the Discursive Constitution of "Learner Subjectivities".

When educators consider ‘student behaviour’, they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out of control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian post-structuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex – as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper, we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration, we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see.

What Crisis of Representation? Challenging the Realism of Post-Structuralist Policy Research in Education.

Offered through a split-text, this article mounts/destabilises the argument that policy research that cites authors usually associated with post-structural thought and which is published in a mainstream education policy journal is overwhelmingly realist in its ontologising practices. It reminds the reader why that is problematic and calls for a stronger post-realist praxis.

The Conduct of Concern: Exclusionary discursive practices and subject positions in academia

Drawing on material collected amongst Danish and Australian humanities and social science academics, the article illustrates and problematises a particular and recurring discursive practice amongst academics: ‘the conduct of concern’. Conceptualising the conduct of concern as an exclusionary and de‐legitimising discursive practice, the article offers a (mis)reading of some of the storylines and constructions it could be seen to invoke and reproduce—amongst others, the idea of the autonomous, rational academic subject. The author discusses the conduct of concern, as a particular kind of subject position and positioning, in terms of Donna Haraways figure ‘the modest witness’. The author suggests that the conduct of concern as a readily available exclusionary discursive practice in academia ‘smuggles in’ and naturalises constructions and positionings associated with the autonomous rational subject, and participates in masking the discourse mobilisers subjective and political investments. In that way, by appropriating the ubiquitous discursive practice academics might contribute to upholding constructions and practices they otherwise seek to disrupt.

The grant game as training ground for tractability? An Australian Early Career Researcher’s story

The future of education research is linked to what early career researchers in Education are doing and learning to do now. This paper presents a narrative of one early career researcher who works and lives in Australia. She tells the story about how she came to research and to an academic life, about what her doctoral work and education taught her and how now, as an academic in an on-going position, she feels needs to unlearn many of those values and practices in order to succeed particularly in the so-called ‘grant game’. The narrative format, though, is intended to invite and encourage other readings.

‘Special’ non-human actors in the ‘inclusive’ early childhood classroom: The wrist band, the lock and the scooter board:

It is well established in research that early childhood classrooms are one of the most controlled environments during the human life course. When control is discussed, the enactment of regulatory frameworks and various discourses are analysed but less focus is paid on the materialities of classrooms. In this article, we pay attention to ‘special’ non-human actors present in an ‘inclusive’ early childhood classroom. These ‘special’ non-human actors are so named as they operate in the classroom as objects specific for the child with a diagnosis. The ‘special’ non-human actors, in the specific case the wrist band, the lock and the scooter board, take on meaning within discourses in the ‘inclusive’ classroom. We illuminate how these non-human actors contribute to the constitution of the ‘normal’ and the regulation of educators and children. To trouble the working of power and the control these objects effect on all who is present in the classroom, we ask the following questions: What do these non-human actors do in the ‘inclusive’ classroom and with what effects? How do non-human actors reproduce/produce the ‘normal’, impossible/possible ways to be and act, thus control educators and children? The data used in our analyses were produced as part of a 6-month-long ethnographic engagement in three early childhood settings in the broader region of Newcastle, Australia. It includes observations and conversations with children.