Sheridan Linnell

Bullies, bullying and power in the contexts of schooling

In this paper the four authors explore the experience of school bullying, drawing on stories of bullying generated in a collective biography workshop and on fictional accounts of bullying. They counter the current trend of reading bullying as individual or family pathology with a post‐structuralist analysis of subjectification and power.

Bullying as Intra-active Process in Neoliberal Universities

The reformed neoliberal universities, with their micromanagement of ever-increasing productivity, competitiveness, and individualization, have recently been described as unhealthy institutions, creating conditions that incite incivility, workplace bullying, and other forms of employee abuse. In this article, the authors employ collective biography as a form of “diffractive methodology” in order to provide new, theoretically driven insights into workplace bullying in neoliberal universities. Drawing on the concepts of intra-activity and performativity, the authors examine bullying in universities as an intra-active process that informs and is informed by the desire of an individual to be recognized and to perform as a viable academic subject—one who is professional, flexible, and accountable within a neoliberal environment.

Technologies of audit at work on the writing subject : a discursive analysis

This article examines the everyday practices of writing in the context of the technologies of audit, as they have been practised on and by the four authors in their capacity as students and researchers. It examines the activity of writing as governmentality, through which students and academics make themselves into appropriate subjects, and also exceed and disrupt the effects of government.