The neo-liberal doctoral student?
Sociability and the possibilities of everyday political interruptions
Sarah Leaney and Rebecca Webb http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer

• Our context
• The autonomous student
• Challenging the “simple story” of neoliberalism
• Reassert the value of the “social”
• Claim the possibilities of everyday political interruptions

• Our story as data
• Making sense through theory
“…ideas about meaning, the way in which meanings are struggled over and produced, the way it circulates among us, the impact it has on human subjects, and finally the connections between meaning and power”
Kenway, Willis, Blackmore and Rennie (1994, p.189)
• Reacting to representations

Sarah
• 3 rd year PhD – “writing up”
• Ethnography of the everyday
“sense making” of state educational provision on an estate on the outskirts of an English city
• “Accidental” academic – undergraduate and postgraduate at University of Sussex supported by many part time jobs
Rebecca
• Completed PhD – now lecturer in same institution
• Ethnography of a primary school in England focusing upon practices and performances of discourses of “children’s rights”
• Background in state education as both teacher and LEA advisor

• Against despair
(Gornall, 2009; 2010; Gornall & Salisbury, 2012;
Birkhead, 2008, Corbin, 2009)
• The discourse of the ‘knowledge economy’
(UCU
Briefing, 2014)
• The normative production of the ‘Master Of Control’
(Barnacle & Dall’Alba, 2013)
• The performative practice of networking
(‘sociality’, Hey, 2005)

• The ‘badly’ Moral
• Linear
• Paradox – denying structure/rigidly structuring
• Assumption of interpellation

• Forms of sociality – or how people do “people work” or social affinities (Hey, 2005: 858)
• Re-assert agency in the social of the academy
• ‘Our Space’
– ‘Thinking with’/‘Permeable theorisation’
– ‘Co-production’ as resistance

• Reclaiming space
• The moral resource of friendship and sociality
• ‘Good Life in a Bad Life’
(Butler, 2012)

References
• Barnacle, R. and Dall'Alba, G. (2014) Beyond skills: embodying writerly practices through the doctorate,
Studies in Higher Education, 39:7, 1139-1149
• Birkhead,T. (2008) Summer Off? Not Likely. Times Higher Education, 4 September, pp. 27
• Butler, J. (2012) Can One Lead a Good life in a Bad Life? in Radical Philosophy. Adorno Prize Lecture,
September 11, 2012
• Corbin, Z. (2009) Workload: It’s Not Heavier, but It Is More Burdensome—Article Reporting the Recent
Longitudinal Study by Professor Malcolm Tight on Academic Workloads, Times Higher Education, 24
September
• Gornall, L. (2009) The Working Lives of Academics and New Professionals in HE. Invited Symposium to the IPED international conference, 11 September, University of Coventry
• Gornall, L. (2010) Hyperprofessionality: Unseen Working and Evolving Forms of Academic Practice. Paper to SRHE Symposium on Academic Professionality, 14 December, Newport, UK
• Gornall, L. & Salisbury, J. (2012) Compulsive Working, ‘Hyperprofesionality’ and the Unseen Pleasures of
Academic Work in Higher Education Quarterly, 66: 2, pp. 135-154
• Hey, V. (2005) The Contrasting Logics of Sociality and Survival: Cultures of Classed Be/Longing in Late
Modernity in Sociology 39: 5, pp. 855-872
• Kenway, J. Willis, S. Blackmore, J. & Rennie, L. (1994) Making 'hope practical ‘rather than 'despair convincing‘ : Poststructuralism, Gender reform and Educational Change in British Journal of Sociology of
Education, 15: 2, pp. 187-210
• University and College Union (2014) Knowledge Economy: Fifteen Big Ideas for the Next Government available at: http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/pdf/1/o/KE_briefing_Nov14.pdf?CFID=17252826&CFTOKEN=e5ea48a4d2 da3e80-A37E7730-D8A0-C2E9-E5321A33E1961DDD