Performance: "(Un)becoming academics: Stripping down and laying bare, to story spaces of hope" for the 6th International Academic Identities Conference, 2018.
We are four women from three Australian universities in various phases of (un)becoming academics. One of us has moved from casual to “permanent” in the last year only, one is awaiting a probation review to secure permanency, one has been in academia for more than twenty years with “very little to show for it”, and one has recently walked away choosing voluntary retirement. This virtually-delivered performance-based
presentation draws on forms, expressions and traditions of arts-based inquiry as vehicles for exploring our academic identities and unveiling our vulnerable, feminine/ist, embodied and multi-layered selves in our work and research (Black, Crimmins, and Henderson, 2017). Our performance includes a metaphorical enactment of our lived experiences of being, becoming and (un)becoming academics. Across this virtual presentation we include drama and visual/poetic representations of our experience, as well as oral vignettes from our (un)becoming stories. Within the performance we engage with autoethnography and collective memoir as feminist processes to explore and make manifest our lived experiences of academic measurement and constraint, and to illustrate the
(contained) liberation that has accompanied the stripping away of academic ‘agenders’ and masculine matrices of success. We reveal to each other our ‘tender pink underbellies’ and offer to one another our ‘landmarks of experience’ (Black & Loch, 2014). These help us to understand the impact of the academic machine and inspire us to find new ways of becoming. Our storying has and is generating friendship, kindness
and ethics of care and caring. Whilst the machine continues to influence our experience, we are creating spaces of pleasure and joy (Black, Crimmins and Jones, 2017). These storied, collaborative and kind processes have opened ways for us to respond to our in/vulnerable longings to be differently—more open, raw, exposed—in academia, and have facilitated the building of regenerative and restorative spaces for hope, agency, relationship and authenticity in the academy.
