On the thresholds of legitimacy : a collaborative exploration of being and becoming academic

The methodology that we use, collective biography, brings together a group of researchers around a topic of shared interest to generate and interrogate specific memories of lived experience in terms of the rationalities and discursive resources through which experiences come to make ‘sense’ and how we might understand them otherwise. Various collective biography projects have examined gendered subjectivities, discourse and material and affective spaces within a post-structuralist paradigm (Davies and Gannon 2006, 2009, 2012), and most recently women’s experiences in the neoliberal university (Charteris et al. 2016a, b; Gannon et al. 2015; O’Connor et al. 2015). In its collaborative processes, collective biography provides a feminist critique of the individualism and competition of neoliberal subjectivities and destabilises the privatisation of research outputs in academic capitalism (Gannon et al. 2015; Wyatt et al. 2017).