uberisation of writing symposium, qpr april 2016
TRANSCRIPT
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Manufacturing “The New Academic”
via writing adviceor - being careful what we wish for?
Pat ThomsonThe University of Nottingham
QPR conference, April 2016
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Doctoral writing support can be seen as a largely unregulated market.This is congruent with (1) the shift of higher education to a commodity and (2) more general political changes.This positions the doctoral researcher as a ‘consumer’ – whether canny or naïve – and the issue of quality as either external or self-designed regulation, or as ‘consumer advice’.
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The proliferation of doctoral writing support can be seen as requiring the doctoral researcher to become highly reflexive about everyday choices. This is congruent with a view of a risk/reflexively modern society.The doctoral researcher must decide on quality - whose advice to follow, which people are trustworthy. The doctoral researcher becomes their own actuary, a calculating self.
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The provision of writing advice draws attention to the importance of production of texts of various types and quality. This positions the doctoral researcher as performative. Performativity is a hallmark of contemporary universities and workplaces more generally. Writing advice supports the production of the performative worker - regardless of its quality?
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• The provision of writing (and other) support positions the doctoral researcher as the one who reads for quality and manages their writing/the doctorate – the self disciplining academic?
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The proliferation of writing support advice of variably quality encourages the doctoral researchers and early career academic to get into the game themselves – forming entrepreneurial subjects?
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• Concerns about quality of doctoral writing cannot be divorced from the changes in higher education - the shift to highly performative, self-managing academic subjects working in increasingly instrumentalised institutions. • Nor can it be seen as separate from changes in wider society.• Without falling into a counsel of despair, what do we do, can we do,
about the uber writing situation?