Becoming an Academic Researcher

Abstract

The neo-liberal restructuring of academia justifies research concerning what constitutes academic work, what it means to be an academic researcher and how researchers manoeuvre in academia. The aim of this article is to investigate how this reshaping of higher education affects how research careers are formed and impacts on ‘becoming researchers’. The authors analyse the processes of becoming an academic subject by means of detailed cartographies of 14 early career researchers and their experiences of making a career in academia. The authors see the nomadic subject as being in a becoming process of constant change and mediation between different levels of power and desire. She or he constantly searches and shifts between a conscious desire and unconscious needs. By using three intersected themes — ‘feeling a bit alone’, ‘I do “my own thing”’ and ‘I decided to move’ — the authors have identified how these 14 researchers, in the processes of becoming an academic subject, are driven by desires that are making it difficult for them to understand and read their situations. There appears to be a tension between how they understand what they need to do and what they actually do. In conclusion, the authors illustrate how these nomadic researchers are made into unproductive individuals who underperform. Their otherness is often understood as and proclaimed to be self-made. That is why academics in a nomadic subject position often seem to blame themselves for their lack of ability to adjust to institutional demands for performativity.