‘Imposter Syndrome’ as a Public Feeling in Higher Education
Call for Chapter Abstract submissions 31st July 2018; send to [log in to unmask]
Editors: Dr Michelle Addison Newcastle University, Dr Maddie Breeze, Prof Yvette Taylor,
University of Strathclyde
Aims and Scope: The collection provides new interdisciplinary analyses of ‘Imposter
Syndrome’, exploring sensations of not belonging, fraudulence and feeling out of place.
Situated in Higher Education, the focus here is on how imposter syndrome becomes
translated, negotiated and refused as an individual problem. In contemporary higher
educational times, negotiating such a ‘syndrome’ might mean ‘working on the self’ in a
climate of competitiveness, and endless metric measure (Addison, 2016). Inhabiting the
‘right kind’ of presence in Higher Education is not straightforward and can, engender a
sensation of imposterism: this collection asks why this matters and how these senses can
be negotiated and resisted, and located within a broader educational economy beyond
the individual ‘imposter’.
We are interested in how feeling like an imposter might be identified, inhabited, resisted,
and re-worked. As editors we are centrally concerned with re-thinking ‘imposterism’ as a
public issue in Higher Education, asking who gets to fit in and get ahead and what impact
these practices have on HE inclusions, exclusions, and marginalisations. This innovative
collection will bring together discussions and analysis of feeling like an ‘imposter’ through
intersections of class, race, and gender, in order to re-think imposter syndrome as a public
feeling (Breeze, 2018) in higher education and academic labour.
The collection will locate academic 'imposter syndrome' in both a social and political
context, reflect on long histories of working class, queer and Black feminist work on the
affective dynamics of structural inequalities in higher education (Taylor, 2012, 2014). It
aims to further these conversations with a critical focus on contemporary career
categories, including the ‘early career’, ‘mid’ and ‘established’ categories (Breeze and
Taylor, 2018). We ask questions around who is visibly marked as an imposter and who
can choose to occupy or speak from such a position, and on how claiming a peripheral or
marginalized position in academia relates to access, belonging, and complicity within
exclusionary and stratifying institutions.
Key Objectives
1. To understand the socio-political context of feeling like an imposter in the
inequality regimes of Higher Education.
2. To explore what feeling like an imposter can tell us about the neoliberal
structure and governance of contemporary UK academia, and international
study.
3. To illuminate whether, and how, feeling like an imposter can be thought of not
as an individual problem to be overcome, but rather as a resource for political
action and a site of agency,
4. To understand knowledge and practices of (not) fitting in and getting ahead in
Higher Education
5. To gain insight into the impact of emotion work on a person’s health and
wellbeing whilst managing feelings of imposterism
6. To identify mechanisms of stigma, shame, and value in Higher Education
7. To explore imposter syndrome across career stages and categories, and the
status hierarchies of HEIs
Timeline
31st July 2018 Submission of abstracts (250 words) and brief bios (100 words)
30th August 2018 Notification of acceptance
30th March 2019 Submission of full chapters
May 2019 Return of reviewers’ comments
Aug 2019 Second (revised) chapter submission
Oct 2019 Manuscript submission to Palgrave
Please send your abstract, bio, along with your title and institutional affiliation to
[log in to unmask] for 31/07/2018.
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the BSA-BOURDIEU-STUDY-GROUP list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=BSA-BOURDIEU-STUDY-GROUP&A=1
|
