ABSTRACT

Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood is a collection of essays in which life writing scholars theorize their early-career, mid-career, and late-career experiences with the documents that shape their professional lives as women: the institutional auto/biography of employment letters, curriculum vitae, tenure portfolios, promotion applications, publication and conference bios, academic website profiles, and other self-authored narratives required by institutions to compete for opportunities and resources. The essays explore the privacy laws, peer review, disciplinary standards, digital media, and other standardizing tools, practices and policies that impact women’s self-construction at pivotal junctures at which they promote themselves in the spaces of academic careers.

chapter |18 pages

Introduction

The Unlikely Autobiography of Women's Career Documentation

chapter 1|17 pages

19Vitae Statistics

The Anti-Autobiographical Imperative of Academic Self-Documentation

chapter 2|18 pages

Docile Bodies (of Work)

Coaxing the Neoliberal Academic via the Online Researcher Profile

chapter 3|14 pages

Sign ‘In the Space Provided’

Academic Email Signatures as Sites of Narrative, Branding, and Refusal?

chapter 4|17 pages

Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards

Academic Women's Efforts to Reframe Success

chapter 5|15 pages

‘Making Spreadsheets Won't Get You Tenure'

Autoethnography, Women Administrative Faculty, and the Genres That Make Them (In)Visible

chapter 6|15 pages

‘Not Another ARC Summer’

Grant Applications and Life Narratives of Motherhood

chapter 8|14 pages

Getting an Academic Life

The Untranslatable, or How to Curate a Polish-Canadian CV

chapter 9|16 pages

Crossing the Lines

Using Personnel File Documents to Negotiate Embodied Space

chapter 11|14 pages

The Poetic Cover Letter

On Crafting Paradoxical Personas

chapter 12|20 pages

Mothers and Myths

A Collaborative Autoethnographic Account of Navigating Domestic Academic Life

chapter 13|18 pages

202Post-it as Praxis

Counternarrating Non-linearity and Multiplicity in Academic Lives

chapter 14|17 pages

Dossiers in Crip Time

Reclaiming a Space for Crazy in the Academy

chapter 15|16 pages

The Same Self/ie

Blurring Academic, Creative, and Personal Identity through the Taking and Sharing of Self-Portraits

chapter 16|14 pages

Spilling Out of the Spaces Provided

How Occupying the Academic Office Becomes an Autobiographical Act