ABSTRACT
Cautious about the dangers of ‘authentic experience’, this chapter uncreatively assembles accounts of the complexities of women’s lives in academia. Online sources of information about navigating academia as a woman become elements for experimentation. Purposely juxtaposing official university web accounts of valuing equity, diversity and flexible working arrangements with online newspaper and blog accounts of the lives of women in universities, the tensions, contradictions, perplexities (and potential liberties) of women’s lives in academia are foregrounded. These words are re-arranged into a form akin to a poem.
To deliberately sort, manipulate, move and manage words from online texts performs and parodies the sorting, manipulations, movements and management strategies of the corporate university, even as there are concurrent, latent modes of agency at work. These new assemblages may not always make sense, but may create something different. In these re-arrangements, the reader (and writer) may become disoriented, amused and impelled to re-think habitual modes of reading, writing and living our interdependent lives.
