ABSTRACT
Although she dresses in a ‘capable and confident’ lipstick and, ties back her ‘I’m all over it’ hair, it takes all the strength she has to carry her chin up.
Inside she feels paper-thin, her ribs are made of pipe cleaners, her spine made of liquorice. She’s had the stuffing knocked out of her. She’s spent.
She’s a casual academic.
This auto-ethnographic narrative is written so that stories of academia are not solely authored by the victors, to expose the myth that academia operates a meritocracy and so that other women will not feel ashamed of their academic (non)careers.
