ABSTRACT
The critical narrative autoethnography seeks to show how reader academics might navigate the narrow spaces of agency, slipping past the monsters while staying on course toward adventure, higher meaning, and life purpose. The appropriate response, of course, is to shoot straight through the middle of the narrow spaces, with all the skill, courage, and fortitude the crew can muster. Meanwhile, university budgets were shrinking (except for administrative salaries, which were going into full “bloat” mode), full-time faculty were replaced with part-timers, and the pressure to be “productive” intensified. Of course, beyond neoliberal and bureaucratic regimes of control, other constraints inhibit the creative action a department head (chair) can take, including administrative power, set policies and procedures, faculty self-governance and faculty intransigence, institutionalized structures. As knowledgeable but hyper-busy agents operating within this narrow space, reader often find ourselves just rowing, as if hopeless, caught up in the repetition of it–working, working, working, counting, counting, counting, but never really gaining.
