ABSTRACT
Alexia’s vignette shares her non-traditional pathway into academia, and sociology specifically. Always a passionate operator, she now wants to impact students how she has been, blurring the line where the pay ends, and intellectual practice stops. Approaching academia from the outside, and publishing research without capital incentive, freed Alexia to think deeper about her work and reinforced that it exists separately from capital. Through the metaphor of ‘the non-collaborative academic’, based on the Autonomist concept of non-collaboration, this miniature self-portrait reveals with sharp honesty a process of affirming the creative capacity of her own affected and emotional labour in her unconventional approach.
