The Ambivalences of Becoming a Professor in Neoliberal Academia

Abstract

The article is a mode of drifting of experiences of an academically young critical scholar, a woman who recently became a tenure track professor of social justice and equality in education in a Nordic “model country of equality.” The concept of experience in this article is not used in the sense of individuals having experiences; rather, it is about an academic subject, a young academic professor, who constitutes herself and is constituted as an experiencing subject. She wanted to write about the process of seeing what framed her seeing. As a critical scholar, she wanted to understand more about how we come to think of, and recognize, particular statements and affects as belonging to certain discourses, and how we maintain but also challenge and change these discourses.