Alienating Apparatuses: Behind the Scenes of the Neoliberal Academic Assemblage

Abstract

In this article, I (re)consider a series of behind-the-scenes encounters with my institution’s thesis editor to explore how my ideas and desires for my dissertation intra-acted with and were rendered impossible by the institutional assemblage. My dissertation explores how stories—used in the context of teacher education, where they serve as necessary vehicles for emerging educators to consider classroom practices—operate as apparatuses. After playing with a variety of ways to instigate a failure of verisimilitude, one way the apparatus-ness of stories is made visible, I landed on working diffraction as a narrative device. An early visit to the thesis editor, the institutional representative responsible for enforcing formatting standards, thwarted these formatting choices. This article considers the entangled apparatuses of academia, those that insist on intelligibility and those that resist it, and the ways they work behind the scenes to limit possible knowings and alienate scholars from their own scholarship.