Suspended,Not Absent: Radical Reflexivity,Institutional Legibility and Interrupted Academic Lives

Abstract

Academic career interruption is often analysed through frameworks of penalty, attrition and productivity loss. This article reframes interruption as a condition of suspended institutional recognition rather than epistemic absence. Mobilising radical reflexivity as an analytic stance, it examines how academic identity persists as habitus and intellectual disposition while becoming temporarily illegible outside institutional contexts. Drawing on auto-socio-biographical writing as a mode of inquiry, the analysis explores domestic reflexive events, intergenerational class memory and survival entrepreneurship as sites where legibility and misrecognition are reconfigured. Rather than treating interruption as a temporal gap between periods of productivity, the article conceptualises suspension as an epistemic condition that reshapes how academic work is recognised, valued and rendered visible. Conceptually, it advances interruption as a condition of knowledge production, challenging dominant evaluative metrics of continuity, visibility and academic worth, and contributing to methodological debates in qualitative inquiry on reflexivity, embodiment and institutional power.