Description
Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood is a collection of essays in which life writing scholars theorize their early-career, mid-career, and late-career experiences with the documents that shape their professional lives as women: the institutional auto/biography of employment letters, curriculum vitae, tenure portfolios, promotion applications, publication and conference bios, academic website profiles, and other self-authored narratives required by institutions to compete for opportunities and resources. The essays explore the privacy laws, peer review, disciplinary standards, digital media, and other standardizing tools, practices and policies that impact women’s self-construction at pivotal junctures at which they promote themselves in the spaces of academic careers.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Unlikely Autobiography of Women’s Career Documentation
LISA ORTIZ-VILARELLE
1 Vitae Statistics: The Anti-Autobiographical Imperative of Academic Self-Documentation
AIMEE MORRISON
2 Docile Bodies (of Work): Coaxing the Neoliberal Academic via the Online Researcher Profile
EMMA MAGUIRE
3 Sign ‘In the Space Provided’: Academic Email Signatures as Sites of Narrative, Branding, and Refusal?
MAY FRIEDMAN AND JENNIFER POOLE
4 Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards: Academic Women’s Efforts to Reframe Success
ALISON L. BLACK, SANDRA ELSOM, AND VICKI SCHRIEVER
5 ‘Making Spreadsheets Won’t Get You Tenure’: Autoethnography, Women Administrative Faculty, and the Genres That Make Them (In)Visible
CANDIS BOND
6 ‘Not Another ARC Summer’: Grant Applications and Life Narratives of Motherhood
KATE DOUGLAS
7 Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a Curriculum Vitae
LEENA KÄOSAAR
8 Getting an Academic Life: The Untranslatable, or How to Curate a Polish-Canadian CV
EVA C. KARPINSKI
9 Crossing the Lines: Using Personnel File Documents to Negotiate Embodied Space
CYNTHIA HUFF
10 How a Lifetime of Academic Administration Gave Me the Freedom to Write a Sisterlocking Academic Memoir: An Interview with Valerie Lee
VALERIE LEE WITH JULIA WATSON
11 The Poetic Cover Letter: On Crafting Paradoxical Personas
VICKI HALLETT
12 Mothers and Myths: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Account of Navigating Domestic Academic Life
VANESSA MARR AND JESS MORIARTY
13 Post-it as Praxis: Counternarrating Non-linearity and Multiplicity in Academic Lives
ELIZABETH RODRIGUES AND MARION WOLFE
14 Dossiers in Crip Time: Reclaiming a Space for Crazy in the Academy
ALLY DAY
15 The Same Self/ie: Blurring Academic, Creative, and Personal Identity through the Taking and Sharing of Self-Portraits
MARINA DELLER
16 Spilling Out of the Spaces Provided: How Occupying the Academic Office Becomes an Autobiographical Act
LAURA BEARD AND LISA ORTIZ-VILARELLE
