Manufacturing “The New Academic”

via writing adviceor - being careful what we wish for?

Pat ThomsonThe University of Nottingham

QPR conference, April 2016

Doctoral writing support can be seen as a largely unregulated market.This is congruent with (1) the shift of higher education to a commodity and (2) more general political changes.This positions the doctoral researcher as a ‘consumer’ – whether canny or naïve – and the issue of quality as either external or self-designed regulation, or as ‘consumer advice’.

The proliferation of doctoral writing support can be seen as requiring the doctoral researcher to become highly reflexive about everyday choices. This is congruent with a view of a risk/reflexively modern society.The doctoral researcher must decide on quality - whose advice to follow, which people are trustworthy. The doctoral researcher becomes their own actuary, a calculating self.

The provision of writing advice draws attention to the importance of production of texts of various types and quality. This positions the doctoral researcher as performative. Performativity is a hallmark of contemporary universities and workplaces more generally. Writing advice supports the production of the performative worker - regardless of its quality?

• The provision of writing (and other) support positions the doctoral researcher as the one who reads for quality and manages their writing/the doctorate – the self disciplining academic?

The proliferation of writing support advice of variably quality encourages the doctoral researchers and early career academic to get into the game themselves – forming entrepreneurial subjects?

• Concerns about quality of doctoral writing cannot be divorced from the changes in higher education - the shift to highly performative, self-managing academic subjects working in increasingly instrumentalised institutions. • Nor can it be seen as separate from changes in wider society.• Without falling into a counsel of despair, what do we do, can we do,

about the uber writing situation?