Care-full academia: From autoethnographic narratives to political manifestos for collective action

Abstract

Building on sociolinguistic analyses of the speech-act of coming out in relation to sexual or gender identity (for example, Livia & Hall 1997) which explored the identity-declaring and identity-making aspects and the consequences of such an utterance, this paper examines the speech act of ‘coming out as a carer’ within the academy, whereby workers declare to their professional community that those acts of care which are generally relegated to the private sphere have a bearing on their professional performances. This illocutionary act of self-definition, which radically and problematically breaches the fourth wall of the private-public divide at work, has several important consequences both negative and positive, for the individual carer but also potentially for the institution and its practices. As in the case of coming out in terms of sexuality or gender, this paper takes the position that such illocutionary acts ‘have the potential force of altering reality for both the speaker and the listener’ (Chirrey 2003). In other words, they have perlocutionary effect.

In this case, taking an autoethnographic approach at first, I examine the cost such a personally and politically radical act has upon the individual carer who thereby publicly puts into question her own professionalism and capacity for excellence in an arena in which excellence is embodied by the old monastic model of the university as once populated by single, male scholars, who, by definition, are free of all such care (Moreau 2016). The personal cost of this breach of the division between public and private, which Hanna Arendt (1958) saw as ‘perverse’, and correctly articulated to questions of freedom and slavery, appears to be the price of institutional change with regard to carers, and, given the personal cost, is usually undertaken only in extremis and in despair rather than voluntarily.

This paper proposes, as the most effective way of moving beyond the cost-heavy act of individual comings-out, a study of institutional attitudes to such revelations and narratives at their most obvious (although simultaneously most concealed), suggesting that one particularly appropriate arena for such a study might be the academic interview in which normative ideas of excellence are most rigorously and obviously reiterated and reenforced because of the structure of the interview and the consequences of the hiring act for the politics and practices of the university, despite institutions’ commitments to achieve inclusion, including through hiring practices and attendant strategies for interview practice (see for instance Tulshyan 2024. It proposes that an examination of attitudes towards care self-outing in interview contexts, often acts of explanation regarding non-normative aspects of the vita, might reveal entrenched ideas about care in the institution itself. On such data, more effective strategies of mitigation might be built.