Facing Inwards and Outwards at Once: The liminal temporalities of academic perfomativity

Abstract

Through metaphor (as ever), we explore some aspects of the mutually implicated con-text, ideo-text, ego-text and sub-text to be found in the contemporary UK academic lifeworld. To this end, carefully selected data from a qualitative study of the changing nature of academic work in Britain is analysed to speculate about how a discourse of performativity (‘the RAE’) has been ‘translated’ into what appear to be ‘normalized’ legitimate forms of organizing and social action. By illustrating how these forms are reflected in academics’ liminal ‘work talk’, it emerges that one possible effect of this holographic process is a spatio-temporal constriction of the academic ‘lifeworld’.