K(not) more than threads: tracing the tangled affective lifeworlds of associate professors

AbstractAt the heart of the neoliberal university, affective energies linked to roles, responsibilities, expectations, policies, and bodies impact the atmosphere of university life. Associate professors report the highest levels of dissatisfaction among all ranks, as they find themselves entangled in affective knots. To understand these knots in associate professor lifeworlds, we solicit their accounts and reveal affective pain points in the neoliberal university. In this paper, we illuminate the affective knots of melancholy, stasis, and death, giving voice, feeling, and texture to associate professors’ dissatisfaction within the neoliberal institution. However invisible, these affective knots threaten the university’s teaching, learning, scholarship, and social transformation.Keywords: Higher educationneoliberalismaffectassociate professorssocial inequalityacademia Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 These reflections on cross stitching come from the lived experience of the second author with special care given to the experience of finding knots in your thread while stitching. The reflections are used throughout the piece as a metaphor to make the elusive affective knots that develop in the lived experiences of associate professors more tangible and offer shape to their experiences that often get overlooked.2 For the purposes of this study, we use the terms “associate professors,” “tenured professors” and “mid-career faculty” interchangeably.3 By bodies, what we are talking about in this essay is primarily human bodies. That said there is no need theoretically to limit as such.4 Since conducting our interviews, more has been written about performative listening and nonrepresentational research methods in interviewing (Willink & Shukri, Citation2018). At the time we conducted the interviews, we had yet to theorize these methods or realize the degree to which affect would play such a constitutive role in our findings. As a result, our analysis of our already collected interviews was limited to affective transcription. In future work, we can take fuller advantage of the nonrepresentational methods before and during data collect.5 For example, Berheide and Walzer (Citation2014) and Mullen (Citation2017) found that women are much more likely than men to have served as department chair before being promoted to full professor and are more likely to have experienced delays getting to full professor because of this administrative work.Additional informationNotes on contributorsKate WillinkKate Willink is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Denver.Keeley HunterKeeley Hunter is a Communication Faculty at Arapahoe Community College.Hava GordonHava Gordon is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Denver.