‘The spirit of research has changed’: reverberations from researcher identities in managerial times

Five poetic transcriptions lie at the heart of this article. We intend that they will convey something of what it means and feels like to be an academic researcher in neoliberal universities such that we begin to notice this condition and its effects more acutely. Our poetic texts began their existence as fast-written prose responses to the question: ‘If you say to yourself, “I am a researcher”, how do you feel, what do you think about and what associations do you make?’ In this article, we foreground an exploration of the poetic mode of representing research data through example and exegesis. We argue this kind of interpretive work is effective because it strikes a different kind of relationship between empirical data and reader, one that encourages ‘reverberation’ – a resounding way of noticing that draws upon our bodily and emotional reactions to a text as well as our intellectual ones. Hence, a methodology of poetic transcriptions may be especially capable of evoking for the reader some of the problematic, although variable, effects of the Anglo-Western neoliberal – or ‘managerialist’ – university on the hearts and minds of its beleaguered academic subjects.