Becoming academic: a reflection on doctoral candidacy

Higher education policy studies over the last decade have addressed the detrimental effects of neoliberalism, new public managerialism and audit cultures on the nature, organisation, form and meanings of higher education at a macro level. This article addresses the micro-practices through which the author, as doctoral candidate and knowledge worker, understands his academic subjectivity to have been constituted and lived. It foregrounds the practices through which the academy and academic knowledge, academic work and standards, and academic subjectivities are constituted, regulated, embodied and performed. It argues for resistance to the reduction of the outcomes of candidature to metrics and economic indicators, and recognises that this resistance produces a necessary ambivalence about academic labour in the enterprise university.