Reflexivity, the picturing of selves, the forging of methods

This paper addresses alternative models for a reflexive methodology and examines the ways in which doctoral students have appropriated these texts in their theses. It then considers the indeterminate qualities of those appropriations. The paper offers a new account of reflexivity as 'picturing', drawing analogies from the interpretation of two very different pictures, by Velázquez and Tshibumba. It concludes with a more open and fluid account of reflexivity, offering the notion of 'signature', and drawing on the work of Gell and also Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the inherently specific nature of 'concepts' situated in space and time

On being and becoming the monstrous subject of measurement

This chapter explores the mechanisms by which academic subjects willingly make themselves amenable to measurement. It explores how measurement is deployed via practices that commodify academic labour and promote an individualising and competitive milieu that is simultaneously experienced as repellent and desirable. In particular, it examines the complicity of the academic subject, who becomes increasingly willing to be formed and to form herself into a fi gure that might be described as the measured monster of the contemporary university. Exhibits from job and promotion applications, software programs and citation collation websites are explored for traces of this monstrous subject. Monstrous, in this sense, is less like the monstrous creature of great leathery wings and a horny head, or the misshapen freak, than the neat clean numerical subject delineated by measurements