Abstract:
This thesis is a creative and critical autoethnographic study of the contemporary neoliberal university.
It draws on the arts-based methods of writing, poetry and photography to interrogate, reconceptualise
and disrupt traditional university practices. With the understanding that the contemporary university
exists within a neoliberalised system of marketized and privatised education, and that this system
informs how knowledge is known, organised and legitimised, it becomes increasingly important to ask
questions surrounding who and what the university is for, and what its future will, or could, look like.
Born out of a frustration towards neoliberal rationality and the institutional perpetuation of hegemonic
knowledge, this thesis aims to offer alternative ways of being, thinking and knowing from a convergent
space within and against the university. Utilising an arts-based autoethnographic methodology and
feminist post-structuralist theory, I was able to explore and collapse the physical, philosophical,
political and personal spaces of the university in order to blur the boundaries between these spaces,
whilst opening up possibilities for knowing and challenging conventional ways of researching.
The thesis is reconceptualised into an exhibition, its chapters become rooms, photographs interrupt
words, and poems emerge from reconceptualising and re-imagining. It is written from an embodied
self, a self that is vulnerable, honest and convoluted. It resists box ticking whilst ticking boxes. It’s
challenge is to practice the university differently whilst being enmeshed in the university’s practice.
This thesis invites the reader to see and think differently, to place the status quo into question, and to
draw on our individual and collective imagination with the hope of opening the world.
