Testimonio and the idios kosmos of the contemporary academic: charting the possibilities for pleasure in personal accounts from inside the academy

Testimonio and the idios kosmos of the contemporary academic: charting the possibilities for pleasure in personal accounts from inside the academy

This past decade has seen an increasing focus on the effects and proliferation of incivility, academic bullying, workplace harassment and similar other disruptive workplace behaviours within the university (Fogg 2008). Yet despite this growing awareness and charting of the costs of these behaviours - both individual and organisational - it remains that the maltreatment of academics, formulation of flawed and ineffective policy responses and the maintenance of organisational structures that encourage negative interpersonal behaviours remain entrenched (Giroux 2014; Chatterjee and Maira 2014). Within current contexts of tight funding climates, the questioning of the role of higher education within wider social contexts and epistemic changes in the shape and function of the university-as-institution, the university has become a space of outright competition and destructive interpersonal encounters.
Yet, the university remains a place of desirable employment and creativity. This chapter turns attention to charting the use and usefulness of testimonio writing as a possible method for recording experiences from the contemporary university in an effort to identify the pleasure that remains in academic labours. Rather than miring its concerns in the further diagnosis of, or lament for, the state the contemporary university finds itself in, this chapter will seek to explore testimonio as a method for recalling the authors’ experiences of academic life as a space of jouissance. In short, testimonio will be exhibited as a method of utility for excavating a sense of the individual via the production of collegial personal narratives that seek insight into the pleasurable aspects of the university, now. In charting the idios kosmos of the authors’ personal experiences of the university via testimonio, a sense of the affective, personal and inner experiences of the contemporary university as a site of collegial possibility will be uncovered.

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