Doubts, debates and discourses : an autoethnographic exploration of the changing space for a programme leader of a UK undergraduate programme (2007-15)

• Main Author: Raper, David
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Winchester 2019

The title, doubts, debates and discourses, is a reflection on eight years of programme leadership in a small UK university. This was during a time of change in policy and management at universities, and these changes challenged traditional notions of the university. In being shifted to a space that is more marketised and managerialist, I sensed dislocation and doubt in terms of my role and purpose in HE. The project is presented in the form of an autoethnography, which provides the researcher an opportunity to examine their lived, evocative (Ellis & Bochner, 2006), experiences. Autoethnography permits researchers to apply flexible modes of inquiry, and this paper utilises these possibilities through the use of a baroque ontology to question the realities of being programme leader. The project conceptualises the exploration of my experience as mapping a labyrinth, and employs a concept of the space as folded and fluid (Deleuze, 2006). My experience was explored within a dialogic approach, based on the ideas of Bakhtin (1981, 1986), to both create a dialogic focus on the describing and explaining realities, and to consider the chronotope of the university in the period I was programme leader. The collection of artefacts, in the form of baroque cabinets of curiosity, allowed for a novel approach to articulating colleagues’ perceptions of the space. My conclusions are that my experience of change in HE can be compared with a baroque mind-set, within the context of change, and competing means of understanding experience, based on the notion of faith, science and magic. But, as was the case in the seventeenth century, these understandings were not binary, or necessarily in conflict, but rather worked together in the form of a ‘both/and’ (Watson, 2008) relationship of ideas that are in anticipation of each other, and it is their interplay that moulds and forms our understandings.