Restorying Imposter Syndrome in the Early Career Stage: Reflections, Recognitions and Resistance

Abstract

This chapter explores imposter syndrome in relation to early career academic (ECA) experiences. Deploying life history methods, a group of ECAs reflect on feelings of imposterism, located as emerging from educational-occupational biographies in interaction with the structural inequities and working conditions of contemporary academia. ECAs can experience liminality, not perceiving themselves as having arrived as ‘real academics,’ exacerbated by market values which position ECAs as less valuable than those more likely to win high levels of grant income. Academic legitimacy is therefore called into question, generating responses of shame, non-belonging and fear—particularly for precariously employed colleagues. Yet being positioned on the periphery can facilitate critiques of academia’s hierarchical inequities and epistemic violence; this collaboration enabled resistance to individualised neoliberal subjectivities and exclusionary practices.