Positionings, policies and practices in the UK's current higher education sector in the context of neo-liberalism: an exploration of the subject position of the female learning support assistant, as they practise their art and craft in the everyday

Hayward, Beverley Marie (2019) Positionings, policies and practices in the UK's current higher education sector in the context of neo-liberalism: an exploration of the subject position of the female learning support assistant, as they practise their art and craft in the everyday. Doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

In the UK, 2019, neoliberalism’s collision with austerity is often the landscape in which education is situated. This is the context for a small cohort of women learning support assistants (LSAs) working at a UK university. Considered in this context are the subject positions and practices that overlap and intersect with the policies that shape higher education and disability. This unique milieu has produced a complex layering of shifting subject positionings for all in education, most notably in this research it is that of the LSA as artist-educator-practitioner and the resilient learner. In order to make sense of the multiple threads I weave together, I use the concepts developed by Foucault and Cixous. In a Foucauldian framework, I analyse discourse and how power/knowledges operate in the LSAs’ landscape. From a close reading of Cixous’s conceptualisation of the écriture feminine, I suggest that there are spaces outside of discourse facilitating transformations. The methodologies used are situated in an auto/ethnographical and auto/biographical approach, where I take up the subject position of the creative-feminine-bricoleur. As the bricoleur, the data collected from interviews and craft-artwork piece together a collage that curates a collective of shared experiences. Their practices and knowledge production, embodied in their (art)work, might otherwise have been lost as they make their exits from the academy. Therefore, this thesis makes a significant contribution to the limited knowledge produced and goes some way towards understanding the work of the LSA in this particular space and time. It is a story that documents the LSAs’ abilities to transgress and resist their positions of marginalisation over a twelve-year period before being made redundant. Accordingly, I celebrate our subjectivities as LSAs, artist-educators, and in this political act of writing, I hope to the right the social injustices that sought to oppress women’s place in the artworld and education.

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