Wed, 9 February 2022 15:00 – 16:00 GMT
Dr Maddie Breeze of Queen Margaret University will discuss her work on ‘imposter syndrome’ among students and staff in higher education (HE)
This talk is about ‘imposter syndrome’ among students and staff in higher education (HE), and aims to re-think feeling like an imposter as a public feeling (Cvetkovich 2012) rather than a private or individual problem. Imposter syndrome is anecdotally ubiquitous in HE, but more evidence is needed to understand how it is felt across different social locations, power differentials, and hierarchies in the university. Drawing on feminist sociologies of emotion, research on HE inequalities, and queer affect studies, imposter syndrome as a public feeling involves three steps: (1) Situating imposter syndrome in a socio-political context of inequalities and exclusions in higher education. (2) Analyzing imposter syndrome as something like a ‘diagnostic of power’ (Abu-Lughod, 1990) asking what it can tell us about e.g. university governance (3) Approaching imposter syndrome as a potential resource for collective action and agency. The paper reflects on a workshop in which participants are tasked with responding to vignettes in the form of letters from differently positioned academics seeking advice on their imposter feelings. Participants were challenged to develop their responses through a sociological frame, collectivising, rather than individualising, the problem. As such the paper investigates possibilities for shifting, in practice, between individual, institutional, and societal understandings of imposter syndrome in HE and traces the limits of advice for ‘overcoming’ it.