Maddie Breeze – “All Imposters? Contemporary Circulations of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education”

Maddie Breeze is a sociologist and Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of Education, University of Strathclyde. Her book Seriousness in Women’s Roller Derby was awarded the 2016 Philip Abram’s Memorial Prize by the British Sociological Association and she has researched and published on: imposter syndrome as a public feeling, feminist collaborations across academic career stages, widening participation, gender and sport, and young people’s political participation.

In this talk I begin by considering imposter syndrome as a ‘public feeling’ (Cvetkovich 2007, 2012) in higher education. Feeling like an imposter is anecdotally ubiquitous among academics, and is commonly understood to involve sensations of not belonging, of out-of-place-ness, and the conviction that one’s professional competence, is fundamentally fraudulent, that it is only a matter of time before this is discovered, before being found out. Feeling like an imposter involves the suspicion that signifiers of professional success have somehow been awarded by mistake or achieved through a convincing performance, a kind of deception. Drawing on Cvetkovich’s work on depression, I argue that thinking of imposter syndrome as a public feeling involves three steps. Firstly, putting it in social and political context, mapping imposter syndrome according to the intersectional inequality regimes that characterise contemporary UK HE. Secondly, asking what feeling like an imposter can tell us about shifts in the structure and governance of UK HE including the oft-diagnosed new managerialism and neoliberalisation, primarily marketization, casualization, and cultures of audit and measurement. Thirdly, re-thinking imposter syndrome, not as an individual deficiency or private problem of faulty self-esteem to be overcome, but instead as a resource for action and site of agency in contemporary UK HE. I explore these three steps by presenting a short story about feeling like an imposter; a piece of semi-fictional auto-ethnography, which draws on precedents for using personal narrative to analyse academic labour, as well as those for writing fiction as a mode of inquiry. The talk concludes by considering the implication of making ‘imposter syndrome’ public, in particular by asking how claims to ambivalent insider/outside positions circulate in everyday academic talk.