Lines of Flight in the Neoliberal University

This chapter presents an analytic autoethnographic self-study of a 35-year academic career lived through successive waves of neoliberal reform in teacher education and in a research-intensive university. I theorise academic precarity as durational and atmospheric, not only episodic contract insecurity, but also as an ambient condition produced through audit regimes, continual restructuring, and the managerial recalibration of what counts as academic value. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the apparatus of capture, the plane of consistency, and the rhizome, and taking Deleuzian cartography as both method and analytic orientation, I map how an academic life is continually territorialised (made legible, measurable, and governable) and deterritorialised (unsettled, redistributed, and re-made) within a neoliberal institution. The analysis shows, first, how capture operates pedagogically by recoding diverse academic practices into comparable metrics and by producing an overcoded self that governs the lived academic body. Second, it shows how planes of consistency, assembled through collegial relations, teaching communities, and international collaborations, function as fragile refuges that keep scholarly life viable when institutional conditions intensify. Third, it traces modest lines of flight, the creative, relational, and pedagogical re-orientations that do not escape the institution but reconfigure what is possible within it. Methodologically, the chapter advances self-study as continuous mapping, an unfinished cartography of shifting assemblages rather than a settled narrative of individual resilience. In doing so, it shows how self-study can function not only as analysis of academic precarity, but also as a practice of re-orienting the scholarly self within it.