In Celebration of the Undisciplined Feminist Academic: A Fox and Seagoat in Dialogue

This chapter brings into dialogue the career journeys of two feminist academics who came late to academic life and labored to navigate institutional belonging and advancement from the margins. Drawing on individual and collaborative feminist autoethnography, we reflect on how we have come to inhabit academic spaces as feminist insiders and outsiders. We deploy zoomorphic metaphor as a mode of feminist sensemaking, articulating and interrogating our academic identities through the figures of the fox and the seagoat. Together, these creatures inhabit the crepuscular spaces of academia between discipline and inter-discipline, conformity and creativity, control and care. Our dialogic autoethnography becomes a site of feminist self-making, grounded in mutual recognition and respect. In this chapter, through our winding paths to academic leadership, we mobilize the trope of the ‘undisciplined' academic to reflect on career formation, belonging, and feminist surviving and thriving within the contemporary university.