The Trauma of Academia: on Attempts of Idiorrhythmic Contextualization

Abstract

The study focuses on three narratives as they unfold within the academy and contextualize academic trauma. The first examines the manifestations of the classical social science structural-agency dilemma in the university setting. The second reveals the mechanisms of balancing between the objectivity demanded of the academicians and their inherent subjectivity, in the suppression of which trauma is highlighted. The third theme, built around R. Barthes’ model of idiorrhythmia, offers a theoretical understanding of the academy as a social aggregate that attempts to harmonize individual and collective experience. The lines of argument are combined into a single theoretical model, focusing on different aspects of the manifestation of the same phenomenon — trauma. Trauma reveals itself in various aspects of academic life: in informal practices that contradict formal rules, in the demands for objectivity imposed on the social researcher under the conditions of their inalienable subjectivity, in the individualization of academic life while simultaneously attempting to universalize the experience of it. At the same time, the multiple contradictions of academic life prevent critical reflection on them. The study notes the advantages and drawbacks of the autoethnographic approach to overcoming these dilemmas in the situation of the academic’s reflection on their academic experience.