Stringing and storying: a post-personal feminist meandering on finding your place-space in the academy

This chapter employs String Figuring, knotting-with and place-space to highlight the gendered experiences of women in traditionally masculine spaces of academia. String Figuring, knotting-with and place-space are a transdisciplinary feminist praxis where post-personal stories provide an opportunity to highlight the happenings which are generally unseen or unspoken. A commitment to transdisciplinary feminist practices is a politically inflected act – one which highlights the affective and material issues faced when finding ones place-space in the Academy. These experiences include affective and physical more-than-human dimensions which mark, regulate, and discipline bodies. They also affirmatively attune bodies in collective connections that invigorate and nourish. Through a series of connected and relational post-personal experiences of the affirmative and destructive happenings, illuminated using Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of String Figuring, the chapter highlights how bodies are shaped and positioned in academia. It explores how post-personal stories reveal the impact of the ways bodies are positioned, enabled, and constrained. The chapter acknowledges the issues faced by women, revealing productive ethical affirmative entanglements that become a response-able alternative to destructive happenings and positionings.