Unruly academic women: laughter, affect, and resistance

Laughter is a socio-embodied phenomenon that is often found in research accounts. Rather than simply relegate these moments to the square brackets of an interview transcript this chapter explores the affective dimensions of laughter. Once constructed as emotion-free zones, prefaced on masculine notions of rationality and objectivity, universities today have embraced the emotional dimensions of organisational change. However, turns towards the affective and emotional in higher education have become incorporated into neoliberal practices, which have in effect equated and legitimated emotions and leadership with brain science and appropriated gender essentialism. This chapter returns to affect and emotion to reveal how the resonances of unbridled, ‘unruly’ and ‘willful’ laughter of academic women disrupts the affective economies that govern the production of knowledge