A day at the office at the University of Borderville: an ethnographic short story

This paper offers a narrative, an ethnographic short story, which the author created from material that she generated through extensive fieldwork and interviews with Australian and Danish researchers in the social sciences and humanities. The material was generated as part of the author’s doctoral study. Inspired by the detailed descriptions of everyday life in the (natural) science laboratory, she offers an ethnographic narrative of a (possible) day in the social science and humanities ‘laboratory’. She follows an actor through an ‘ordinary day’ to explore how ‘academicity’, that is, culturally intelligible academic subject positions and practices, comes into existence through everyday interaction and activities. The story explores the ways in which the constructions of what it means to be ‘the right kind of person’ in an academic context work invisibly, insidiously, insistently, in everything academics do, say and feel.