Knitting as Metaphor for Work An Institutional Autoethnography to Surface Tensions of Visibility and Invisibility in the Neoliberal Academy

This article discusses the coauthors’ experiences as academic colleagues who took up knitting together, and the insights about contemporary complications and tensions of research and work that we developed through that practice. Adopting some of the tenets of ethnography and, more particularly, autoethnography and institutional ethnography, we ground our analysis in everyday encounters and routines in our academic workplace. Employing knitting as metaphor, we organize our discussion of findings as a series of tensions that are alternately evident and hidden in our work(place). We close by considering how our inquiry points to aspects of both similarity and uniqueness in relation to other work contexts and assists us in interpreting and understanding our academic work in the context of broader society.