Performing Wild Time

Workshopping Friendship as Critical Autoethnographic Paraversity Method

Abstract

The focus of this autoethnographic paper is on its authors’ experiences of running a conference workshop on Friendship as Method in Paraversity scholarship development. Using the workshop sequence as a framework and context for the paper enables a developing focus on a key emerging analytic issue. This is the tensions around the conception, use and management of time between the Paraversity and the corporate academy. The authors show how friendship-based relations can be crucial for personal and academic thriving in promoting critical sensibilities and reflexivity. They argue, however, that, because it is normally associated with ineffective and unproductive time use, friendship is neither sufficiently encouraged nor taken seriously as a methodological topic in the corporate academy. Moreover, the corporate management of time and relations can inhibit the friendship-mediated development of critical and creative academics, the expansion and exploration of knowledge, and creative ways of generating knowledge.