The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded 'knowledge economy optimism' (Cuthbert & Molla, 2015). Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises of the 'knowledge economy' on its knowledge workers. We extend previous analyses of the discursive constitution of academic subjectivity (Petersen, 2007a, 2007b) through the figuration of 'emotional knots' (Thrift, 2008, p. 206) as we explore three stories of the constitution of academic subjectivities in institutional spaces. These stories were composed in a collective biography (Davies & Gannon, 2006) workshop, where participants constructed accounts of the physical, social, material and imaginative dimensions of subjectivities in the 'academic-city' of higher education spaces. Identifying moments of 'perturbation' (Berlant, 2011, p. 6) in these stories, this paper considers the micro-contexts of 'becoming academic': how bodies, affects and relations become knotted in precise times and places. The figuration of 'knots' provides an analytical strategy for unravelling how subjects affectively invest in the promises of spaces saturated with 'knowledge economy' discourses, and moments of impasse where these promises ring hollow. We examine the affective bargains made in order to flourish in the corporate university, and identify spaces of possibility where 'optimistic projections' of alternative futures might be formed (Berlant, 2011, p. 263). These stories and their analysis complicate the metanarrative of 'knowledge economy optimism' that is currently driving higher 'Third', Kath replied. 'Oh, I thought you'd at least be on 16', she said, looking a bit taken aback. 'You do have a view and parking space though, right?' Sue jumped in. 'No, I wish though,' Kath smiled. 'How do you get those?' 'I think it all depends on your academic rank. You're a senior academic, right?' Sue asked. 'Yes,' Kath replied. 'Career academic or practitioner?' Sally asked. Kath made some rather inane comment about her career and then tried to turn the conversation away from parking to finding out more about the students she was going to be teaching in the next couple of weeks. However, the focus quickly turned to 'academia' again and writing, publications and quality research outputs, and then back to office size and the number of windows one had. Kath's mind wandered back to the previous universities she had worked in. Yes, I think I knew how to act, speak, think, write and feel in those worlds and yes there were hierarchies, levels and titles which dictated place, space and mindsetsbut not minds. She thought of Deb and Rose and Suzy and Andy… and all the meaningful discussions they had had about their students, their teaching, their research, their learning. The word 'academic' just wasn't there. It wasn't needed. It didn't matter. She asked herself, am I losing that self, that voice? She was becoming academic. The story of Kath captures the fluxes experienced in the formation of...