In this paper the four authors explore the experience of school bullying, drawing on stories of bullying generated in a collective biography workshop and on fictional accounts of bullying. They counter the current trend of reading bullying as individual or family pathology with a post-structuralist analysis of subjectification and power.

The reformed neoliberal universities, with their micromanagement of ever-increasing productivity, competitiveness, and individualization, have recently been described as unhealthy institutions, creating conditions that incite incivility, workplace bullying, and other forms of employee abuse. In this article, the authors employ collective biography as a form of “diffractive methodology” in order to provide new, theoretically driven insights into workplace bullying in neoliberal universities. Drawing on the concepts of intra-activity and performativity, the authors examine bullying in universities as an intra-active process that informs and is informed by the desire of an individual to be recognized and to perform as a viable academic subject—one who is professional, flexible, and accountable within a neoliberal environment.

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Drawing upon and infused by the 'micropolitical' moves of Deleuze and Guattari, this article arose out of a participative workshop at the 2018 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry that took up Braidotti's proposition to explore how collaborative writing 'like breathing, [is] not held into the mould of linearity, or the confines of the printed page, but move[s] outwards, out of bounds, in webs of encounters with ideas, others, texts' (Braidotti, 2013, p. 166). We worked with the view that collaborative writing is a political act, a 'minor gesture' (Manning, 2016), a world making that opens up to the new and challenges the sedimented. This is an article that engages in and with collaborative writing, that dances with ideas of what collaborative writing might be and, crucially, what it might do.