‘The Red Shoes’ in Salem: unnatural performances and witch-hunts of the ‘feminine’ in Higher Education

Do you know Hans Anderson’s folktale, ‘The Red Shoes’? A young girl ends up in the wrong shoes caught up in a continuous and deadly destructive dance. It is all about how we can be seduced to follow ways of ‘being’ not our own, often alien to our instincts, in order to conform to another’s rules and regimes and which become deadly threatening to our wellbeing (Acton & Glasgow, 2015). In telling tales we can make sense of events and who we are in them, hence wishing to explore this story in order to question the relationship between the ‘red shoes’ and what happens when ‘Academics are persuaded to teach the same way, complete the same forms, make applications to the same funding bodies…in short to reproduce the same practices in order to re/organise themselves to fit the template of best practice as this is defined by management’ (Davies & Bansel, 2010:7). In my experience, the red shoes of ‘Performativity’ results in chronic anxiety, greater impositions of control; and far less playful and significantly more dour attitudes to educational practices, concepts of professionalism, and research endeavours (Kinman, et al, 2006). And if these shoes don’t fit us, how perhaps there are too many parallels with the witch-hunts of the seventeenth century and the debasement of other ways of being and knowing (Shotwell, 2011) which now abound within new figurative sites of Salem (Miller, 1968).