It Has Been Handled: A Story about Ruling Relations and Power in the University Setting

This article draws on an experience of online bullying in the university setting to make sense of the ways that universities are embedded in, and subject to, ruling relations that shape and limit their power in situations of context collapse. This experience took place over two months in early 2023, when the author was repeatedly bullied on Twitter by a classmate who claimed her research on J.K. Rowling’s amplification of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) was a “misogynistic hate crime.” These events are framed as a series of context collapses where seemingly solid constructs, like the ideologically neutral classroom or the disciplinary power of the university itself, themselves collapsed when faced with the unique questions posed by the events that occurred. Through an institutional autoethnography of these experiences, the ruling relations the university uses to make sense of the ways it wields power and attempts to apply justice are exposed.

Accepted pending revisions at the Journal of Autoethnography