Abstract

Using ethnographic life history methodologies, this study investigates the discursive construction of authenticity among visual and performing arts faculty after their participation in a program to learn entrepreneurial language and skills. It explores the ways in which the arts mediate the adoption of entrepreneurial language by these individuals and how this phenomenon complicates standard majority culture conceptions of academic disciplinary identity. There is a discourse within entrepreneurship that privileges the positivistic, objective, and scientific. These discourses force faculty members in the arts, whose knowledge claims distance them from this socially located space, to construct themselves linguistically as authentic via both form and content. At the same time, claims of authenticity based on an essentialized view of the self-expressive individual, claims rooted in the Romantic vision of the modern world, reinscribe conventional identity categories. This work speaks to how individuals' discursive constructions confound these structural positionings