Making a Spectacle of Oneself in the Academy Using the H-Index: From Becoming an Artificial Person to Laughing at Absurdities

This article offers autoethnographic insights into the consequences of making a spectacle of oneself in the audit culture of the academy. Spectacle 1 explores my experiences of using the h-index as part of an annual salary review and how this made me feel like an artificial person. Spectacle 2 shows how, at a conference, I used laughter to expose some absurdities of the h-index and felt better for doing so. Stories that tell different truths about ourselves in combination with the corporeality of laughter, I suggest, can assist us to re-attune ourselves and resist the process of becoming artificial persons.