Like tock follows tick… academics will regularly receive requests for short bios. Their purpose is to help others to ‘place’ them, in relation to a heuristic model, trotted out to help them decide, in a flash to beat the competition for time and attention, and to flag whether attending to what this disembodied ‘personal profile’ promises: an interesting tidbit, or intellectually useful shaft of light.

Writing as heat and light…

Profiles pithily describe a credible academic self through their body of work — and — and here is the nub — rarely are they all-purpose. Each profile, like baking flours, needs to deliver different things so that the finished product (i.e. engagement and knowledge exchange) – has the desired attributes — due to the leavening, lightness, crumb structure, crust thickness and flavour expected during the process of introducing the heat — the interpretive friction, the symbolic interactionist crucible — hell, if I meant the tempering and annealing flame of a hot oven, shouldn’t I be free to use such words and images? Let me flame on with this line of thought before the self-consciousness undermines ideas as they flicker and eventually founder the wit and wick in an energetic fondue…!

All writing needs to conceptualise the informational needs of its audience.

For example, I was an invited speaker for this Erasmus+ event: ‘Neurodiversity in a capitalist era: Neurodiversity as Marketing/PR Campaign’.

Notably, I was the only marketing academic involved in the debate, which potentially put me in a bit of a defensive position because for many persuasions, marketing is the devil and root of all evil, or at least diffuse social and environmental ills. Hence, in many social milieu, being a marketing expert carries an invisible stigma (Ragins 2008).

My profile needed to explain who I am (in other words to suggest: what I’m not, i.e. one of the stigmatized marketing people) — and here’s why I am qualified to be an invited discussant (the other was Dr Oliver Koenig, an expert on disability and inclusion, and editor in chief of the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change) to respond to a keynote presentation by Dr Alicia Broderick, an autism and disability expert, and author of The Autism Industrial Complex: How Marketing, Branding, and Capital Investment Turned Autism into Big Business. Here’s a book review.

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This is how I positioned myself in the debate within the marketing of the June 2023 event:

Dr Josephine Go Jefferies is a Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Prof.) in Marketing at Newcastle University Business School in the UK. Her work considers the interplay between technology, service design and responsibilized consumer subjects. She has published two papers on neurodiversity in marketing journals. Go Jefferies and Ahmed (2022) explored Twitter conversations about neurodiversity to examine its potential as a destigmatising label. The paper identifies five different perspectives on neurodiversity, with recommendations about informed use of neurodiversity as a term to avoid harm. The second paper, Go Jefferies (2023), draws on Arendt’s (1958) categories of human action to explain the path to well-being for women with ADHD under neoliberalism. It analyses online narratives that depict a heroic path to well-being under the sociocultural conditions shaped by individual responsibilization. Josephine’s current research focuses on neurodiversity and family caregivers. 

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However, here I am again, rewriting a profile for a February 2024 where I am due to be a speaker at an industry-facing event series hosted by Newcastle University Business School: Industry Insights to showcase our academic work to benefit local businesses.

The event is titled: Inclusive marketing: aligning people, purpose and profit. You may imagine that although I have not transformed from vampire-to-bat-and back again, sufficient to need to re-purpose and rewrite my profile. Yet, with each response to a short bio request, it is necessary to present a different angle to me and my work enough to communicate my bona fides to a predominantly non-academic/lay audience applying their own ideas and pet ideologies about academics and their work.

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Here’s the draft I submitted to the organisers:

Dr Josephine Go Jefferies is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Newcastle University Business School. She has industry experience from working in the public, private and Third Sectors and an MBA in Corporate Social Responsibility from the University of Nottingham.  Since obtaining an ESRC-funded PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2016, she has continued to conduct research in the areas of digital health technologies, inclusive marketing, service innovation, sustainable consumption and social transformation. 

Her main interest is to improve marketing and public policy for the well-being of disadvantaged groups. Her past research analyses consumer use of technology-based services to manage complex, chronic and stigmatized conditions – from heart and lung disease, diabetes, neurodiversity, and mental illness, to parenting autistic children, or having bad consumer credit. 

Her work appears in the Journal of Service Research, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Marketing Theory, Public Policy and Administration, and The Routledge Handbook of Service Research Insights and Ideas. 

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What do you think?

Each time I have to write a profile it takes more time and attention than I wish it did. Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical model explains self-presentation in social life involving impression management and performances that enable people to avoid stigma.

This also links with my current writing project, a book chapter concerned with the work of neurodiversity disclosure and autistic masking, to contribute to debates relevant to disability and digital marketing scholarship.

I think writing this is helping me get closer to addressing autism’s ‘double empathy problem’ (Milton 2012) through writing: where every writing task involves a performance that exacts its toll in enactment every time. Like tick follows tock…