This article extends feminist debates on academic labour and particularly career categories, exploring how ambivalent insider/outsider academic ‘imposter’ positions are performed and circulated on social media. We argue for a conceptual shift from imposter syndrome to imposter positionality via an empirical focus on how the UK 2018 Universities and Colleges Union industrial action played out on academic Twitter. We develop autoethnographic fictions as method, exploring the ethical dilemmas of doing feminist research online. Industrial action was fractured by categorical career stages; however, contested career categories are also mobilised by academics to claim an outsider-on-the-inside imposter position, which implies well-documented academic exclusions according to class, race, and gender while simultaneously glossing over and conflating such inequalities with, for instance, ‘early career’ status. Our argument is against the depoliticization of both imposter ‘syndrome’ and career stage categories, and rejects any search for the avowedly authentic academic imposter. Instead we attend to how imposter positionality is claimed and circulated online, across the career course, questioning the notion that we are ‘all imposters’ in the academy.

本文扩大了关于学术劳动尤其是职业类别的女权主义辩论，探讨了内部/外部学术“冒名顶替者”立场的模棱两可并如何在社交媒体上传播。我们通过对英国2018年大学和学院联盟产业行动如何在学术推特上进行实证研究的重点，主张从冒名顶替综合征向冒名顶替者地位进行概念性转变。我们开发人类志小说作为方法，探索进行在线女权主义研究的伦理困境。严格的职业阶段破坏了产业行动。但是，学术界也动员了有争议的职业类别，以宣称内部局外人冒名顶替者的身份，这意味着有据可查的，根据班级，种族和性别划分的学术上的例外情况，同时掩盖和消除这种不平等现象，例如“早期职业”地位。我们的论点反对冒名顶替的“综合症”和职业阶段类别的去政治化，并且反对寻找所谓的真正冒名顶替的冒名顶替者。取而代之的是，我们研究了在整个职业生涯中冒名顶替者的立场是如何被宣称和在线传播的，并质疑我们在学院中是“所有冒名顶替者”的观念。