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This performance autoethnography may or may not be interpreted as a continuation of a conversation regarding the experiences of those with devalued statuses in academic settings. The authors rely on “strange accounting” to consider their experiences in the academy from various standpoints: before and after promotion, before and after leaving academia. While reflecting on our past experiences, we introduce the concept of “everyday precariousness” as a way of explaining the normalization of instability, insecurity, and negative affect that is part of everyday life for those with devalued statuses in academic settings and beyond. Everyday precariousness is an embodied experience for those in vulnerable positions. Normalized exposure to risks, such as discrimination, harassment, bullying, or structural instability, produces an undercurrent of threat that permeates academic culture. Our stories of everyday precariousness span race, ethnicity, class, academic roles, and gender boundaries (among many others). Analyzing these experiences furthers previous work on the uses of strange accounting as well as the dynamics of status silencing. In the final analysis, unresisted and unabated, everyday precariousness and status silencing can lead to institutional failure and resonance disasters.

In this chapter, we share narratives from our personal experiences with a shared focus on the relationships between personal identities and family language. The acquisition of a family language is said to be accompanied by a specific ‘intercultural burden’ (Kagan 2012), which is manifested at the intersection of different influences and psychological tensions. This psychosocial and cultural reality has the potential for the development of a true intercultural identity that brings together contradictions and conflicts of inherited cultural differences. Here, through a prism of three personal narratives, we create a series of questions and reflections in relation to the family language. The three voices are articulated through three auto-ethnographic accounts of individuals – two linguists and a theatre scholar who are both personally and professionally invested in the topic of post-migration. The common thread of the three narratives is the experience of Serbian as the first language. As an aspect of personal identity, the idealised concept of family language affects one's identity and makes a decisive impact on investment and potentially life-defining decisions.