Feedback as epistemic formatting : neurodivergent academic labour and the institutional legibility of assessment

This paper examines feedback in higher education as a practice through which academic judgement is organised, structured, and rendered institutionally legible. While feedback research has conceptualised feedback as communicative, relational, and epistemic practice, limited attention has been paid to the organisational conditions under which evaluative thought becomes recognisable as legitimate feedback or to their implications for academic labour. The paper develops the concept of epistemic formatting to describe how institutional expectations of coherence, clarity, sequential organisation, and timeliness regulate feedback production and reflect neuro-normative assumptions about cognitive organisation. Drawing on analytic autoethnography from the standpoint of a dyslexic academic, the analysis examines the cognitive and temporal labour through which neurodivergent academics translate non-linear interpretation into institutionally sanctioned forms of pedagogical clarity. It shows how feedback production entails the reorganisation of thought and the disciplining of cognitive expression within assessment regimes shaped by demands for transparency and consistency. The paper reorients feedback scholarship from student uptake to the institutional governance of evaluative practice, contributing to debates on assessment theory, academic labour, and neurodivergent experience in higher education, and highlights the implications of assessment practices for cognitive plurality and inclusion within contemporary universities.