Academic Work

This paper draws on the results of research with artist academics – artists employed as academics within universities principally to teach artistic skills - over a period of almost four years. Through this research we have sought to understand the experience of working in academia within an artistic discipline, one of which has been music. Effective music education is shaped by a complex set of relationships, including those between the musician as educator, practitioner and researcher. Within the higher education environment, all three activities are increasingly required, and we argue that the link, or nexus, between practice, research and teaching cannot be denied. Specifically, we ask: How does the knowledge contained within the process and product of artistic practice construct and inform pedagogy within undergraduate and postgraduate university teaching programs? In responding to this question, the paper draws on a diverse literature including our own previous research.

Research shows that the ascendency of managerialism in the higher education sector and its fundamental contradictions with the professional values has placed misaligning identity claims upon academics. However, the identity tension that arises from the misfit between the professional ethos and the organisations' market-driven requirements, and the ways in which academics cope with it has received insufficient attention. In this article, grounded on a conception of identity that describes it as in-progress narratives available to people, I analyse the routine work of academics in a Canadian public university. The results reveal that they reflexively and situationally construct different versions of their professional selves to minimise the tensions between the co-existing yet contradictory identity claims. In so doing, I found that the academics undertake two discursive strategies of embracing and distancing. I explain how these 'identity work' mechanisms help to strike a balance between the two contradictory discourses and suggest some directions for future research.

Se aborda la definición del trabajo escrito académico, cómo se estructura y sus fases de elaboración. En una segunda parte, se dice cómo estructurar un ensayo, cuáles son su fases de desarrollo y algunas medidas de autoevaluación en su ejecución.
This report treats about the structure and steps for writing an essay and a schoolwork or academic work.

In the neoliberal university, how do doctoral candidates (PhDs) and early career academics (ECAs) experience time? This analysis brings together two qualitative studies in Australian universities: interviews with 64 PhD candidates, and a survey of 522 ECAs on teaching and research experience, and identity and career development. The data is analysed using Ylijoki and Mäntylä’s (2003. “Conflicting Time Perspectives in Academic Work.” Time & Society 12 (1): 55–78. doi:10.1177/0961463X03012001364) categories of academic time: scheduled, timeless, contracted and personal. Reading Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) enables us to extend this framework to include deferred time. We argue that the dominant affect of deferred time is anxiety. As political subjects of the university, following Derrida’s line of argument, participants are in a deferred state of waiting for academic careers that are yet to come.

For almost two decades now, higher education in Germany has been undergoing a significant transformation, driven to a great extent by business imperatives to keep up with the ever intensifying international academic competition. Major milestones of this process in the sphere of policy making have been the Exzellenzinitiative that promoted a financial prioritization of certain universities and research programs, on the one hand, and the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (WissZeitVG) that limits the employment period of contingent mid-level faculty without granting them any future prospect for a permanent position, on the other. Both interventions remain justifiably subject to much controversy: The Excellence Initiative for undermining the traditionally egalitarian higher education structure, the Academic Fixed Term Contract Law for institutionalizing precarious work in academia. Moreover, critics argue that these regulations add to and are being maintained by the already existing – almost feudal – hierarchies of rank within the German universities such as the Lehrstuhlprinzip (chair principle) that endows full professors with immense privileges regarding income level, job security, and decision-making authority.
This paper attempts to contribute to the discussion on the decline of both job security and workplace equality in academia with a critical view of these recent policy interventions. Its main argument is that the market-oriented transformation of higher education not only undermines the critical essence of knowledge production in general, but also weakens occupational fraternity by aggravating existing hierarchies. The demand-oriented re-shaping and restriction of research agendas poses a structural limitation on scientific freedoms, while the loss of job security and the monopolization of institutional power in the hands of a small academic labor aristocracy gradually erodes the academic ethos. To substantiate this line of reasoning, the paper will refer to the demands and criticisms raised by two noteworthy counter-initiatives from the ranks of the German academia, namely Exzellenzkritik and Netzwerk für Gute Arbeit in der Wissenschaft, which were formed as a response to the Excellence Initiative and the Academic Fixed Term Contract Law respectively.

This piece discusses an experimental ongoing research that began with my experience as an academic freelancer. It focuses on my experience of moving frequently within and between cities under specific work/ life conditions. An autoethnography provides insights not observable in quantitative research designs; and allows for access to embodied experience, along with reflections on emerging topics going beyond the purely personal, namely, mobility, advantage, and (work)place-making. This strategy allowed me to delineate the boundaries of the fieldsite across online and offline settings, including the digital technologies I share with other research participants. Personal maps of geolocalised trajectories overlapped with experiential accounts (photos, audio-notes, interviews, and hand-drawn maps) are included. An interpre-tational thickness emerges from this association of materials. The research process has inspired the development of a smartphone mobile application for documenting such experiences of mobile freelancing, yet to be created with developers, who are, in turn, participants in this research.

Digital technologies and eLearning afford many rewards and pleasures including enabling academic work to be smarter rather than harder. This chapter is an autoethnographic (Ellis, 1999) account of academic work. Specifically, as an exploratory study, I investigate my relationship with the digital world over two years, with an emphasis on my own digital literacies (Bawden, 2001, 2008; Gilster, 1997; Martin, 2006) and pedagogies. Initially I drew on a year of field texts (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) including emails, screen shots, personal journal notes, video, and electronic documents. I noticed themes such as displeasure, pain, frustration, and anger occurring in relation to my digital world. Identifying an absence of narratives in the literature about academic work in relation to digital experiences, I took more notice of the negative feelings in the second year of this project and created narratives that represented my experiences. These narratives, what I term digital bytes, are by no means universal but provide some insight into available subject positions and pedagogies to learn an academic digital habitus. I explore smarting as a significant outcome in academic work and embodiment of the digital. Smarting, in a negative sense, is not a useful outcome for university business or for educational change that is positive, proactive, sustainable, or even intellectually, digitally, or pedagogically smart. If intellectual work, in partnership with technology, is to remain central to universities, we need to be cognisant of how academics learn an academic self, our pedagogical work in teaching and research, and the professional and public pedagogy of the institution in relation to technology. I discuss implications for learning by those doing academic work and for the institutional employers attempting to facilitate engagement with the digital world.

This paper addresses the topic of work–life interferences in academic contexts. More specifically, it focuses on early career researchers in the Italian university system. The total availability required from those who work in the research sector is leading to significant transformations of the temporalities of work, especially among the new generation of researchers, whose condition is characterized by a higher degree of instability and uncertainty. Which are the experiences of the early career researchers in an academic context constituted by a growing competition for permanent positions and, as a consequence, by a greatly increased pressure? Which are the main gender differences? In what elements do Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics disciplines differ from Social Sciences and Humanities? The collected narratives reveal how the ongoing process of precarization is affecting both the everyday working activities and the private and family lives of early career research...

‘Diversity’ is a dangerous misnomer in the white academe because the idea fails to recognise the politics of whiteness that structure a spectrum of assimilation academics of colour are positioned by. Taking the title and plotline from the Jacobean masque written by Ben Jonson in 1605, this revisionist play sets out to consider the politics of assimilation academics of colour perform in their daily lives. Drawing on black liberation and anti-racist literature, the play draws attention to how black bodies are asked to perform and use voice daringly or silence instrumentally to leverage degrees of assimilation into white structures. The play firstly, questions the ontology of foreignness by reflecting on the colonised history of the black body becoming assimilated into whiteness, and secondly, it provides a counter-narrative for people of colour who experience perpetual exclusion and racism at work while other colleagues of colour seem to become accepted and even celebrated by white hierarchies.

Despite the rise of teaching academic (teaching only) roles in Australia, the UK, the USA, and Canada, the experiences of teaching academics are not well documented in the literature. This article reports from a university-wide study that responded to the introduction of teaching academic roles during a major restructure of academic staff. Thirteen focus groups involving 115 academic staff employed in a range of roles were held approximately 12 months after teaching academic roles were introduced. In conveying the results, we first report on the teaching academic experience, highlighting the perceived low value of the teaching academic (TA) role and confusion about what the role entails. We then focus on teaching academic career pathways. The findings highlight the uncertainty surrounding career paths for teaching academics, who noted the absence of career or promotion scripts. Respondents noted also an absence of role models within the professoriate. They expressed widespread concerns about developing the traditional academic skill set required to transition between roles and institutions, with many TAs finding themselves in boundaried careers with an uncertain future. The construct of career or promotion scripts is used to examine multiple perceptions of career pathways for teaching academics. The findings highlight the importance of systematic change management processes when new academic roles are introduced within the context of university-wide academic restructure, and the critical role of human resources in designing and implementing the same.

It has been argued that leadership in higher education differs from leadership in other organizational contexts in part because of the culture of collegiality and autonomy underpinning academic work. Collegiality, however, is a complex and somewhat 'slippery' idea that features in academic leadership literature in a variety of, sometimes contradictory, ways. We argue for the need to unpack and explore the notion of collegiality to understand what makes it such an enduring idea in academic leadership. We start by examining the multiple meanings of collegiality circulating in scholarly writing on leadership to reveal the complexity and tensions it raises for academic leaders. We then turn to Lacanian theory and explore collegiality as a subliminal fantasy that represents an important interface between 'leaders' and those who are 'led', and one which influences our understanding of academic work and leadership. From the perspective offered by our Lacanian exploration, we propose that in order to traverse the nostalgic fantasy of the collegial past, instead of looking for closure, it might be more useful to put indeterminacy, absence, and lack at the centre of the academic leadership project.

This paper reports findings from interviews with fourteen Australian artist academics, who discuss the complex relationships between their Arts practice, their Research and their Teaching. We refer to this as the ART nexus because of the strong flow of information reported between these three activities. However, this information flow is not achieved without conflict. Conflict arises over the balance of time available and different mindsets required for differing activities, and there can be hesitation about analysing intuitive creative thought. The findings reveal ways in which information is ‘translated’ for different audiences including undergraduate and postgraduate students, who are both recipients of and contributors to the nexus. The article problematises the ART nexus in an attempt to offer greater insight into the ways in which individual artist academics teach through their arts practice and their research, within a university system that struggles to accommodate this brea...

This paper reports findings from interviews with fourteen Australian artist academics, who discuss the complex relationships between their Arts practice, their Research and their Teaching. We refer to this as the ART nexus because of the strong flow of information reported between these three activities. However, this information flow is not achieved without conflict. Conflict arises over the balance of time available and different mindsets required for differing activities, and there can be hesitation about analysing intuitive creative thought. The findings reveal ways in which information is ‘translated’ for different audiences including undergraduate and postgraduate students, who are both recipients of and contributors to the nexus. The article problematises the ART nexus in an attempt to offer greater insight into the ways in which individual artist academics teach through their arts practice and their research, within a university system that struggles to accommodate this brea...

Academics without PhDs are common in developing countries and among lecturers from marginalised communities, yet the literature on doctoral education largely ignores them. This qualitative study aimed to address that gap by interviewing academics without PhDs in South Africa and Australia. Their narratives of betwixt and betweenness contribute to theories of liminality as well as doctoral education. Liminality is traditionally conceptualised as a linear, vertical process with clear rites of passage. However, in our study the interviewees were not only facing a vertical trajectory between non-PhD and post-PhD status but also a lateral trajectory between staff and student identity. The research confirms the importance of

Research into effectiveness of teaching practices and professional development invites questions of teaching and learning change: how it takes effect and is accounted for, and where its agency is claimed and contested across a range of institutional, disciplinary and pedagogical actors. This article investigates change in teaching practices and professional development through the notion of obduracy (Law, 2003): ordered arrangements that persist in the background and surface in a process of change. In focussing on practice as the object of inquiry, this study is part of a shift away from the study of professional learning drawing on individualist, cognitive traditions towards practice-oriented understandings of change and agency as an effect of social and material arrangements. The setting for this study of teaching practice is two disciplinary academic collectives, or workgroups, in one Australian university. Rather than approaching change as a human-centred and intentional process, the method of sociomaterial tracing was applied to teaching practice undergoing an institutional change process. The study highlights the process in which change is assembled, resisted or accomplished through heterogeneous networks of curriculum, discourses, technologies, and policies. Teaching and learning change, it is argued, involves recognising how obduracy is embedded in distinct networks across the university. The contribution of this study is to draw attention to the agentic role of materials and spaces in the negotiation and stabilisation of teaching practices and in approaches to professional development.

Se exponen las condiciones en que se desarrollan las relaciones de poder y la legitimación del discurso dominante en el desarrollo de la actividad profesional de los académicos de la Universidad de los Pueblos del Sur (UNISUR). Para lo cual se analiza la estructura discursiva de las situaciones comunicativas clave -como las asambleas- que permiten articular y explicar, en relación con el contexto social, cómo se desarrollan los mecanismos de construcción de la legitimidad del discurso dominante, así como las formas de manifestación de las inconformidades y la formación de discursos alternativos. Se considera que la estructuración del discurso tiene su parte medular en el discurso de género que fomenta prácticas sexistas en los procesos de trabajo y en la organización del trabajo. En este trabajo se expone la forma en que, en un contexto específico, se realiza estar estructuración del discurso y se realiza el discurso de género en la actividad académico-administrativa de la UNISUR.

This paper addresses the topic of work–life interferences in academic contexts. More specifically, it focuses on early career researchers in the Italian university system. The total availability required from those who work in the research sector is leading to significant transformations of the temporalities of work, especially among the new generation of researchers, whose condition is characterized by a higher degree of instability and uncertainty. Which are the experiences of the early career researchers in an academic context constituted by a growing competition for permanent positions and, as a consequence, by a greatly increased pressure? Which are the main gender differences? In what elements do Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics disciplines differ from Social Sciences and Humanities? The collected narratives reveal how the ongoing process of precarization is affecting both the everyday working activities and the private and family lives of early career research...

We analyze a series of interviews with Estonian humanities researchers to explore topics related to the beginning of academic careers and the relationships with supervisors and mentors. We show how researchers strive to have meaningful relationships and produce what they consider quality research in the conditions of a system that is very strongly oriented towards internationalization and project-based funding, where their efforts are compromised by a lack of policies helping them establish a stable position in academia. Leaving researchers to face these obstacles alone places a great burden on them and may lead to a loss of talent in academia. Identifying and addressing these issues is thus important for both the well-being of early career researchers and the future of academia.

The idea of'transmorphosis' will be used in this article to discuss the impact of new teaching and learning environments on the highly mobile global academic pedagogue.'Trans-'implies' movement across', whether it be space, time, place, culture, or institution.'-morphosis' evokes the possibility/requirement to shapeshift one's pedagogical presence and performance in new and previously unimaginable ways. This article begins by positing that the traditional pedagogue, the one charged with the responsibility of leading the child to ...

Academics without PhDs are common in developing countries and among lecturers from marginalised communities, yet the literature on doctoral education largely ignores them. This qualitative study aimed to address that gap by interviewing academics without PhDs in South Africa and Australia. Their narratives of betwixt and betweenness contribute to theories of liminality as well as doctoral education. Liminality is traditionally conceptualised as a linear, vertical process with clear rites of passage. However, in our study the interviewees were not only facing a vertical trajectory between non-PhD and post-PhD status but also a lateral trajectory between staff and student identity. The research confirms the importance of

In the last years, many scholars across Italy and Europe have focused on labour uncertainty and precarity in academia. With different approaches and various key concepts, like mobility, unwaged work, occupational identity, and neoliberalism, these studies have focused on an academic context marked by a crucial, problematic dualism between who occupy secure, stable and high-salaried positions and those who are forced to accept frustrating, lasting conditions of instability and insecurity. Through this dualism, attention is drawn to a new class of precarious, academic workers subjected to hyper-flexible, unstable contracts, with irregular hours, low pay, and no benefits. This academic precariat is totally marginalised despite the fact that it represents a fundamental part of the university system, performing many important tasks and offering an outstanding contribution in teaching and research. The frustration and anxiety of this growing group of precarious academic workers goes beyond the boundaries of the workplace and negatively affect their private lives and personal relationships, producing a sort of precarization of existence. This paper explores how this academic precariat and its problematic existential conditions are represented in contemporary Italian cinema. Considering and comparing some Italian movies of the last few years—such as Into Paradiso (Randi, 2010), C’è chi dice no (Avellino, 2013), and Smetto quando voglio (Sibilia, 2014) with its sequel Smetto quando voglio: Masterclass (Sibilia, 2017)—the paper develops an analysis of the cinematic depiction of these precarious academic workers and their social location, with particular reference to the effects that such a condition of uncertainty and vulnerability produce on their personal lives.

The ‘European landscape’ casts a long shadow in academic work with effects reaching way beyond Europe as a geographic space. As an academic in Australia, I recognise this shadow in my university, its enlightenment traditions and scientific norms, and in my own biography. It also becomes apparent in Australia’s preoccupations with becoming a knowledge economy using the neo-liberal social technologies pioneered in the Eurocentric Anglo-American tradition. Yet as Australia orients itself towards the Asian century, I also see how the contradictory trajectory of the European shadow is itself being reworked. What does this positioning mean for academic identity formation?  In this chapter I use the notion of contextualised epistemologies as a way of tracking my academic identity formation, which I focus by considering the challenges that I have experienced in knowing, doing and being an academic writer. I track who I was and who I became as I was recruited into academic work and took up particular analytical procedures. I show how this trajectory reframed my academic practice, providing an epistemological platform, which uses disciplines, principles of objectification, and contextual analyses, to speak back to those imagined critics that swirl around the long shadow of Europe.