Academic Identity and the Place of Stories

The Personal in the Professional

Susan Carter

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030436001
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030436018
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica per adulti

This book explores academic identity development in the 21st century university. Recognising dramatic shifts in academic practices and landscapes, the book pushes back on rising neoliberalism with a person-focused, culturally aware pathway for career development. Stories of the author's own experiences intersect a solid grounding in educational literature, encouraging scholars to take an active role in considering their own academic identity. In doing so, this volume suggests that academics look inward at what matters to them – rather than being overwhelmed by academia – in order to shape identities and career trajectories that are dynamic and satisfying. 

© The Author(s) 2020

S. CarterAcademic Identity and the Place of Storieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43601-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. A Fruitcake Imaginary?

Susan Carter¹

(1)

CLeaR, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Susan Carter

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter sets out the book’s goal, context, theories and methods while introducing the extended metaphor of the fruitcake imaginary. It locates the book’s central topic of academic development in the context of pushing back against neoliberal pressure. It explains the unusual approach of this book: novel inclusion of stories as a performance of the argument being made. New materialism’s interest in the body’s contribution to understanding is expanded via theories of imagination to include individual mindscape. That leads to defence of exegesis as a research methodology. Indigenous knowledges demonstrate cultural reclaim from the business model of academia. Then each chapter is briefly summarised as an overview map of what the book covers.

Keywords

Academic pressureStories within academic argumentAcademic developmentImagination as toolExegesisIndigenous knowledge

End Abstract

I started this book in the summer at a writing retreat, a CLeaR writing retreat enabled by a director who knows it is hard to maintain academic writing amongst the busyness of the semester, and who believes that academic writing is worthwhile (Sword 2007, 2009, 2012, 2017). It had been raining. With the wet Waiheke Island bush around us shutting out the world, we were talking about what we were working on. September 5, 2017, I told my colleague, Ashwini Datt, that I was trying something radically different, with both stories and academic prose juxtaposed to pay homage to the imagination and to shunt together an argument about developing academic identity. The book would admix ideas that run through my previous work—about doctoral pedagogy, learning and transformation, academic writing and identity, and the tissues of emotion and interconnectivity that weave together academic existence. It was to be a culmination, and to be studded with stories as a way of performing its point. To defuse how risky and ambitious that introduction of stories into an academic argument felt, I joked that this would be “one fruitcake of a book.” Our laughter together led to the decision that I should say, right up front, “this is a fruitcake of a book.” Over the next few years, the idea of a mad mixture firmed up into the fruitcake imaginary.

The abstraction of the “fruitcake imaginary” stands in for imagined possibilities regarding academic development. The fruitcake imaginary is an extended metaphor that tries to span the intellectual richness of academia and kitchen-table homeliness of a family recipe, with a whiff of quirkiness from working across these zones. There’s the literature and framework of academic thinking, rich with accumulations of research, and flavoured by theory. Game theory is here, and, with it, a penchant towards play as a deliberate method. Stories from life persistently wind through academicity to textually enact the interconnections between extramural life and academic career. Life experience is valued. A fruitcake is an inclusive cake. It is solid by merit of all that goes into it. The book closes by unpacking what the metaphor of the fruitcake imaginary offers.

That is the style; the content is about academic development. I’m an academic developer doing that work in this book as I do in my day job at the University of Auckland, sifting through academia as I see it, and looking for ways to enhance academic experience. Academic developers strive to “mark out and create safe spaces where we can engage in conversation about the idea of the university and find our place in it”—as they do so, they grow to “understand their own attachments to, and desires for, the idea of the university” (Fyffe, 2018, p. 364). Typically, the workshops I facilitate support academics who are seeking to improve their supervision, research writing, teaching and learning, and career development. I share resources and exemplars, and prompt collaborative learning with “students” who are actually colleagues, often with more experience than I have. My teaching focus, and now my research focus, is on how academics construct their identities, acquire their professional expertise and plan career trajectories. In this book I address questions that keep surfacing in my mind when academics talk about how their work is going:

1. 1.
   How can academics step out of the sense of being always harried?
2. 2.
   How can academic careers be steered to the realisation of their full potential?
3. 3.
   How can academics have more fun while at the same time making the world a better place?
4. 4.
   How can academics best weather the unsettlement of restructuring and change?

There’s a need for this fruitcake of a book: academics are the new precariat, beleaguered, pressured, and often troubled when neoliberalism’s focus on finance bulldozes through the ethics of pedagogy (Collini, 2013). Wheaton (2020, p. 67) reports that “global higher education is in a state of disequilibrium”; she notes a widening hierarchy in employment within academia, and a move away from Humboldtian values of public good to focus on the entrepreneurial university. Arguably, neoliberalism’s propensity for change managers bent on change weakens academia’s retention of what matters. “Dislocated, dismembered, and progressively unbundled, the public university today exists in a state of chronic fragility, servitude and uncertainty that has left it… drained of autonomy and agency” (Shore & Wright, 2017, p. 18). A litany itemising and lamenting “hidden injuries of neoliberal academia” cites the following as part and parcel of a successful academic career: “exhaustion, stress, overload, insomnia, anxiety, shame, aggression, hurt, guilt and feelings of out-of-placeness, fraudulence and fear of exposure within the contemporary academy” (Gill, 2009, p. 229). Seeking possible ways to sustain self-confidence and satisfaction within the academic working life, I draw on what I know, with a literature studies doctorate underpinning my years of work as a doctoral learning advisor and then as an academic developer. Besides sharing good practice strategy within this often troubled environment, I draw on an arts humanities approach. I propose that even within a constricted environment, or perhaps especially within a constricted environment, academics can more consciously use individual imagination as a compass—and that recognising this empowers the recuperation of autonomy, agency and pleasure.

The book takes academic development off the career path’s route up academic promotion rungs, suggesting that instead careers can follow individual desire lines, “unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground to show every day comings and goings” (Ahmed, 2006, pp. 19–20), perhaps with deviance that proves to be positive (Marsh, Schroeder, Dearden, & Sternin, 2004). The purpose is to avoid becoming a “beleaguered, managed, frantic, stressed and demoralized professor” (Berg & Seeber, 2017, p. xvii). Allowance for possible deviation according to the dictates of the imagination may make an authentic, satisfying academic career more likely. The book’s goal is to locate meaningful ways to build individual academic identity. Doing so requires self-fashioning and self-representation, the construction of career, life and self. Individual performance occurs within the framework of social affects, the frequent instability as “change managers” reshape the academic context.

Teaching a particular course, Academic Citizenship and Professionalism (aka ACADPRAC 702), within a postgraduate certificate of academic practice prompted me to think about how academic development can be fostered into deep-level satisfaction. Who do we think we are as professionals, and what are the responsibilities that citizenship calls forth? This book wriggled out from the thinking prompted by the course, and the practical exercises in text-boxes at the end of each chapter here are ones that worked well in that course, where we engaged in “collective biography,” a therapeutic opening up (Taylor et al., 2020). These can be used in group work, in seminars for academics, or in private, for personal reflection. Talking to other academics, and sharing these exercises, I was advised to take care: the exercises ask participants to expose who they are and what they think. Many wouldn’t feel safe doing that. (I can relate to that discomfort. I’m taking a gamble on empathetic readers in publishing this book.) Because I’d like ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. A Fruitcake Imaginary?
• 2. Stories, Games, Language, Imagination
• 3. Academia as Unhomely Habitus?
• 4. Teaching, Research, Service, Self
• 5. Taking Stock of Identity During Change
• 6. Personalising Professionalism: Balance, Risk, Chance, Change…
• 7. Your Dance, Your Self, Your Story: The Fruitcake Imaginary
• Back Matter