Brown, Nicole;
McAllister, Aine;
(2021)
Collaborate, compete, repeat: career(ing) in Higher Education.
Presented at: CFP 7th International Irish Narrative Inquiry Conference, Dublin, Ireland.
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Abstract
Higher education has always been seen as a privileged working environment with individuals enjoying levels of autonomy and flexibility that are unrivalled. However, as recent explorations of the neoliberal academy highlight (Taylor and Lahad, 2018; del Cerro Santamaría, 2020), the lived experience of working in higher education is more complex and nuanced. Academics become "hyperprofessionals" (Gornall and Salisbury, 2012), who go above and beyond to contribute to the excellence discourses (Blackmore, 2015) prevalent in contemporary higher education. At the same time, individuals navigate precarious working conditions, temporary or zero-hours contracts and job insecurity, and therefore do not feel they can openly state what it feels like to be an early careers academic in the current climate. Our contribution is a performance of poetry written as a result of and in response to these developments. The poems combine autoethnography with poetic inquiry (Faulkner, 2017), writing as a method (Richardson, 2000, 2003) and thinking with stories (Frank, 2013). In its fundamental form autoethnography is the research of socio-cultural phenomena through introspection, thus by turning inwards it is possible to look outwards and to identify the universally applicable. Drawing on research data as well as personal experiences, we focus on key themes in the life of early career academics: collaboration and competition, and the tensions arising from competitive collaboration or collaborative competition. Along with the performance of the poems, we provide a critically reflective, analytical commentary to contextualise our creative work.
| Type: | Conference item (Presentation) |
|---|---|
| Title: | Collaborate, compete, repeat: career(ing) in Higher Education |
| Event: | CFP 7th International Irish Narrative Inquiry Conference |
| Location: | Dublin, Ireland |
| Dates: | 16 - 17 June 2021 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/faculty-social-s... |
| Language: | English |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Culture, Communication and Media UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152028 |
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