Unsettled: Handling academic identities, knowledge and frameworks through disruption

• Main Author: Lewis, Melinda Jane
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: The University of Sydney 2022
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/2123/27730

This thesis offers a close-up view of academic identities at a research-intensive university in Australia. It considers how constructions of identity play out within one academic practice framework, known as the research-teaching nexus. The study explores the history of earlier movements linking research and teaching, where action research supporting teacher professional development and student learning experiences were available to classroom teachers. Contemporary scholars explored the links between research and teaching in higher education where proponents praised the nexus for inquiry-based learning, research-informed teaching, and the scholarship of learning and teaching (Neumann, 1992; Brew & Boud, 1995; Healey, 2005; Jenkins, 2004). Conversely, opponents surfaced rigidity of the framework, and the incompatibility of research and teaching activities (Boyer, 1990; Barnett, 1992; Hattie & Marsh, 1996). My ethnographic study drew on Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice (1977; 1990), Jungian archetypal schemas (1959), and Bakhtinian dialogues to form a multitheoretical framework. Methodologically, the thesis drew on feminist research principles and Indigenist protocols alongside close-up, insider research in higher education (Trowler, 2012). Data obtained through semi-structured, in-depth interviews and participant observations with academics demonstrates how aspects of identity are constituted. The thesis highlights performativity when expressing research and teaching activities as missions, rather than lived and voiced experiences of academic identity. Significantly, the thesis engages with the notions of framework rigidity evidenced by academic health professionals’ expressions of being unsettled in their academic selves, whilst navigating an increasingly disrupted higher education sector. The thesis advocates for more urgent inclusion of framings drawn from feminist and First Nations knowledge systems to promote a more culturally nuanced research-teaching nexus in Australian higher education.