Academic identities research: mapping the field’s theoretical frameworks

ABSTRACT

For several decades, Western universities have been subject to wide-ranging structural, financial and ideological changes. These changes have problematised afresh the meaning of academic identity as evidenced by the emergence of a substantial, international, anglophone research literature. This article examines how the idea of academic identity has been theorised to date in a set of highly cited research literature, with the ambition of providing some points of departure for further work in the area. Our analysis of 11 works suggests a small set of related (constructivist) theories provides the core resources for academic identities scholarship, although somewhat varied understandings of agency and power/politics surface in the discussions and implications advanced by different authors. As a result of this analysis, we suggest the need to extend the theoretical and empirical scope of academic identity research if we are to produce new insights and ways forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic identities
• faculty identities
• theoretical frameworks
• identity theories

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A similar increase is found through searching the EBSCOhost and ProQuest databases.

2 We did not use the terms ‘subjectivity/ies’ in our initial searches because ‘academic identity’ per se was our target. Following a reviewer query, in July 2020 we carried out a posthoc search using ‘academic subjectivity/ies’ as our search terms. Two works were located with more that 200 cites: both were poststructural accounts and would, therefore, not have substantively altered our analysis or conclusions.

3 The biennial International Academic Identities Conference has been held six times, most recently in Hiroshima, Japan in 2018. The 2020 Conference was to be held in Roskilde, Denmark but was postponed due to Covid-19.

4 Both Henkel’s book (2000) and 2005 paper appeared on the list. While the book – at 1268 citations – is the most highly cited single work by far, we chose her 2005 paper (the second most highly cited) for our set because the theoretical framework is the same across both works and the paper was a more compact focus for analysis.

5 Burrows does not define ‘structures of feeling’ but it is important for this article so we do. Raymond Williams coined the term to describe talking about ‘not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought’ (as cited in Sarup, 1996, p. 58).