Agency and structure in academic development practices: are we liberating academic teachers or are we part of a machinery supressing them?

Abstract

This text taps into an ongoing discussion about academic development. It challenges an image of academic development as precarious and liminal and explores academic development as powerful. Sources of power are described and put into the context of values, ideologies, and policies governing higher education of today. It is our hope that readers will be inspired to problematise their own academic development practices and to reclaim a phase in the history of the profession where members displayed more of a political awareness.

Keywords:

• Academic developers
• agency
• governmentality
• power