Early career academics (ECAs) are a highly vulnerable group, typically facing job insecurities, persistent pressure to publish, and conflicts in academic values and beliefs. Researchers have noted the precarious position of ECAs in neoliberal universities and expressed growing concerns regarding the effects of neoliberalism within higher education…

Academic institutions are characterized by specific dynamics between leaders and followers. Academics prefer work autonomy but expect quality leadership. In this article, we explore how early career researchers (ECRs) constructed followership identities through their expectations of supervisory interventions. We used thematic analysis to analyze…

Recent years have seen the development of accountability processes to monitor the quality, autonomy, and performance of universities. These include the evaluation of university academics based on a quality quantification system that prioritizes research over other roles. For Spanish academics, their professional trajectories hinge entirely on…

This article describes an autoethnographic approach that can be used by academics in higher education to better understand how their academic identity is constructed. The article emphasizes considerations for academics with non-traditional roles that are not discipline-focused, while also providing relevant methods for academics with any role who…

The evolution of the higher education sector has included a strong focus on academic performance despite increasing workloads and employment precarity, with COVID-19 further disrupting traditional university expectations. Drawing on HERD's author voices from 2010 to 2020, this reflective review examines the changing nature of academe, mapping the…

This study analyses early career researchers' identity positions from a dialogical-self perspective and their experiences when facing significant research events over their career trajectory. An idiographic longitudinal approach, based on the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), and a narrative methodology were used. Five social science…

This paper explores the reflections of occupational therapy academics about the experience of kindness in academic and professional life. Data were derived from a reflective group conversation in the context of a larger overarching research project exploring occupational therapy academic development. The findings elaborate how kindness and care…

Academic developers enter the field of academic development (AD) from various disciplines and at different stages of their careers. They bring with them their academic experiences, home disciplinary culture and presumptions about what AD is. These circumstances inform the initial professional identity for those working in what has been described…

There is an academic acceptance that doctoral studies are a complex, multifaceted endeavour bound with the differing, emerging and contrasting identities of the students who undertake them. This article explores such journeys in the context of one of the most disruptive events to hit the higher educational sector worldwide: COVID-19. The study…

Interest in teacher educator research continues to grow with a focus on the influence of identity development on educator practices in teacher education programs. Scant in the research, however, is an awareness about how life experiences with marginalization contribute toward the development of teacher educators' identities, particularly those…

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…

As decolonization?of the curriculum in higher education (HE) gains traction, academics?may question?their positionality and role as actors in the field. The concept of decolonization is contentious, but primarily focuses on uncentering the?Western?filter through which the world is viewed both socially and academically. Just as Gavin Sanderson has…

This article critically investigates the impact of a program of professional learning for education-focused academics (EFAs) in an Australian university, focused on developing their education research capability. The 'Higher Education Research' (HER) program employed a three-pronged strategy: skills development workshops; sustained small group…

Collaborative drawing is a multimodal approach to examining problems within small groups of individuals when the perspectives of multiple stakeholders should be considered. Collaborative drawing can be useful for helping students visualize and analyze a challenging problem from different world views and provide opportunities to confront, discuss,…

Employability development has become a central concern of higher education, with many students attending university to enhance their employability and career development. Universities offer a range of curricular, co-curricular and extracurricular employability-building activities, including work-integrated learning, mentoring and career…