Suggested reading: Your academic identity

Bruce Macfarlane emphasises the importance of recognising all the different aspects of what he calls the “academic citizenship”. With this “citizenship” comes both academic freedom and academic obligations. Academics realize the obligations in serving five overlapping communities: students, colleagues, institutions, disciplines or professions, and the wider public.

Macfarlane, B. (2007) Defining and Rewarding Academic Citizenship: The implications for university promotions policy, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 29 (3), 261-273, DOI: 10.1080/13600800701457863 Links to an external site.

 

Sue Clegg has interviewed university employees about what constitutes their academic identities and suggests academic identities are complex and cannot be read off only from descriptions of teaching, research or management roles, but also have salient features of eg. class, gender and the significance of family.

Clegg, S. (2008). Academic identities under threat? British Educational Research Journal, 34 (3), pp. 329-345, DOI: 10.1080/01411920701532269 Links to an external site.