1st Edition

Academic Life in the Measured University Pleasures, Paradoxes and Politics

Edited By Tai Peseta, Simon Barrie, Jan McLean Copyright 2019
204 Pages
by Routledge

204 Pages
by Routledge

204 Pages
by Routledge

While a life in academia is still one bestowed with enormous privilege and opportunity, on the inside, its cracks and fragility have been on display for some time. We see evidence of this in researchers bemoaning time spent applying for grants rather than doing research; teachers frustrated at the ways student feedback data are deployed to feed judgements about them; and doctoral students... Read more

Introduction – Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics  1. Higher degree research by numbers: beyond the critiques of neo-liberalism  2. The paradox of collaboration: a moral continuum  3. Measures of success: cruel optimism and the paradox of academic women’s participation in Australian higher education  4. Counting on demographic equity to transform institutional cultures at historically white South African universities?  5. The mismeasure of academic labour  6. Rendering the paradoxes and pleasures of academic life: using images, poetry and drama to speak back to the measured university  7. Made to measure: early career academics in the Canadian university workplace  8. Fear and loathing in the academy? The role of emotion in response to an impact agenda in the UK and Australia  9. Challenging a measured university from an indigenous perspective: placing ‘manaaki’ at the heart of our professional development programme  10. Measuring the ‘gift’: epistemological and ontological differences between the academy and Indigenous Australia  11. Target-setting, early-career academic identities and the measurement culture of UK higher education  12. The missing measure? Academic identity and the induction process  13. Lost souls? The demoralization of academic labour in the measured university

Biography



Tai Peseta is a Senior Lecturer in the Learning Transformations team at Western Sydney University, Australia. Her current research interests include the development of teaching cultures in academia, stewardship in doctoral curricula, the idea of the university, and the scholarship and ethics of academic development.



Simon Barrie is Pro Vice-Chancellor of Learning Transformations at Western Sydney University, Australia. He is responsible for leadership of strategic educational innovation and collaboration to shape the University’s commitment to ensuring its students fulfil their potential to become influential global citizen-scholars in a new technology-enabled world.



Jan McLean is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Interactive Media and Learning at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. As a higher education researcher, she is particularly interested in the effects of the changing higher education context upon academic life and practice as well as student belonging and learning.