1st Edition
Navigating the Complexities of Post-Academic Life Ageing, Identity and Professional Transition
Preface
— Joanne Yoo
1. Introduction: autoethnography and the context of academic retirement
— Sheila Webber and Bill Johnston
2. Heavenly Pursuits
— Bill Johnston
3. Working in the weekends: A talanoa on retirement from the afternoon of an academic life
— Katarina Tuinamuana
4. A post-retirement autoethnographer on the edge?
— Graham Francis Badley
5. Contemplating the life after
— Sheila Webber
6. The Spiralling Academic: An Activist Institutionalised/Liberated by Higher Education in Australia
— Rob Townsend
7. Past, present and future: continuity without sameness
— Hilary Yerbury
8. Reflections on the meaning of life within academia and beyond
— Nina Burridge
9. In search of a good enough ending: retiring, leaving and letting go
— Angela Cotton
10. Academic separation, despair, and creating a new life
— Roslyn Appleby
11. Aftercare: Retiring from the University
— Carolyn Ellis and Kim Etherington
12. The Poetry of Reason
— Rodney Nillsen
13. The blessings of mindfulness
— Joshua Berrett
14. Living at the ‘end,’ without having yet arrived
— Joanne Yoo
15. Relinquishing tenure before I retire: Returning to the profession in my ‘pracacademic’ life
— Kimberley Pressick-Kilborn
16. Conclusion
— Hilary Yerbury, Joanne Yoo and Nina Burridge
Index
Biography
Joanne Yoo is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Her research interests include teaching as an embodied practice, autoethnography, and arts-based research methodologies. She continues to write creatively within academia to understand the links between academic inquiry and human flourishing.
Hilary Yerbury is an honorary research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney. Her background in European social and political cultures, information management, and anthropology has given her a broad-based approach to the use of information in everyday decision-making and in social change.
Nina Burridge is an industry fellow at the University of Technology Sydney. She was a Founding Director of the Institute of Aboriginal Studies and Research at Macquarie University and a Co-Director of the Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre at UTS. Her research interests centre on education for social justice and human rights within Australia and in international contexts.
Bill Johnston is a retired academic from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Before retiring in 2010, he was a senior lecturer and assistant director at Strathclyde University’s Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement. His academic interests include information literacy; strategic academic development; the First Year Experience at university; curriculum and course design; and critical pedagogy.
Sheila Webber is a senior lecturer in the School of Information, Journalism and Communication, University of Sheffield, UK. Her core areas for research and teaching are information literacy and information behaviour.
