Call for Papers

Preliminary Call for Papers

Research/scholarship about the changes and challenges to academic work and identities is everywhere now. In the neo-liberal academy, under the spotlight of audit and the exigencies of bureaucracy, there is a sense that academic identity is ruined, that the sort of work academics want to do and feel committed to doing is becoming harder to undertake with any real ownership, joy or pleasure. Today’s lesson for academics is to learn how to be flexible, enterprising, efficient and effective, and to carry out teaching, research and service under taxing conditions of rapid change and significant contradiction.

This third conference on academic identities, to be held in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, invites contributions that offer productive, creative and imaginative possibilities for, as well as critical encounters with, academic identities. The conference theme, Thinking, Researching and Living Otherwise, is an opportunity for researchers and scholars of academic practice and identity to imagine a space of being and practicing ‘otherwise’, of speaking back to discourses that dominate the organization of academic life, of remembering that our responsibilities to society lie in both duty and imagination.

Keynote Speakers

  • Dr Melinda Webber, The University of Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand
  • Professor Sandra Acker, University of Toronto, Canada
  • Dr Eva Bendix Petersen, The University of Newcastle, Australia

Conference Themes 
Contributions on the following sub-­â€themes will be welcome:

  • Academic identities beyond collegiality and/or managerialism
  • Academic identities that challenge orthodoxies and/or norms
  • New ways to theorise academic identities and the process of learning to be an 
academic (research students, post-­â€docs, early-­â€career academics)
  • Playfulness, sociality and creativity in academic life.

Types of Contribution

  • Papers/Symposia
  • Pecha Kucha
  • Roundtables
  • Performances

Submissions: Open on 12 Dec 2011, close on 24 Feb 2012, with confirmation by 05 March 2012.

Registrations: Open on 16 Jan 2012, Earlybird by 31 March 2012

Contact: Barbara Grant, bm.grant@auckland.ac.nz