This is the second conference paper that I will be delivering at the SRHE Annual Conference this December in Newport:

Being an academic: The changing writing practices of academics and how they influence professional identity

Keywords: academic writing, higher education, literacies, ethnography, knowledge creation

Abstract
This paper explores how changes in higher education are transforming academics’ writing practices and sense of professional identity. It reports on preliminary findings from an ERSC-funded project that involves interviewing a range of academics from three different disciplines across three contrasting higher education institutions in the UK about their literacy practices around research, teaching and admin-related writing. The data reveal that research-related writing and the creativity it entails lie at the core of what it means to be an academic, but that assessment exercises such as the research excellence framework and attendant pressures to publish in certain forums were influencing both people’s writing practices and their accounts of their academic identities. The implications of this for scholarship are discussed.

The paper draws from the data of the ‘Dynamics of Knowledge Creation‘ project at Lancaster University.

The paper submission is available here

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