Challenging Approaches to Academic Career-making

This event was originally due to take place on Wednesday 6th March and will now be taking place next year on Wednesday 22nd May 1-2pm(GMT). We apologise for the inconvenience and hope that you can still join us in May.

This event is part of the School of Education’s Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Please note: for tickets you will need to Register at Eventbrite. You can attend in person or via Zoom.

Host

Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET)

Speaker

Honorary Associate Professor Celia Whitchurch (IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education)

The session will draw on an ESRC/OfS-funded project conducted for the UK Centre for Global Higher Education between 2017 and 2020. Against a background of changing patterns of academic labour, this research identified a shift towards ‘concertina-like’ careers, in which individuals stretch the spaces and timescales available to them. Thus, in the same way that the musical instrument expands and contracts in music-making, the process of career-making expands and contracts in relation to the different spaces that individuals find themselves in over extended time periods.

Underpinning this process, the concept of ‘career scripts’ is used to described how the career paths of individuals may be informed not only by formal career structures (represented by Institutional scripts) but also by activity associated with professional practice (represented by Practice scripts), and by personal strengths, interests and commitments (represented by Internal scripts). This has, in turn, has led to new forms of activity, across both the formal institutional economy, consisting of, for example, promotion criteria and prescribed career pathways; and the informal institutional economy, represented by personal interests and initiatives, and professional relationships and networks, that may be unique to the individual.

The ‘concertina’ process also enables individuals to address a series of common misalignments and disjunctures within formal institutional economies, including, for example, those associated with disciplinary and departmental affiliations, job profiles, progression criteria, and work allocation models. Finally, consideration is given to some possible implications of these findings for both individuals and institutions.