Researching academic working life: outside-the-box perspectives

Presenter

Linda Evans, Professor of Education at the University of Manchester’s Institute of Education, and Associate of the Centre for Higher Education Transformations at the School of Education, University of Bristol.

Registration

Click here to register.

Location

This is a hybrid event.

Introduction

In this intentionally provocative talk, Linda Evans will aim to widen your perspectives and encourage you to think outside the box.

Representing a radical departure from mainstream interpretations, she will examine three aspects of academic working life – professionalism, professional development and leadership – introducing her own original conceptualisation of each and briefly outlining where these conceptualisations sit within their respective scholarship fields. She will address contentious issues, such as whether leadership exists or is a myth that we have reified, and whether there is such a thing as ‘unprofessional’.

Linda will present conceptual models of academic professionalism and professional development (including academic development and researcher development). She will outline how these models may be applied as rigour-enhancing analytical frames for examining working life in education contexts.

About the presenter

Linda Evans is Professor of Education at the University of Manchester’s Institute of Education. Currently, she holds the role of deputy head of the university’s School of Environment, Education and Development, within which the Manchester Institute of Education sits. She has also worked at the University of Warwick, and before her appointment to Manchester in 2017, she was a professor of leadership and professional learning at the University of Leeds. She researches working life in education contexts, specifically focusing on professionalism, professional development, researcher development, workplace attitudes, and leadership – including research leadership, academic leadership and intellectual leadership. She adopts a critical, leadership-sceptic perspective, and her most recent publications question whether leadership exists and whether it may be distinguished from other social influence phenomena.

Linda has carried out funded research projects into teaching and learning in higher education, academic leadership, university professors, and academic journal editorship. Her most recently published monograph, Professors as Academic Leaders: Expectations, Enacted Professionalism and Evolving Roles, appeared in 2018 and was translated into Spanish in 2019. Linda has been editor-in-chief of The International Journal for Researcher Development from (2010–2013), associate editor of Educational Management, Administration and Leadership (2013-2023), and she currently sits on the editorial board of Educação, Sociedade & Culturas. She has served on the governing council of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) and was the SRHE elected vice-chair from 2015 until 2018.

A former student of European studies and modern foreign languages, Linda remains a fluent French speaker who, from time to time, collaborates with francophone colleagues and presents her work in French. She also speaks reasonably fluent German. In 2011, she lived in France as a visiting professor at the Institut Français de l’Education within the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. She has travelled to Paris, Stockholm and Amsterdam to serve as an invited member of the international expert reviewer and assessor panels of, respectively, the Agence nationale de la recherche (French National Research Agency); Swedish National Research Council, and the Nationaal Regieorgaan Onderwijsonderzoek (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). Linda is an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.