Academic career construction: personnel documents as personal documents

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I consider the implications of career construction theory for the writing and peer review of academic career narratives. I take tenure and promotion essays, employment letters, vitas, website profiles, publication bios, and other self-authored documents required, written, and reviewed for determining and maintaining academic careers to be a form of professional life writing. While these forms of self-reflective writing are not typically considered autobiographical, they are a required method of self-identifying that determines belonging in the academy. My research question is: How does the way we write and witness the academic career narrative change when we frame it as a form of life writing? I confront matters of privacy practice and the false security promised by closed review that can leave academics vulnerable and unprotected no matter how they self-identify in their career narratives. I argue that this method offers a model career narrative that, if geared toward inclusive understandings of individual and collective identity, can aid in transforming career review by focusing not on limiting self-identifying life experience to protect against bias, but on how the process can evolve to safeguard against the threat of bias.