Mid-career Academics Research Articles

Reminiscences and Reflections on my Retirement: Ten Takeaways that Worked for Me

In this paper, I reflect on a 45-year career in higher education. I hope that PhD students and assistant professors looking ahead to such a career along with some mid-career academics will find my experiences and the lessons I discuss useful and relevant.

Precarious Romanticism: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Germany

Precarious Romanticism: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Germany Clemens Spahr (bio) I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. —Henry David Thoreau1 For this essay, and in keeping with this Forum’s intent, I will heed Henry David Thoreau’s advice. Such a focus allows me to address some of the general issues associated with the field of American studies in Germany from a particular subject position, one linked to a specific research field and shaped by my career stage. While I don’t think that topically or theoretically there is something inherently “German” about American studies in Germany—there is a Heideggerian Emersonian tradition in the United States, just as there is a pragmatist romanticist tradition in Germany—the question about the specificity of German American studies can productively be asked institutionally: How do local institutional conditions affect scholarly exchange? How is it possible to reconcile the expectations of the German university system with the often different time lines of academic discourse and publications in the United States? The latter question is, of course, of particular relevance for those on the job market, and it importantly shapes what it means to work in American studies in Germany. I will try to link the “narrowness of my experience,” as Thoreau has it in the same passage from Walden, to a few general observations.2 But, first, some further details: I am an assistant professor of American [End Page 357] studies at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. My major research fields are American transcendentalism and modern American poetry. My interest in the links among idealism, materialism, and modernity developed at the University of Tübingen, both in the American studies department and the philosophy department, with its strong focus on German idealism. As I read widely in romanticism and, more particularly, transcendentalism, I also turned to neo-Marxist theory from Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Block to Fredric Jameson, later including Immanuel Wallerstein’s historical sociology. As Marx himself was heavily influenced by romanticism, the move from romantic idealism to materialism could be considered theoretically imperative.3 As I showed in my first book—Radical Beauty: American Transcendentalism and the Aesthetic Critique of Modernity (2011)—the transcendentalists dwelled on this relationship more than is usually appreciated. They recognized that a universalist aesthetic utopianism ultimately has to overcome social injustice and class division. Although not all of the transcendentalists embraced the radical politics of Orestes Brownson and Margaret Fuller in her socialist years, all of them understood aesthetic experience as having a potential for resisting capitalist commodification. My institutional position comes with a number of complexities and complications, which affect the ways I approach the field. Thoreau is still one of the best critics of the nature of liberal capitalism, but when he exclaims, “Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth,” I respectfully disagree.4 In Germany, assistant professors are usually nontenured: this is the case for me and, at least at my university, the norm. But the German academic system is undergoing fundamental changes, and as a result the parameters for a permanent position are shifting. While the Habilitation used to be the most important criterion to apply for full professorships, this criterion has been replaced by “Habilitation or habilitation-equivalent achievements,” which can mean anything from a second book to a book manuscript, essays, or research grants. The lack of clarity in this phrase reflects a larger shift in academic structure: there are nontenured assistant professors, nontenured junior professors, and tenure-track junior professors. The intricacies of this system are beyond the scope of this essay, in particular since these positions also vary according to state. Generally, however, tenure-track positions remain the exception, so that most midcareer academics find themselves in a precarious job situation. Academic employment law, a complicated statute that essentially limits academic employment at the PhD and postdoc level to a combined twelve years, adds to this insecurity. As an [End Page 358] assistant professor, then, I occupy a particular place within the university system, hoping to enjoy the kind of “true wealth” Thoreau celebrates but limited every day by a precarious job...

News Spring 2019

Annual Conference: The 60th Annual Conference will be held at Royal Holloway, University of London, 1–3 July 2019. We are delighted to be offering a full and varied range of contributions following a very strong response nationally and internationally to our call for papers. The conference programme and registration details will be circulated shortly, as will details of plenary speakers. Please note that postgraduate travel bursaries are available to help enable postgraduate students to attend the conference. For full information on these bursaries, please contact our conference officer, Victoria Turner, vct2@st-andrews.ac.uk. We look forward to welcoming you to Royal Holloway. Prize Research Fellowship: The Society is pleased to announce that the 2019 Prize Research Fellowship competition is now open for applications. The Fellowship, which is open this year to early and mid-career academics in all areas of French Studies (see below), will cover the cost of a one-semester replacement lectureship at the lowest point of the Junior Lecturer scale (to include gross salary, National Insurance, superannuation and a London allowance where applicable) to enable the successful candidate to take research leave. The Fellowship will be tenable for a period in the 2019–20 academic session.

Job demands and psychological well-being: Moderating role of occupational self-efficacy and job social support among mid-career academics

The study investigated the moderating role of occupational self-efficacy and job social support on the relationship between job demands and psychological well-being among mid-career academics. Participants were 203 academics at three public Nigerian universities (female = 37.93%; mean years of service = 8.58 years, SD = 2.20). The academics completed measures of job demands, occupational self-efficacy, job social support, and psychological well-being. Moderated regression analysis of the data suggested only occupational self-efficacy to moderate the relationship between work demands and psychological well-being. Findings underpin the buffering effects of work self-efficacy in employee psychological well-being with high job demands.

Worker Bees and Wild Roses: The Pleasure and Pain of Mid-Career Female Academics

Drawing on self-identified metaphorical expressions that represent women at work, this paper discusses how a group of mid- career academic women experience their work and workplace. The research was prompted by consistently high number of female academics who remain in the mid-levels in the academic career ladder despite research that shows this group is ambitious and holds leadership aspirations. Understanding the experiences at the mid-career levels, by gaining insights into their workplace experiences, may further our knowledge of how to advance women in leadership. The research draws on the metaphoric descriptions provided by 28 mid-career women working across three Australian universities. Metaphors elicit hidden and implicit values about how the subjects respond and give meaning to their work and working conditions and have been used in organisational practices to disclose underlying issues. The findings discuss the positive and negative work and workplace associations disclosed by the participants. However, the findings suggests that women find pleasure and desire in and through their work. It is through their work that academic women experience self-expression, creativity and adding value. By focussing on the value of doing academic work and the rewards of contributing to academia, there is potential to enhance the capacity for mid-career women to thrive in academia and build the foundations for leadership. Keywords: metaphors, mid-career academics, women, higher education

Responding to university policies and initiatives: the role of reflexivity in the mid-career academic

ABSTRACTHow do academics make sense of university policies and strategic initiatives and act on them? Interviews were conducted with 27 mid-career academics in different disciplines, different research-intensive university environments and two countries (England and Australia). Data were analysed iteratively utilising a critical realist perspective, specifically, Archer’s modes of reflexivity. The paper argues that individuals’ responses to university policies and initiatives, to changes in policy and policy conflicts, can at least partially be understood through interrogating the modes of reflexivity they employ.

Navigating the demands of academic work to shape an academic job

ABSTRACTFindings from interviews with mid-career academics in English and Australian universities elucidate how academics interpret and navigate complex institutional contexts in shaping academic jobs. The paper argues that how they do this is a function of what they notice and respond to as well as the mode of reflexivity they employ. Three core areas are seen to affect academics sense of agency as they shape their own jobs: how they orient themselves to the world around them including the academic institution and department; their underlying goals and purposes as they seek to have a fulfilling role; and how they relate to structural conditions of the workplace. The paper argues that understanding academics’ differing foci of awareness in these areas is helpful to institutional policies and strategies.

Negotiating the rapidly changing research, publishing, and career landscape

The career prospects of tourism and hospitality academics have changed radically in the past 40 years, and this study examines how senior researchers, mid-career academics, and new and emerging scholars are negotiating the rapidly changing research, publishing, and ultimately career progression landscape. A total of 264 respondents were recruited via TRINET and CIRET. Respondents assessed their perceived pressures to adopt research and publishing approaches and provided career advice that were analyzed via content analysis. Collaboration, selection of journal, topic choice, and contribution to the field were highly ranked publishing advice from academics. Pressures to adopt authorship tactics were reported among new and emerging, and mid-career academics to maximize publication output. This study suggests academics may risk sacrificing longer-term career prospects for short-term survival as increased emphasis of performance metrics becomes more common, and considers the implications of shifting goal posts in research and publishing for the field.

The role of informal conversations in developing university teaching?

ABSTRACTWithin workplace contexts, professionals learn from colleagues by engaging in informal conversations, yet little is known about the contribution these types of conversations make to how academics develop as teachers. Taking a socio-cultural perspective, this article reports on the experience of mid-career academics in conversations about teaching within their departmental contexts. This study drew on semi-structured interviews with 24 academic staff working in different departments at an Australian research-intensive university. The transcripts were analysed using Glaser and Strauss’ [1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New York: Aldine] constant comparative method for developing grounded theory. The analysis reveals that the nature of conversations between colleagues has a distinct role in supporting academics to learn how to manage and improve their teaching practice in several unique ways, for example, through collaboration following a venting incident. Informal conversations about teaching are revealed as an avenue for continuing professional development for mid-career academics, and a productive area for future higher education research.

Should we quit our jobs? Challenges, barriers and recommendations for interdisciplinary energy research

Many plea for a better integration of social sciences in energy research, which would imply more comprehensive interdisciplinary energy research. We argue that in order to achieve this, institutional barriers and research challenges need to be recognised and addressed. We identify six challenges and barriers, and provide recommendations for working towards solutions. We conclude that to engage in interdisciplinary research implies extra costs and fewer rewards for all researchers, particularly early and mid-career academics. We propose a new conceptualisation of practices and incentive structures among academic institutions, funding agencies, and publication outlets, and urge all energy researchers to join this debate.

Pedagogical Change at Times of Change in the Higher Education System: An Exploration of Early Career Mentoring, Co-publication and Teaching & Learning Insights

Universities are at a time of change. Their social, political and economic conditions are under challenge, while technological change challenges curriculum design and implementation, requiring reconsiderations of teaching and learning practices. In this context, and as part of the conference session on Higher education in 2014: threshold, watershed or business as usual?, I reviewed an approach I have been trialing to supporting early- and mid-career academics to navigate through this changing environment. This paper presents an illustrated essay on a human-scale approach to early- and mid-career mentoring through the establishment of small team-based research and writing projects. The essay provides examples of activities that, on the one hand, assist academics to develop the tools they need to navigate the new and evolving environment of higher education, while on the other hand directly addresses key pedagogical issues and provides new insight into teaching and learning in higher education.

Desarrollo de profesores en educación veterinaria

<p>Hoy en día hay una mayor concienciación de que los profesores de formación profesional y educación superior deben ser capacitados en la enseñanza, aprendizaje y evaluación para apoyar el aprendizaje más eficaz de los estudiantes. Sin embargo, existen retos en la formación de estos profesores, que son especialistas disciplinares con grandes cargas de trabajo y no disponen de tiempo para estudiar. Como la “educación” es una disciplina con su propia epistemología, la participación de estos profesores implica demostrar esta diferencia desde el principio, y proporcionar oportunidades para que puedan integrar su propia práctica, específica de su disciplina, para personalizar la formación. En este artículo se describe un curso de certificado de postgrado que fue diseñado para la formación específica para los profesores en los sectores veterinario y paraveterinario. Los participantes se sometieron a un ciclo de aprendizaje experiencial al convertirse en “estudiantes”, y tuvieron experiencias de primera mano sobre la comprensión de cómo sus propios estudiantes aprenden, la mejor manera de utilizar diferentes métodos de enseñanza y cómo las evaluaciones pueden impulsar el aprendizaje. La filosofía central del curso fue el desarrollo de un profesional reflexivo, y esto se logró mediante un modelo de tutor-tutorando con retroalimentación formativa. El curso fue impartido en el modo cara a cara (F2F) y de educación a distancia (DL) para ampliar el acceso y la flexibilidad. A través de la integración de los modos de F2F y DL, todos los participantes experimentaron el uso de la tecnología en el diseño educativo y la enseñanza. La demografía de los 152 participantes en el programa, que ha estado funcionando desde 2010, muestra que la mayoría son veterinarios que trabajan en instituciones de educación superior y son académicos principiantes o a mitad de carrera. Además, el 25% de los participantes son de fuera del Reino Unido, lo que muestra la necesidad de un curso específico de la disciplina que se pueda estudiar a distancia.</p>

Informal conversations about teaching and their relationship to a formal development program: learning opportunities for novice and mid-career academics

Engaging in informal activities, like conversations with colleagues, is one way that professionals can learn within workplace contexts. Informal conversations present opportunities for academics to learn about teaching. The current study investigated academics’ experience of informal conversations, and their experience of the relations between conversations and one formal development program. Semi-structured interviews with 30 individual academics were conducted and the transcripts analysed using the constant comparative method associated with grounded theory. This analysis provided evidence that conversations play a developmental role in supporting academics to learn about teaching from colleagues, and these conversations can reinforce the learning from a formal development program. The results of this study suggest roles for academic developers in encouraging informal conversations about teaching, and building constructive relations between formal and informal development strategies.

Publish, Don’t Perish: Research and Publication for Otolaryngologists

Publish, Don’t Perish: Research and Publication for Otolaryngologists

We Walk the Line: An Analysis of the Problems and Possibilities of Work at the Sport Psychology-Sport Sociology Nexus

Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars in sport psychology and sport sociology have begun forging inter- and transdiciplinary research lines that attempt to follow Ingham, Blissmer, and Wells Davidson’s (1998) call for a coming together of the sport sociological and sport psychological imaginations. This paper presents the results of a thematic analysis of the stories of five early-to midcareer academics who have lived at/through the boundaries of these two sub disciplines of Kinesiology. Following an introduction in which we attempt to situate the two subdisciplines within the larger field of Kinesiology, we present a thematic analysis of the five individual stories, and attempt to tie them to the politicized boundaries and related spaces of tensions faced by those wishing to do the kind of interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work advocated recently by the emerging areas of cultural sport psychology (CSP) and physical cultural studies (PCS).

Changing Academic Roles and Shifting Gender Inequalities: A Case Analysis of the Influence of the Teaching-Research Nexus on the Academic Career Prospects of Female Academics in the Netherlands

The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of the change in academic roles for female academics and the implications of this change for their career opportunities. In this article, we therefore aim to answer the following research questions: (1) How have the changes introduced by the new public management affected the division of academic labor in universities? (2) What academic role differentiation can be found in the Dutch higher education system? (3) How is the workload of female academics distributed in the managerial Dutch university? (4) How does this workload differentiation influence their career prospects? We investigate these questions by concentrating on the Dutch academic system in general and on one case-study university in particular. Our findings indicate that the teaching-research nexus is changing in the Netherlands in that new career paths with a focus on either teaching or research have already been integrated into the formal job classification regulations. Furthermore, we find that the changing nexus is likely to be negatively related to the career prospects of female academics, while this relationship is more pronounced for mid-career academics than others.

More than an Encore

More Than an Encore Mary E. Hunt (bio) Twenty years of publishing a journal is reason to celebrate and time to contemplate an encore. The Board of Directors of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc., the nonprofit organization that publishes the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, realized that as the JFSR matures there is much more we need to do to develop the infrastructure of feminist scholarship and activism. So, the group organized a conference with the ambitious title "Teaching for Change: Creating Knowledge, Transforming Institutions," which convened at Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 10–14, 2005. Some short reflections on that exciting, formative event and its impact are included in this issue. As a signal that the organization now does more than publish a journal, we are using the name Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc., or FSR, Inc., as our official title. During the conference, more than eighty colleagues from around the world (including women from Aoteorea/New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, England, Germany, Ghana, India, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Mexico, and the United States) lived and worked together in an intensive effort to map the terrain of and organize future projects. We included graduate students as well as senior professors, midcareer academics, government and religious workers, and activists of many stripes. Primary support for the conference came from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, with additional funds from the Ford and Luce foundations to facilitate international participation. The conference was conceptualized as a working event that actively involved all of its participants. More than half of those in attendance made plenary panel presentations. Everyone assembled was involved in daily working [End Page 89] groups that digested the agenda's input and shaped future collaboration. Creative rituals led by an interfaith (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian) team added a spiritual dimension; music provided by a women's ensemble was a welcome balance to all of the words. Meals together, informal conversation in the evening, and forays in Cambridge allowed participants to get to know one another beyond titles and publications. A lively party that included dancing and comedy capped an unforgettable week of intense work and equally intense enjoyment with committed friends. We began "Taking Stock" with "Critical Reflection on Experience" chaired by Vivian-Lee Nyitray. We learned that feminism is still a costly commitment around the world, often misunderstood and/or instrumentalized to diminish women's capacity to thrive. We heard about creative efforts to change this situation, including strategies for teaching in an all-women's college and the development of online journals to expand the reach of academic discourse. We moved on to "Structural/Institutional Analysis" chaired by María Pilar Aquino. We focused on class issues, especially how higher education can result in "mobility for stasis." We acknowledged the need to build bridges beyond the university. We asked who constitutes "we" when it comes to feminist work, a question that led us to look critically at the variety of our starting points. We explored how feminist studies can provide the tools for dismantling oppressive structures as well as a starting point for building a power base, a springboard for movement building. All of these conversations continued in the working groups, where each participant added her experience to the general taking stock. Thus concrete instances of racism, sexual violence, poverty, discrimination against indigenous people, heterosexism, and/or ageism formed the basis of our analysis and the impetus for our constructive work. "Theoretical Analysis" was our next task, kicked off by a panel on "Theoretical Approaches to Feminist Knowledge and Pedagogy" chaired by Naomi Goldenberg. We looked at subjugated knowledge and the need for critical, subversive pedagogies that help dismantle oppressive structures. We explored the ways in which our multiple identities make feminist work both complicated and rich. We talked about the role of the media and of governments in shaping consciousness. We saw how advertising functions as a powerful force and what psychoanalytic theory can contribute to the discourse. Postcolonial feminist analysis added a much-needed critical dimension. Power questions of who is listening/speaking and what the goal of specific projects is in an unjust world became...

Attitudes about Work Practices, Time Allocation, and Publication Output: Profiles of U.S. Marketing Academics

This study examines attitudes of U.S.-based Academy of Marketing Science members toward teaching, research, participation in administration (including service), and academic promotional issues. Individuals were grouped using Ward’s and K-means clustering procedures, which revealed four groups—established academics, research-focused academics, less satisfied midcareer academics, and satisfied teachers. Clusters were further profiled according to the amount of time spent on teaching, research, and administration; research output; and individual demographic and institutional characteristics. Overall, clusters were generally dissatisfied with a range of work-related issues, with workload stress appearing as an issue that needs to be addressed within marketing academia.