“You become academic royalty once you’ve published”: A social practice exploration of identity in academic writing

Abstract

Academic publishing plays a visible role in the lives of academics in the contemporary university. This paper, located in the academic literacies field of critical enquiry, illustrates the complex ways in which two South African academics understood and discursively constructed their identities through their writing for a recently published book exploring lecturers’ teaching and learning contexts and practices. The autoethnographic sensitivity of the research enabled the elicitation of critical self-reflective accounts, presented through detailed individual reflective sketches. The analysis uses the concepts of autobiographical self, discoursal self and affiliation (Ivanič, 1998; 2005) to show how these writers were able to discursively represent themselves in the book. It further highlights how continued disparities and inequities that characterise academic publication are experienced by the writers. The findings demonstrate the value of the social practice view of writing and its capacity to make visible how writers enact various linguistic, rhetorical and stylistic resources as they discursively construct their alignment to their scholarship community. In particular, it illuminates generative spaces where academic development practitioners can lead dialogues to re-examine current publication practices, their consequential nature for writers and explore possibilities to support emergent SOTL authors.