Narrating Academic identity of Higher Education Researchers in East Asia: Diverse Responses to the Impact of Covid-19

• In Event: Research practices in Asia: Influence and influences

Proposal

In the last two decades, the literature of higher education (HE) studies in Asia has been growing (Hayhoe, 1995; Mok, 2003; Huang, 2007; Shin & Harman, 2009; Marginson, 2011; Welch, 2011), examining the topics of internationalisation and globalisation, massification and managerialism. Recently, there is a body of research which takes stock of the development of HE studies in Asia as a field of research (Jung, Horta & Yonezawa, 2018), using mainly the historical/ policy reviews or scientometric method (Lo & Ng, 2015; Horta, 2018). However, there is a lack of qualitative research which understands East Asian academic profession in the light of academic identity. This paper intends to fill the research gap by offering an empirical account of how academic identity affects East Asian HE researchers in their response to the impact of COVID-19, and how the global pandemic affects the reworking of academic identity.

Globally, COVID-19 is impacting various aspects of higher education to different degrees and it has been creating a broad-based crisis (Altbach & de Wit, 2020). Teaching, learning and assessment have been converted to online or hybrid mode in most HE systems. Research and international academic meetings/ conferences were interpreted. The global pandemic also severely affects student enrolment when the mobility of international students is constrained. This can have significant financial implications for the operation of a university, an academic department or a study programme. Austerity measures may lead to increased professional insecurity, anxiety and changing academic identity. Situated at a challenging time when universities are facing significant structural and systemic adaptation and transformation, there is increasing uncertainty regarding the nature and stability of academic identity (Evan & Nixon, 2015). Novel, emergent and entrepreneurial values arise and compete with the established, fundamental and good values alongside the reflection and re-articulation of academic identity.

This study understands academic identity as an ongoing project continually being formed and reformed by the institutional, socio-cultural and political contexts within which academic professionals operate (Henkel, 2002; Billot, 2010; Fitzmaurice, 2013; Evan & Nixon, 2015). It is a process which involves action and reaction, accommodation and agency, adjustment and resistance (Nixon, 2015). The way in which academics respond to the changes and challenges brought along by COVID-19 depends on academics’ identity -- how academics identify themselves in their personal and professional life. Academic identity is a multidimensional concept which is constituted and co-represented by academic disciplines, professorial priorities (between research, teaching, administration, knowledge exchange), sense of affiliation and loyalty (disciplinary, departmental, institutional), employment status (full time, tenured: Levin & Shaker, 2011; or ‘para’ academics: Macfarlane, 2011), roles and key professional duties (researcher, teacher, administrator: Leven & Aliyeva, 2015; academic manager or managed academics: Winter 2009; Deem & Brehony, 2005), and citizenship (locals/nationals or cosmopolitans/ ‘mobals’: Gouldner, 1957; Tang, 2013). The academic identity an academic professional currently holds is in fact situated in the intersectional contexts (personal, institutional and societal) in which s/he lives her/his academic life (Billot & King 2017; Shin 2011). Apart from the lived experiences in academic socialisation through doctoral education and professional socialisation in post-doctoral stage, changing policies also contribute to the social construction and the unfinished ‘crafting’ project of academic identity (Henkel, 2005).

This paper centres around 2 research questions:

[1]. How does academic identity affect East Asian HE researchers in their response to the impact of COVID-19?

[2]. In what ways does the global pandemic affect the reworking of their academic identity?

This paper employs the interpretive framework of social constructivism and understands the world in which they work and elicits their worldview when they ‘live their academic life’. It engaged in qualitative interviews with 12 academic professionals in HE studies across East Asia to offer in-depth descriptions (or ‘thick descriptions’, Geertz, 1973) and narrated the lived experience of how academic identity affects HE researchers to respond to the impact of COVID-19, and how the global pandemic affects the reworking of academic identity. The qualitative data will be supplemented by the recent data and statistical patterns of academic identity from the international database “The Academic Profession in the Knowledge-based Society” (APIKS).

This project purposefully recruited the HE researchers from diverse personal, institutional and national contexts (employment status, professional roles and duties, professorial priorities, sense of affiliation and loyalty, age and academic generation, citizenship, gender etc.) for constructing the research sample which can generate a rich portrait of academic identity, responses to global crises and professional engagement of research and education. Investigators conducted the qualitative interviews individually and used inductive method of probing emergent ideas.

We borrowed the methodological tool of ‘big stories, small stories’ by Bamberg (2006) to make situated interpretations (Gumperz & Berenz, 1993) of the interviewees’ views, perceptions, values and subjectivities. Their unique ‘small stories’ of individual crafting project of academic identity will be interpreted as situated within the ‘big stories’ of the COVID-19 impact and institutional change in the context of HE studies in East Asia. Most importantly, new perspectives and paradigms, which are useful for contextualisation and re-conceptualisation processes, were probed from the field data in a bottom-up manner. Ontologically, multiple realities are constructed through lived experiences and interactions with others.

This research found that significant events over the COVID-19 crisis played an important role as the ‘turning points’ or epiphanies within their stories of lived experiences of living out or re-articulating their academic identity. For researchers working in the institutional context which was financially impacted by the global pandemic had their work contract and work routines affected and their academic identity reconsidered. The factors of (1) interaction (personal, institutional, social), (2) continuity (past, present, future) and (3) life-course stages of academic life constitute the narrative accounts, chronological sequence and contextual understanding of the HE researchers, as compared with the larger story of university entrepreneurial responses to COVID-19. Bringing together academics to reflect upon what it means to be an academic in the era of global crises, empirical analysis from this paper will contribute to a better understanding of the role of academic identity in enhancing educational and research productivity at universities.

Authors

• Hei-hang Hayes Tang, The Education University of Hong Kong

• Yangson Kim, Hiroshima University

• Soo Jeung Lee, Sejong University, South Korea

• Roy Y. Chan, Lee University