Conference Agenda

Research on professional identity formation in higher education has highlighted a need for deeper insight into the tensions and dynamics shaping students’ pathways into professional life. Trede et al. (2012) identify unresolved questions related to tensions between personal and professional values, structural and power relations, discipline-specific versus generic educational aims, and the role of workplace learning. More recent work similarly notes that although identity development is central to students’ ability to be, become, and remain professionals, it is often insufficiently addressed in higher education (Beijaard et al., 2023). Consequently, there is a need for stronger empirical knowledge about how professional identity unfolds across educational stages and transitions (Beijaard et al., 2023; de Paor, 2017).

This paper draws on a two-phase research design conducted over four years, addressing the following research questions:

What factors and tensions emerge in the development of professional identity across transitions throughout professional education and into the first year of practice?

What differences, similarities, and profession-specific tensions related to the development of professional identity emerge when comparing social work, teacher education, and nutrition and health professions?

The first phase of the research project comprised a comparative study of first-year students enrolled in teacher, nursing, social work, and nutrition and health education, drawing on the rationale articulated by Trede et al. (2012). The second phase (2025–2026) follows a sub-sample of the participants from the original cohort – specifically from the teacher, social work, and nutrition and health programmes - supplemented with new informants and focuses on the transition from the final year of study into the first year professional practice.

Professional identity development can be understood as an ongoing individual and collective sensemaking process shaped by relational, experiential, historical, contextual, and environmental factors. Tensions emerging during practicum and placement periods often play a central role in this process (Rodrigues & Mogarro, 2019). Findings from the first phase of our study revealed both shared and profession-specific tensions among teachers, social workers, nurses, and nutrition and health students (Nielsen et al., 2023).

Although professional identity development is complex, much of the literature still examines either a single profession or a single educational stage. Our research traces individuals from multiple professions across successive stages of education and into early-career practice. This longitudinal and comparative design provides insight into how tensions and transitions emerge, interact, accumulate, and reconfigure over time. The longitudinal perspective offers a nuanced account of both continuity and disruption (O’Donnell et al., 2016), highlighting how key transition points shape professional identity trajectories.

By tracing students through their first year of study, their final year following completion of practicum, and their first year as professionals, we analyse how early anticipations develop, how practicum experiences reshape understandings of the profession, and how entry into the workplace reconfigures identity-related tensions. Although the three professions operate within different knowledge bases and organisational conditions, they share characteristics common to welfare-oriented fields. This enables us to identify both shared and profession-specific patterns in how students experience stability and change in their identity development.

Across the dataset, we observe a spectrum ranging from students who feel isolated in their identity work and struggle with inadequacy or disillusionment to those who experience practicum as the pivotal element that clarifies who they are becoming as professionals. In doing so, the findings contribute new knowledge about how transitions across education and practice shape the dynamic and tension-laden processes of becoming - and belonging - as a professional with implications for the development of higher education.

Driven by neoliberalism and globalization, higher education (HE) has shifted toward a "prestige culture" defined by competition over collaboration, metric-driven validation, and reputation-based evaluation (Oliviera et al., 2024). In this environment, academic values are sacrificed to rankings and individual indicators like citation counts and h-indexes (Blackmore, 2015). HE systems actively reproduce and legitimize this prestige culture through promotion criteria, funding mechanisms, and performance-based evaluation systems (Altbach, 2004; Brankovic, 2018). International relations, competition, and performance indicators became crucial within this prestige-driven HE system (Marginson, 2006). In this context, international research collaborations (IRC), one of the practices signifying the academic profession, has been transformed into a measure of rankings; as a result, into a tool of metric based competition. Situated at the intersection of research productivity and internationalization, IRC provides several measurable benefits, such as access to resources (Serrano Velarde, 2018), visibility (Oldac et al., 2023), and research impact (Krücken, 2021). Therefore, IRC can be considered as one of the practices academics can demonstrate their compliance with the contemporary academic norms. IRC is closely tied to academic identity as it shapes how researchers understand themselves, how they are recognized, and how they position their work within the current knowledge system. Although there are broad investigations on IRC, very limited scholarly work has been conducted on the implications of IRC on academic identity development. This study contributes to addressing this concern by exploring how academics negotiate their identities in the context of shifting academic values, norms, and practices, particularly under the pressure of IRC.

Academic identity is a dynamic process that is constructed and reconstructed through continuous interactions between academics and the HE system. This professional identity is progressively constructed through market-driven values, competition culture and metric-oriented quality understanding. As a result, academic identity formation is shaped by practices globally and institutionally valuesd, such as increasing research productivity, enhancing international visibility, and participating in multinational academic networks (Henkel, 2005). While, what it means to be a legitimate and successful academic is constantly defined by exogenous norms and values; academics construct and reconstruct their academic identities according to their own agency, by internalizing, resisting, or selectively conforming to these expectations in line with their epistemic commitments and personal motivations (Clarke et al., 2012; Shams, 2019).

Self-Discrepancy Theory (SDT) (Higgins, 1987) provides a framework for understanding how individuals evaluate themselves according to internal and external standards and how inconsistencies between these self-states lead to specific emotional outcomes. SDT divides the self into three main domains: actual self, ideal self, and ought self (Higgins, 1987). In this study, the actual self represents the academic's perception of their current academic position in relation to their IRC experience. The ideal self corresponds to the academic's personal desire to be internationally connected and recognized in this study. The ought self represents the qualities that the individual believes they should embody due to external responsibilities or pressures. In the current HE environment, this reflects the performance-oriented expectations, institutional and normative pressures on academics to participate in IRC (Ball, 2003; Karvounaraki et al., 2018). Discrepancy between an academic's current experiences and the demands of a performative academic culture, can lead to identity conflicts and, consequently, negative emotions such as “inadequacy" and "deficiency." Conversely, the harmony of these selves can support professional development and motivation (Timostsuk & Ugaste, 2010). Therefore; this study, which focuses on academics' feelings, perceptions, and interpretations of the harmony and disharmony between their ought, ideal, and real selves in relation to IRC, seeks to answer the following research question: In contemporary academia, how do academics negotiate their academic identities, and how do they position IRC within this process?

In the last 10-15 years, higher education has experienced significant shifts in how academic work is organised, recognised, and valued (Whitchurch, 2013). Alongside traditional roles centred on teaching, research, and institutional service, an increasing proportion of academic labour now takes place at the edges of the university: through consultancy, fixed-term or project-based roles, sector bodies, academic development work, and institution-building initiatives that does not always sit comfortably within conventional academic categories. Despite the prevalence of such work, higher education research has yet to develop adequate conceptual language for understanding academic work that is institutionally decoupled. This paper argues that significant forms of contemporary academic contribution are design-oriented, relational, and structurally influential, yet remain conceptually under-recognised in higher education research.

This paper explores how academic contribution and identity are understood and negotiated when academic work occurs partially or wholly outside institutionally anchored roles. It responds to a growing but under-theorised phenomenon in European higher education: experienced academics continuing to contribute meaningfully to the sector while operating at its periphery, often without formal recognition as “research-active” or “teaching-active” staff.

The paper is guided by the following questions:

• How is academic contribution currently conceptualised and recognised within higher education?
• Which forms of academic work become less visible or less valued when contribution is narrowly defined through teaching loads, grant income, or research outputs?
• How might we reconceptualise academic contribution to better account for design, advisory, and connective forms of work that increasingly shape contemporary higher education?

The paper draws on literature concerned with academic identity, professional practice, and changing forms of academic labour, alongside work on programme design, assessment, and sustainability in higher education. It argues that a greater proportion of contemporary academic work than is commonly recognised is architectural, that is, concerned with shaping structures, frameworks, curricula, and conditions for learning, rather than delivering visible outputs. Such work is typically future-oriented, relational, and distributed across institutional and national boundaries, making it difficult to capture or measure.

The paper also engages with the idea of the university as an increasingly porous and networked space, where academic influence and expertise circulate across institutions, sector bodies, and international contexts. From a European perspective, this raises questions about how higher education systems recognise expertise, support academic careers, and sustain scholarly communities in conditions of uncertainty, precarity, and change.

Rather than positioning work at the edges of the university as a deficit or a transitional phase, it is proposed that such positions offer distinctive vantage points from which to reflect on academic values, institutional priorities, and the purposes of higher education. In doing so, it aligns with broader debates within European educational research concerning academic wellbeing, sustainability, and the future of academic work.

The objective of the paper is not to offer a universal model of academic contribution, but to surface tensions, patterns, and questions that can inform ongoing discussion within the higher education research community. By making visible forms of academic work that are often overlooked, the paper seeks to contribute to more inclusive and realistic understandings of what it means to ‘contribute’ academically in contemporary higher education at a time of tension, scrutiny, and uncertainty.

This paper examines the temporalities of applying competitive research funding. The temporal conditions of academic work constitute one of the central concerns in recent research on productivity, efficiency and competition, which increasingly shape the rhythms of academic work (Vostal 2015; Venäläinen 2023; Poutanen 2025). Much of this research draws on broader theoretical accounts of social acceleration. Rosa (2013) describes acceleration as a set of interrelated temporal dynamics encompassing technological speed-up, rapid social change, and an accelerated pace of life characterised by growing time pressure, dynamics he understands as characteristic of late modern societies.

The rhythms of academic life are often portrayed as intensifying cycles of pressure that erode the scope for self-determined scholarly engagement and generate pervasive feelings of anxiety and exhaustion (Loveday 2018). This emphasis is also reflected in studies of academic temporality, which have focused on the costs of acceleration (Müller 2014; Vostal 2016; Ylijoki 2016; Kezar et al. 2019) and studies of academic temporality have largely emphasised the costs of acceleration, framing academic work primarily as a source of strain and alienation (Ylijoki 2016; Kezar et al. 2019). While such accounts provide important insights into the structural pressures shaping universities today, they also represent a relatively narrow picture.

In the context of research funding, this narrowness is particularly visible in how application processes have predominantly been approached through outcomes of success and failure, with attention directed to frustration produced by low success rates (Borgstrom et al. 2023). We shift attention instead to the lived process of writing research proposals, considering funding applications as processes that unfold over time and may also give rise to resonance. To capture this dimension, we draw on the notion of affective rhythms (Gibbs 2007; Venäläinen 2023), understood as temporally organised and collectively experienced patterns of feeling that shape how researchers engage with applying for research funding and make sense of it as part of academic work. In addition, we draw on Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance to conceptualise how temporal conditions shape meaningful engagement with funding practices. The core interest of this paper lies in the observation that speed is not problematic per se, but becomes detrimental when it results in alienation (Lijster, Celikate & Rosa 2019; see also López-González 2024). From this perspective, experiences of urgency or fast-paced work are not necessarily problematic in themselves; rather, alienation may emerge as a by-product of acceleration.

Rosa describes resonance as a responsive relation to the world characterised by a sense of meaningful engagement, whereas alienation denotes situations where such responsiveness is absent (Rosa 2019). Attending to moments where the funding application process lacks responsiveness, we introduce the notion of shadow rhythms to capture less gratifying affective dynamics in funding applications. By shadow rhythms we refer to affective dynamics that resonate with alienation, capturing situations where the temporal flow of applying does not generate meaningfulness and anticipated pauses or relief fail to occur. Attending to these shadow rhythms allows us to highlight the ambivalence of application work, showing how the same practices may generate both resonance and detachment.

While the analysis is attentive to affective expressions, affect is not treated as a primary object of analysis. Rather, affective intensity is approached as a relational dimension through which temporal structures become experientially meaningful. Feelings of determination or renewed energy are considered insofar as they illuminate how researchers relate to the rhythms, pressures, and moments of intensity involved in application work. In this sense, affect functions as an entry point into examining temporal experience and resonance, including the points at which engagement is sustained and those where the risk of alienation becomes perceptible.