Conference Agenda

Background Context

Higher education has undergone significant transformations in recent decades, shaped by globalisation, marketisation and increasing accountability measures (Marginson, 2000; Olssen & Peters, 2005). Framed by the promissory logic of neoliberalism (Beckert, 2019), these shifts have fostered "academic capitalism" (Jessop, 2017), where academic labour is increasingly assessed by profitability and output (Slaughter & Leslie, 2001). This phenomenon is prevalent in European and other university systems across the globe, reflecting the transnational nature of contemporary higher education (Djerasimovic & Villani, 2020; Siekkinen et al., 2020).

Consequently, academics worldwide now navigate a complex terrain of competing demands, shifting identities and evolving notions of scholarly work (Henkel, 2005; Archer, 2008). They face intensifying workloads, pressure to secure funding, demands for 'excellence' and the need to demonstrate impact (Tight, 2010; Watermeyer, 2015). These pressures, compounded by employment precarity and eroding academic freedom (Courtois & O'Keefe, 2015), have cultivated an affective environment of instability, burnout and self‑doubt (Brunila & Nehring, 2023).

Within this turbulent context, academics negotiate their professional identities, balancing personal values against institutional imperatives (Clegg, 2008). The emotional labour involved is significant yet often overlooked (Constanti & Gibbs, 2004). Discourses of overwork and exhaustion have become normalised and sometimes valorised as "heroic" (Skea, 2021; Kidman, 2020), while many academics experience a "passion trap" of simultaneous pleasure and exploitation (Luczaj, 2020). These experiences, though locally specific, share common threads across global contexts and deeply affect academics’ emotional and experiential lives.

This presentation considers how printmaking can render these complexities legible, using a series of woodblock prints to evoke tacit meanings, emotional registers and paradoxes of identity that often elude textual accounts.

Objectives

The objectives of this study are to:

• Produce a curated suite of woodblock prints that explore and communicate the affective landscapes and material realities of academic work through visual metaphor and printmaking practice.
• Demonstrate and theorise arts‑based approaches as rigorous analytic practices within higher education research, showing how creative production can function as data, interpretation and scholarly output.
• Create an integrated visual–textual portfolio that engages with international debates on accountability, professionalism and policy, fostering critical reflection and dialogue about how systemic forces shape academic identities and labour.

Research Question / Problematic

The problematic underpinning this inquiry is:

How can a series of woodblock prints that weave personal and collective narratives illuminate the affective and paradoxical dimensions of academic life and engage diverse audiences?

This question is framed to:

• Examine how material and compositional choices in woodblock printmaking function as analytic practice, generating insights into academics’ affective and paradoxical experiences.
• Translate individual narratives into collective accounts that address debates on accountability, professionalism and policy.
• Explore modes of presenting and sharing the visual–textual ensemble with diverse audiences (scholars, policymakers and the public) to provoke reflection, dialogue and potential impact.

Conceptual / Theoretical Framework

The framework for this project integrates theories of academic work with arts‑based inquiry, using the carnivalesque as a bridging concept. It draws on supercomplexity and academic capitalism (Barnett, 2000; Slaughter & Leslie, 2001) to contextualise higher education's contested nature, and on 'cruel optimism' (Berlant, 2011) to explore academic identity negotiation. Arts‑based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012) and printmaking as research (McMordie & Stempel, 2023) legitimise aesthetic inquiry and embodied experience in research. The carnivalesque (Bakhtin, 1984) and world‑travelling (Lugones, 1987) enable critique through humour, inversion and perspective‑shifting.

These lenses inform both the making processes (material and compositional choices) and the interpretive aims (translation of personal narratives into collective forms and dissemination to varied audiences). The project treats printmaking not merely as illustration, aiming to provoke scholarly and public engagement with the affective realities of academic labour.

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which is still ongoing as in times of writing. Despite the destruction of educational facilities, forced displacement of universities from occupied regions, and the lack of funds, Ukrainian universities continue to function, persevering in teaching and learning. The full-scale invasion had a dramatic effect on all Ukrainians, including university teachers, who are responsible for upholding higher education and preparing future specialists.

The existing research documents challenges faced by the University teachers: feelings of depression (Lavrysh et al., 2022), psychological problems (Fiialka, 2022), emotional exhaustion (Tsybuliak et al., 2023a) and decrease in family income (Tsybuliak et al., 2023b). However, the research has rarely discussed how the realities of war impacted university teachers’ everyday practice. Ukrainian higher education institutions (HEIs) are symbolic of the nation's resilience to Russian occupants as they continued to work, firstly, by returning to distance education, mastered during the COVID-19 pandemic, and lately by resuming face-to-face instructions. The proposed presentation aims to highlight, describe, and reflect upon university teachers’ experiences in their own words. The research question, who the presentation will answer, is How has the professional experience of Ukrainian university teachers been since the full-scale Russian invasion?

Here, we understand professional experience as a sum of teaching and research/scientific activities that Ukrainian HEIs’ teachers undertake in their respective universities. This study adopts interviews as a method for gathering research data, as the aim is to prompt the participants’ reflexive thoughts (Dewey, 1991) on their practice. Instead of focusing on what happened, reflexive thought fosters considerations of how something happened, for what reasons, and how a person felt and positioned themselves in it, as it is spontaneous and real thinking (Clarà, 2015).

We further connect reflexivity with dialogue, as the interviews with participating Ukrainian university teachers are conducted by the fellow Ukrainian university teacher, the first author. Dialogue looks simultaneously towards individual thinking and reflection and the constitution of cultural practices at a specific historical moment (Renshaw, 2004). As such dialogue provides a space for a deeper reflexive thought, stimulated and co-constructed through each others’ utterances, since, as Wells (2007) writes, when individual understanding becomes powerfully enhanced when realised in dialogue the stamps from inquiry and knowing-together. Hence, in dialogue the research is done with the participants, and not on them.

The first author, who conducted the interviews, shares cultural and professional identity, language, and experiential base with the research participants, which makes them an insider researcher (Asselin, 2003; Dwyer & Buckle, 2009). Being an insider researcher allowed to prompt more reflexive thoughts, as there was no necessity for establishing the context. Being an insider researcher also brings ethical and methodological challenges as it might be difficult to detach personal from experiences of the participants and to not to impose own ideas on the participants (Pillow, 2003; Finefter-Rosenbluh, 2017). During the interviews, it was important for the authors to provide a space for teachers’ agency without imposing and including ourselves in their stories through engaging in open and respectful dialogue. Overall, recognising and critically reflecting on affordances and challenges of the authors’ positionality, the authors approach interviews as dialogue to provide space for the participants’ authentic self-expression and reflexive thoughts.

The rapid integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in higher education has triggered a profound socio-professional disruption, particularly within Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS; Ferret et al., 2025). While institutional discourses often frame this transition through a techno-pedagogical lens, emphasizing innovation, adaptation, and assessment transformation, our longitudinal study reveals a deeper psychosocial crisis. We posit that GenAI does not merely challenge pedagogical methods but fundamentally destabilizes the professional identity of HSS scholars, whose expertise is grounded in the authenticity of writing as proof of critical thought.

This paper proposes a social psychology of “augmented” education, exploring how academic communities regulate the epistemic uncertainties introduced by GenAI. We define epistemic uncertainty as the radical incapacity to distinguish human from synthetic authorship, leading to a breakdown in both the didactic contract and interpersonal trust within the academic community. Unlike previous digital transformations, GenAI introduces a creative agent capable of producing scholarly outputs that challenge the traditional distinctiveness of academic expertise (Pasonen, 2025; Brynjolfsson et al., 2025).

Research Questions:

1. How does the intrusion of GenAI into student production affect the professional identity and epistemic beliefs of HSS scholars at micro (individual), meso (organizational), and macro (institutional) levels?
2. What social regulation strategies (resistance, securitization, re-territorialization, identity work) do academic communities develop to cope with this “augmented” uncertainty?
3. How do institutional mediation devices (training, guidelines) interact with grassroots regulation processes in facilitating or hindering collective identity renegotiation?

Theoretical Framework:


Our integrated framework articulates three complementary psychosocial dimensions:

1. Identity Process Theory (Breakwell, 1986; Vignoles et al., 2011)

We analyze the crisis through threatened identity principles. Following Endacott (2021) and Pasonen (2025), we hypothesize that GenAI attacks two core dimensions: the distinctiveness of the scholar (if AI writes like a human, what constitutes scholarly expertise?) and self-efficacy (loss of evaluative control). The demand for detection software, despite its technical unreliability, is interpreted not as naive technological solutionism but as a coping strategy to restore professional integrity and boundary work (Nelson & Irwin, 2014).

2. Social Representations of Professional Knowledge (Moscovici, 1988; Jodelet, 2008)

We investigate the conflict between competing representations: the institutional view of AI as a “cognitive partner” requiring pedagogical adaptation versus practitioners’ representation of AI as a “viral threat” to the central nucleus of their profession being the evaluation of authentic authorship. This polarization reflects what Wallin et al. (2022) identify as the dual potential of digitalization to either support or undermine professional identity.

3. Collective Efficacy and Identity Work (Bandura, 2000; Watson, 2008)

We examine how the academic community shifts from individual distress (“paranoia,” isolation) to collective identity work and normative reconstruction (Pasonen, 2025). By creating new local norms (oral exams, hybrid writing assignments, ethical charters) and deliberative spaces (general assemblies), the community attempts to rebuild “vicarious mastery” over technological disruption. This transition mirrors the movement from professional identity flux to strategic re-territorialization documented in creative knowledge work (Golgeci et al., 2025).

Objectives:


This study moves beyond the binary “pro-innovation versus anti-cheating” debate to document the hidden psychosocial costs of digital transition. It highlights the specific vulnerability of HSS disciplines, where writing style is inextricably linked to critical thinking, and proposes a model of “augmented professionalization” that integrates epistemic anxiety as a legitimate component of professional development rather than mere resistance to change. By adopting a multicausal perspective (ie. integrating micro-level identity threats, meso-level organizational mediation, and macro-level institutional discourses) we aim to provide actionable insights for supporting academic communities through this socio-professional transformation.