Creating my academic self and space: autoethnographic reflections on transcending barriers in higher education

Abstract

This article focuses on my ethnographic self-reconstruction in order to explore my academic journey, by critically evaluating the influence of professional academic cultures on my teaching practice, with a view to understanding my professional identity. I make visible to the reader and myself my suppressed feelings, emotions and ambitions by analysing learning opportunities that facilitate my ‘being’ an academic. Drawing on theoretical frames from autoethnography, I engage in personal epistemological vigilance by directing my sociological gaze inwards. I retroactively and selectively draw on diary recordings of my own micro-ethnographies, and my teaching portfolio statement as the data sets. My entry into this slippery, treacherous space evokes feelings of vulnerability and hyper-visibility. It illuminates the struggle of being on the right-hand side of binaries such as disciplinary specialist/ interdisciplinary researcher, experienced/novice academic, and scholar/teacher. This work has implications for other academics who feel undervalued, over-extended and trapped in the labour of teaching.