Agnes Bosanquet

Torrens University · Design and Creative Technology

‘Early career’ in academia is typically defined in terms of research capability in the five years following PhD completion, with career progression from post-doctoral appointment to tenure, promotion and beyond. This ideal path assumes steady employment and continuous research development. With academic work increasingly casualised, experiences of...

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler [2001. “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Diacritics 31 (4): 22–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566427.] shows that the question ‘What have I done?’ can only be answered by first asking: ‘Who is this “I” who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?’ This article exp...

This epistolary article presents a slow reading of Raewyn Connell's The Good University by two feminist scholars. Our conversation brings a unique perspective to Connell's book, capturing our lived experience of plagues, or persistent afflictions causing worry and distress, within and beyond the university. We started reading and writing together i...

This case study presents two qualitative feminist research approaches to investigate lived experiences of early-career academics: autoethnography and collective narrative inquiry. Autoethnography tells a story from the researcher’s perspective, whereas collective narrative inquiry challenges researcher objectivity and presents multiple participant...

When my first child was born eighteen years ago, I was a doctoral candidate who aspired to an academic career. Birth certificates in Australia require parents to include their profession (although my own from thirty years earlier listed my father as a librarian and left my mother, a nurse, without an occupation). With uneasy hubris, I wrote academi...

This collaborative chapter explores the concept of slow scholarship and the slow scholar in the context of the accelerated landscape of contemporary universities. The neoliberal university of today demands high productivity and efficiency within compressed time frames, leaves little room for reflective scholarly thinking or practice, and disregards...

What has been the contribution of Higher Education Research & Development (HERD) to feminist scholarship? This analysis utilises Acker and Wagner’s definition of feminist scholarship as having the following characteristics: puts women and gender at the centre of analysis, deconstructs unequal power relations, works toward improving women’s lives, v...

Academic garments have, for centuries, privileged white, male, able, cisgender, middle class bodies. The mortar board, floppy PhD hat and cape, the suit and tie, the tweed jacket with elbow patches were all designed with the white male body in mind. The effect of recent neoliberal trends has only reinforced this. In this book chapter, two feminist...

In this chapter, we offer a glimpse behind the scenes of higher education scholarship in action. We reflect on the unanticipated complexities of a participatory action research project on the peer review of teaching in a university context. Our aim was to promote a culture of ongoing reflection that would lead to quality enhancements in learning, t...

In the neoliberal university, how do doctoral candidates (PhDs) and early career academics (ECAs) experience time? This analysis brings together two qualitative studies in Australian universities: interviews with 64 PhD candidates, and a survey of 522 ECAs on teaching and research experience, and identity and career development. The data is analyse...

This chapter is a collective autoethnography that reveals the messiness and fractured identities of (non)mothers and (non)researchers in and out of academic contexts. Luce Irigaray’s writing on breath, interiority and autonomy brings together the reflections. In Between East and West, Irigaray (2002) has learnt “the importance of breathing in order...

This article extends examinations of the gendered nature of care and service in academia, with a particular focus on the labour of maintaining conference communities. Utilising empirical data from a cultural history of the International Academic Identities Conference, we draw on interviews with 32 conference organisers, keynote speakers and partici...

Early career academics (ECAs) represent the future of the academic workforce, but competition and career uncertainty is resulting in disengagement and burnout. In professions outside academia, increased engagement is associated with perceived organisational support and fair recognition and rewards, as well as opportunities to meet basic psychologic...

In “Birds, Women and Writing”, Cixous (Birds, women and writing (Trans: Cornell S, Sellers S). In: Calarco M, Atterton P (eds) Animal philosophy: essential readings in continental thought. Continuum, London, pp 167–173, 2004) refers to opening “the back door of thought” (p. 169), a place where the unthought, the risky and the impossible can be imag...

In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray (1993) asks us to celebrate mucus for “its abundance . . . its availability, its joyfulness, its flesh” (pp110–111). This chapter uses Irigaray’s metaphor of mucus, and its connections with her concepts of sexual difference and women’s two sets of lips, to perform a feminist writing of the lived experienc...

This paper takes a glimpse behind the scenes of higher education scholarship: a showcase of leadership, practice and policy that is a work in progress, rather than a retrospective narrative of excellence. We reflect on the unanticipated complexities of a participatory action research project on the peer review of teaching in a university context. W...

he dominant definition of “early career” in academia is a normative one. Typically five years post-PhD, the early career academic (ECA) moves from post-doctoral, tenure track or Level A to Assistant Professor, Level B, Reader and onwards. This assumes steady employment and continuous research and professional development, and does not reflect the l...

While there is a growing body of research on sessional staff experiences, there are few published accounts evaluating their professional development. This paper reflects on an evaluation of a university-wide professional development program for tutors at an Australian university. A combination of complementary approaches were used to inform the dev...

This paper examines what it means to be an activist and to do activist work in the Australian contemporary university. In a context of globalisation, massification and marketisation, what does academic or scholar activism look like? In a time of political uncertainty about fee deregulation, further cuts to public funding and changes to the income-c...

People with dyslexia are vastly under-represented in universities (Katusic et al., 2001, Richardson & Wydell, 2003; Stampoltzis & Polychronopoulou, 2008). This situation is of concern for modern societies that value social justice. This study was designed to explore learning experiences of university students with dyslexia and factors that could co...

Abstract of conference presentation, full paper TBA

Title: ’Getting real’ in PhD students’ researcher development The traditional purpose of a PhD degree is the preparation and development of researchers. Surprisingly, researcher development is mainly discussed in regards to post-PhD and early academics and researchers (McAlpine, Jazvac-Martek, & Hopwood, 2009; Sinclair, Barnacle, & Cuthbert, 2013)....

Writing is undoubtedly affective, and the development of a writerly identity is realised affectively. Scholarly writing can awaken positive and negative emotions from pleasure to anxiety in both novice and experienced writers (Cameron, Nairn & Higgins, 2009; Dwyer, Lewis, McDonald & Burns, 2012). Developing a writerly identity, as Grant and Knowles...

This paper emerges from a research study that analyses graduate attributes statements from 39 Australian universities over a 20 year period. Graduate attributes articulate an institution’s vision of students they seek to develop and the knowledge, values and dispositions they wish to impart. Specifically, this paper examines graduate attributes fro...

This essay is a response to the third biennial conference showcasing research and scholarship on academic identities held at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in July 2012. The first conference, with the theme of ‘academic identities in crisis’, was held at the University of Central Lancashire in 2008; the second, ‘academic identities in the...

Purpose - Many universities are in the process of changing their learning management systems to Moodle yet there is limited empirical research available on the impact of this change. This paper explores the results of an initial pilot, which was conducted as the first stage of implementing Moodle at an Australian university. Design/methodology/app...

This paper explores an innovative approach to evaluating the effectiveness of a writing group in an Australian research-intensive university. Traditional qualitative and quantitative methods typically applied in higher-education research may be effective in analysing the output of writing groups; however, they do not always address the affective do...

This paper explores an innovative approach to evaluating the effectiveness of a writing group in an Australian research-intensive university. Traditional qualitative and quantitative methods typically applied in higher-education research may be effective in analysing the output of writing groups; however, they do not always address the affective do...

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the cont...

The ways in which the value-added benefits of higher education are conceptualised and measured have come under increased scrutiny as universities become more accountable to their funding bodies in a difficult economic climate. Existing approaches for understanding quality learning often rely on measuring the subjective student experience or on inst...

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Reflective practice is widely considered for its contribution to learning through experience (Caldicott, 2010). Current learning and teaching design across WIL often relies on reflective journals or diaries as the dominant form for documenting and assessing reflection (e.g., Clarke and Burgess; Stupans and Owens; McNamara, 2009). However, there are...

Discussions of student engagement have gained prominence in universities nationally and internationally in recent years. Simultaneously, statements of graduate attributes have become near ubiquitous for Australian universities. To date, however, there is limited understanding of how the two are linked. Embedding graduate attributes into the curri...

Writing groups have been espoused as a means of supporting early-career researchers as they face the challenges of establishing research profiles, attaining job security, gaining funding, and collaborating with other researchers. This paper presents an evaluative study of a writing group in a central learning and teaching development unit at a metr...

Drawing on data from 39 Australian universities over the past 15 years, this paper examines the social inclusion curriculum in higher education through an analysis of university statements of graduate attributes. Graduate attributes articulate an institution’s vision of students they seek to develop, and the knowledge, values and dispositions they...

In 'What is Enlightenment?' Foucault poses the question: 'How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?' This article revisits that question by raising critical questions about graduate capabilities. Its aim is to reflect, and to prompt reflection, on the complexities of the definition, implementati...

This paper outlines the findings of a study that examined the conceptions of academics regarding the nature of ‘leading’ and ‘managing’ learning and teaching in six Australian universities. These data were considered in the light of institutional systems and documentation regarding the leadership and management of learning and teaching and the cont...

Statements of graduate attributes have gained prominence in universities nationally and internationally in recent years (Barrie, 2006; Bowden, Hart, King, Trigwell, & Watts, 2002; Jones, 2009). Increasingly, such statements include global citizenship as an “attitude or stance towards the world” that students develop during their studies (Barrie, 20...

The research discussed in this paper presents the preliminary findings of a comparative analysis of graduate attributes statements across Australian universities. Specifically, it addresses the change over fifteen years through a thematic and word frequency analysis of institutional definitions of and justifications for graduate attributes. An anal...

In Sexes and Genealogies, Luce Irigaray refers to becoming divine as “entering further into womanhood”, and goes on to say that “the becoming of woman is never over and done with. A woman’s subjectivity must accommodate the dimensions of mother and lover as well as the union between the two” (1993c, pp 60-63). In “Body Against Body: In Relation to...

This paper describes the way in which Macquarie University is implementing graduate capabilities in the curriculum. It asks: What potential is there for graduate capabilities defined at an institutional level to improve student experience? In embedding graduate capabilities in the curriculum, is it possible to move beyond rhetoric and enact positiv...

In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Luce Irigaray suggests that “sexual difference ... could be our ‘salvation’ if we thought it through.” Thinking through the issue of sexual difference, she continues, would signal the beginning of a newly fertile and creative era, “the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language: the creation of...

The term curriculum is familiar in school education, but more ambiguous in its usage in a higher education context. Although it is frequently used in academic staff discussions, policy and planning documents, and to describe advisory bodies, its usage is inconsistent and multifarious. This article reports a phenomenographic study of the ways in whi...

In The Way of Love, Luce Irigaray suggests that we (Westerners), trained in rigid and coded meanings and senses, forget the requirement of the carnal in our communications. We let pass the opportunity to be “surprised, touched, wonderstruck, called beyond … what we already [are]” (2002, viii). By writing a philosophy that seeks to transform ethical...

This paper explores the transformative possibilities of everyday life experiences through Luce Irigaray's call to become divine women (and men). The paradoxical construction of the sensible transcendental is Irigaray's attempt to imagine a divinity that would be an "inscription in the flesh" (An Ethics of Sexual Difference 147). The paper considers...

Increasingly, universities are addressing environmental sustainability issues by modelling ecologically sound practices and supporting the integration of sustainability into the curriculum. It is not yet common, however, to examine human resource practices from a sustainable perspective. With greater than ever scrutiny of learning and teaching acti...