Drawing upon findings from a UK-based and -funded study of academic leadership provided by (full) professors, this article focuses on research leadership as perceived by those on the receiving end of it. Research leadership is defined as the influence of one or more people on the research-related behaviour, attitudes or intellectual capacity of…

Academic work in Sweden's higher education system is changing character. Distinctly different career pathways are emerging, as facilities for developing research careers and capital have become both more restricted and more dependent on external funding. These developments are in focus in the present article. Based on ethnographic research and a…

Universities in Australia are becoming increasingly concerned with their reputation as "engaged" institutions. Yet there is significant confusion about what this idea of "engagement" means and no clear way of measuring or reporting it. In part, this is because of the nature of engagement itself which is dependent on local…

This paper looks at ways in which methods used in literary analysis can contribute to higher education research. I start by describing a methodology commonly used in the analysis of literary texts, close reading or textual analysis, and outline how it can be utilised in conjunction with several theoretical approaches in the literary studies…

Current literature about interdisciplinary education research is focused on three points: conceptual definitions of interdisciplinarity, the need for interdisciplinary research to tackle the advent of problem-based research and the positive curriculum outcomes to be gained from interdisciplinary research. While this research is important, it does…

Supervisors supporting queer individuals engaged in postgraduate research in Visual Arts face a number of issues. Beyond concerns with balancing the autobiographical and the scholarly, a supervisor may also encounter questions relating to safety, identity, tokenism, exoticisation and the pressure candidates feel to develop work that has…

In this article, I draw mainly on an analysis of my research experiences in science and higher education. My aim is to construct a conceptual argument that will help explain some of the evident complexity of the higher education field and inform future developments. I propose that the study of higher education is an open-access discipline with the…

This article addresses the problem of how we theorise in writing about higher education through a reconstruction and interrogation of my previous work. I argue that theorising is messy, incomplete and a non-reductive process. Using C. Wright-Mills' notion of craft and Val Hey's insights into theorists who come to haunt us, I retrace the steps…

Professors endorse a symbiotic relationship between research and teaching, but empirical evidence supporting this relationship is inconsistent. Many studies operationalized research and teaching too narrowly to detect the believed relationship. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 27 chemistry professors from a large…

This paper reports findings from a study that focused on the experiences of research-intensive academics in relation to the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Framework. Interviews with academic staff at different career stages and across all academic faculties followed completion of a short survey in which respondents compared their…

This article considers the value of clarity--of theory, method and purposes--in educational research. It draws upon the work of early critical theorist, Theodor Adorno, and particularly his notion of negative dialectics and his challenge to the traditional dichotomy of theory and practice. Using the notions of virtuous mess and wicked clarity, I…

In this article, the role of theory in higher education research is problematised using a communities of practice framework. Drawing on a case study derived from the author's own published work and doctoral study, the article concludes that the differential uses of theory within communities of research practice can be fruitfully explored, in part,…

The articles published in 15 specialist academic journals--based in Australasia, Europe and North America--focusing on higher education in the years 2010 (n = 567) and 2000 (n = 388) are analysed. The analysis focuses on: the themes and issues addressed in the articles published, the methods and methodologies used, theoretical engagement, the…

This article is the first comprehensive review of speed dating in the tertiary sector. While speed dating has its origins as a networking technique to connect singles, it has only more recently made its way into the academy. Since 2005 universities world-wide have begun to adopt speed dating protocols as a tool for building research culture. An…

Ever since he stumbled into doing higher education research as a young academic in the 1980s, the author has been trying to understand it as a "field" of study. His career, as a former business lecturer, then an academic developer and now an associate professor for higher education working in an Education Faculty has given him opportunities to see…