Continuously Mapping our Trajectories Towards Advancement as Mid-Career Women Academics through Collaborative Self-Study

We are two mid-career women teacher educators from a South African institution currently immersed in repositioning itself as a leading research-led institution by adopting the global neoliberal trends that privilege market logics. These changes have intensified competition amongst academics, created uncertainty, and increased stress for mid-career women academics. As they attempt to keep up with their early-career male counterparts while juggling family responsibilities and maintaining positive academic functioning, which is fundamental to career advancement. Hence, in this study, we asked, “What can we collaboratively learn from continuously engaging in mapping our academic trajectories towards advancement as mid-career women academics? Our data sources included: a) Our first data sources were the collages we created in response to the research question, what can we, as mid-career women academics, do to better position ourselves for academic advancement? b) transcribed audio-recorded narratives, c) poems which we individually created from the transcripts. Data analysis involved creating a collaborative poem from the individual poems, which served as material for poetic interpretation. By continuously engaging in mapping our trajectories towards academic advancement through collaborative self-study as a methodology, we could create our own pathways as mid-career women that lead to upward mobility within academia. When we reflected, we learned that, by responding to the lack of adequate support for mid-career women academics, we can find comfort in the collective efforts as we move toward a sense of self-development that is forever evolving. Therefore, we concluded that staying on track, continuously self-evaluating, self-positioning, and collaboratively moving into action can open up opportunities for academic advancement in a space that understands who you are. For us, this highlights the necessity of continuing to self-evaluate for change and action through self-study to inspire and open up possibilities for future advancements in one’s practice.