Dr. Jani Ursin

The increasing flow of managerialist practices into higher education has transformed the academy as a workplace, with challenges to the perceptions of academics concerning their work. Faced with these continuous changes, academics need to rework and redefine what it means to be an academic and what key values and moral commitments are associated with being an academic in these complex, multilayered contexts. In the presentation I will focus on how academics make sense of the current transformations of higher education and what kinds of academic identities are thereby constructed. I will also discuss what kinds of expressions of agency and emotions are related to academic identity and end up arguing a need for better acknowledgement of the emotionally loaded nature of academic work.

Jani Ursin is senior researcher at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He holds a title of Docent in higher education research. His research has focussed on quality assurance in higher education, mergers of Finnish universities, learning outcomes in higher education as well as academic work and identities. He is also active in the European Educational Research Association (EERA); he is the former Link-Convenor of EERA's Network 22: Research in Higher Education and currently is Networks' Representative on Council in the association. He is the former President of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers in Finland (CHERIF). Ursin is national editor of Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research and editorial board member of several journals in the field of higher education.