Research is making the emotional dimensions of academics' research visible.

Research is at the core of universities' raison d'être and is an integral aspect of academic work, yet the ever-changing parameters around research are problematic. While studies have examined changes brought about through research assessment exercises and issues of academic identity in the twenty-first century, fewer studies have used arts-related research methods to engage with academics' experiences of these changes. This article draws upon visual and textual material generated by academics at an Australian university to investigate how academic researchers engage with research in the current milieu. This research offers an aesthetic mode of interruption and resistance to consider the emotional labour, work and energy involved in doing research that cannot be captured through neoliberal research measurement discourses. It deploys a post-Foucauldian governmentality theoretical framework to illustrate the ways in which academics [re]position multiple selves constantly to build more robust and critical responses to higher education reform.

'Luck, chance, and happenstance? Perceptions of success and failure amongst fixed-term academic staff in UK higher education'.

What does it mean to attribute success to 'luck', but failure to personal deficiency? In 2015/16, more than 34 per cent of academic employees in UK higher education institutions were employed on temporary contracts, and the sector itself has undergone a substantial transformation in recent years in terms of expansion, measurement, and marketization. Based on two waves of interviews conducted with fixed-term academic employees at different career stages, the article explores the narrativization of success and failure amongst staff working at the 'sharp end' of the so-called neoliberal academy. Arguing that precarious employment situations precipitate the feeling of being 'out of control', the majority of the participants' narratives were characterized by a distinct lack of agency. The paper explores the recourse to notions of chance and the consolidation of 'luck' as an explanatory factor in accounting for why good things happen; however, in tandem with this inclination is the tendency to individualize failure when expectations have been thwarted. While accounts of fixed-term work are suffused with notions of chance and fortune, 'luck' remains an under-researched concept within sociology. The article thus concludes by considering what the analysis of 'luck' might offer for a fuller, politicized understanding of processes at work in the contemporary academy.

Nosotros los académicos. Narrativas identitarias y autodefinición en la universidad actual / We the academics. Identity Narratives and self-definition in the current university

Las transformaciones del espacio universitario a partir de los años ochenta, en Chile, revelan el ascenso de formas managerialistas de organizar la universidad y el trabajo académico. El nuevo managment, orientado por lógicas de eficiencia y mercado, promueve una cultura laboral de rendición de cuentas y, en consecuencia, una reconfiguración de las identidades académicas llamadas a adscribirse a este nuevo modelo de universidad. Este artículo presenta una investigación cualitativa realizada en Chile con veinte académicos de planta en torno a su identidad laboral. A partir del análisis de contenido -discursivamente orientado- de veinte entrevistas, se presentan como resultado dos ejes en torno a los cuales se organizan las narrativas identitarias de los académicos, mostrando los efectos para la autodefinición de este grupo y la ética del trabajo académico.

The transformations of the university space from the eighties reveals the rise of managerialist ways to organize the university and its workforce, fostering a culture of accountability and plurality of tasks such as research, guided by the logic of efficiency and market movements. Such claims therefore imply the existence of reconfigurations in academic work identity. Drawing on focused interviews with 20 academics, the article shows two axes around which the narrative identities of academics are organized and what are its effects on self-definition of the group and the ethics of academic work.