Speaker:

Professor Emily F. Henderson

Abstract:

This inaugural professorial lecture emphasises the importance of looking inwards at the academic profession, not as a navel-gazing exercise but as a vital reflexive endeavour to ensure that academia is doing what it should be doing both within higher education institutions and in contributing to the wider public good mission of higher education. All too often, academics reserve their ‘research brains’ for their scholarly research and teaching, and adopt a less secure intellectual and moral compass when engaging in the processes and operations of the institutional structures that contain us. This talk reflects on an oeuvre of work which has focused on critically engaging with, demystifying and – hopefully – contributing to the gradual and ongoing transformation of academia towards a more inclusive and equitable profession. The talk draws on a range of theoretical-empirical projects which have always departed from (if not always overtly stated) a feminist poststructuralist orientation to knowledge production, and which have included explorations of international academia in relation to conferences, caring responsibilities, academic mobility, doctoral admissions, higher education outreach and research centres, among others. In addition to the comparatively safe exploration of previous research projects, the talk also reflects on a career thus far spent in a reflexive (auto)ethnographic engagement with academia, touching on deliberate and conscious strategies to craft and perform an identity that can be conceptualised as achingly academic.

About the speaker:

Professor Emily F. HendersonLink opens in a new window is Professor and Director of the ‘Doctoral Education and Academia Research Centre’ (DEARLink opens in a new window), at the University of Warwick, and is located in Education Studies. She is also a Visiting Professor at Centre for Policy Research in Higher Education (CPRHE), National Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), India. Emily’s current research projects include ‘Widening Access to Higher Education in IndiaLink opens in a new window’, ‘The Heart of ResearchLink opens in a new window: Exploring the Aims, Nature and Values of Education Research Centres’,and an evaluation project Link opens in a new windowof the University of Warwick PATHWAY Programme for Black Researchers. She is most recently co-author of Gendering the Massification Generation: Higher Education Access and Choice in India (Routledge, 2024), Making Sense of Academic Conferences (Routledge, 2023) and co-editor of Exploring Diary Methods in Higher Education Research (Routledge, 2021). She is co-editor of the academic blog Conference InferenceLink opens in a new window and Co-Convenor of the online platform Diary Method CommunityLink opens in a new window. She is on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilyfhenderson/Link opens in a new window