The Role of Collegiality in Academic Work

Abstract

Collegiality is at the heart of the academy’s collective endeavour. It is central to how we think about academic governance structures, academic cultures and values, as well as the norms guiding academic work. Yet collegiality tends to be misconstrued as a singular and unproblematic ‘good thing’. Situated in the field of critical university studies, in this thesis, I engage with poststructural and postfoundational theories to generate new readings of collegiality that challenge these simplistic conceptions. Through an ongoing iterative process of assembling theoretical concepts and putting them in conversation with collegiality as an empirical phenomenon, I examine collegiality as both a discursive category and a practice. To do this, I draw on a range of texts: academic and online texts, as well as interviews with academics situated in Australian and New Zealand/Aotearoa universities. I read collegiality, first, as a fantasy; second, as a tactically polyvalent element of discourse; third, as a constellation of practices; and finally, as affective attunement to academic contexts. These theoretical angles enable me to shed a different light on the role collegiality plays in academic work, and to examine a range of mechanisms through which the collective imaginary of collegiality is constructed, maintained, contested and negotiated. Taken together, these interpretations allow me to reinscribe collegiality as a relationally and dynamically constituted phenomenon that is enacted by a multiplicity of players in academic contexts. Through these new readings of collegiality, this thesis makes three main contributions to the higher education literature. First, it invites us to reflect on the effects that collegiality produces in academic contexts and to shift our analytical gaze away from viewing collegiality as a universalising concept. Second, this study offers a reconfigured picture of academic relations creating a more expansive view of collegiality and its role in academic work. Finally, by noticing and affirming fragmented and marginal collegial practices that are attentive to difference, this thesis opens up the possibility for new responses to challenges facing the contemporary academy. Through these types of practices, I contend that the (good) academy could be forged as a pluralistic, open and more socially just formation.