Mapping Academic Citizenship: Institutional Documents and Individual Experiences

Sterling, Mark ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2119-592X and Blaj-Ward, Lia (2025) Mapping Academic Citizenship: Institutional Documents and Individual Experiences. In: Re-envisioning Academic Citizenship. Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 29-78. ISBN 9781836083610 (Print) ; 9781836083580 (Online) ; 9781836083603 (Epub)

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Abstract

Discussion of academic citizenship has been linked in recent years to redesigned academic career frameworks. Attempts to evaluate citizenship, collegiality and service formally in decisions about individual promotion have been both welcomed and regarded with mistrust in universities across the world. This chapter examines a selection of actual academic career framework documents and analyses how citizenship, collegiality and service are included in these documents, reflecting to a greater or lesser extent the universities’ stated strategic ambitions. Analysis of actual frameworks is followed by five scenarios of citizenship being enacted by academics in different roles and at different stages in their professional journey. Each of the five scenarios responds to a prompt from the literature and draws on conversations with three purposively sampled interviewees. The scenarios and accompanying commentary offer positive examples of citizenship which would meet and exceed threshold citizenship criteria in career frameworks: scholarly peer review and journal editorial work; integrating citizenship as a professional development opportunity into a research project; an informal science communication initiative which draws on contributions from different disciplines; a contribution to a university’s EDI agenda from a position of allyship; and reflection on how to develop a mentoring scheme for academics for a post-pandemic context. The chapter closes with reflection on increasing the scale and visibility of impactful ways of enacting citizenship.