(Further) Reflections on Scholarly Identities: From quantified selves to self-qualifying selves

Paul Prinsloo, University of South Africa
Sharon Slade, Open University
(Further)
Reflections on
scholarly
identities:
From quantified
selves to self-
qualifying
selves Presentation at TAU – Kievitskroon, Pretoria, 12 July 2015
Paul Prinsloo (Prof) University of South Africa
Teaching Advancement @ University (TAU)
Fellowships Programme
Image credit: Vitruvian man – Da Vince -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man
Data - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BinaryData50.png

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I do not own the copyright of any of the images in this
presentation*. I hereby acknowledge the original
copyright and licensing regime of every image and
reference used. All the images used in this
presentation have been sourced from Google labeled
for non-commercial re-use.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
* Except for personal photographs as child and as adult
Teaching Advancement @ University (TAU) Fellowships
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (2)
This presentation is a further reflection on the following past
presentations and (hopefully) adds nuances and meanings as I try to
make sense and find meaning in the dystopia of neoliberal higher
education:
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin: researcher identity and performance –
University of South Africa, Inaugural 22 October 2014
Networked literacies and agency - an exploration – University of
Cape Town, 9 April
The researcher as quantified self: Confessions and contestations –
University of Johannesburg, 14 May 2015

OVERVIEW OF THE PRESENTATION
1. Welcome as member of Faculty
2. Understanding being a scholar – what and who shaped us, shapes us
and will shape us…
3. Mapping becoming and becoming a (digital) scholar
4. My own story of becoming and being a scholar…
5. The higher education context: Broader context, the move to digital &
networked identities & the changing rules of being a scholar
6. The notion & praxis of being & becoming a quantified self
7. Five modes of self-tracking (Lupton, 2014c)
8. The quantified (digital) self: some considerations
9. Deviants or heroes: The net effect of being quantified & classified
10.(In)conclusions
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Welcome as a member of Faculty
Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismemberment

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A balancing act…
Image credit:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_tightrope_walker_above_a_clown._Engraving._Wellcome_V0007470.jpg

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On academic labor and performance anxiety
Source: http://www.richard-hall.org/2014/03/05/on-academic-labour-and-performance-anxiety/

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So who are you as a scholar?
Who/what determines what are you are as
scholar on a daily basis?
How is our scholarship and being a scholar
evaluated, by whom and for what purpose?
Who do you say you are as a scholar?

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So who/what determines who I am as scholar?
My disciplinary
background
My age
My race
My location – type of
institution
My geopolitical
location – African,
Southern African
My gender
My marital status
My students’
evaluations of my
lectures/performance
My performance
contract/appraisal
The number of
Twitter followers
My Facebook profile –
number of friends,
who are my friends…
My publication
& citation
record My ‘worth’ in monetary terms?
Do I have tenure?
My political affiliation –
where was I during the
‘struggle’?
My colleagues
My line manager

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I am all of them as scholar…
• At different stages of the day
• In different forums and platforms
• In different disciplinary and institutional and inter-
institutional forums and meetings
My identity is therefore “robustly plural” and the importance of
one identity “need not obliterate the importance of others”
(Sen, 2006, p. 19). Not only does my identity consist of many
mutually constitutive or even incommensurable layers, it is also
dynamic and context-specific (see e.g. Boelstorff, 2005; Brah,
1996; Du Toit, 2014).

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Each of our identity ‘tags’ has a
meaning, and a penalty and a
responsibility.
(Chinua Achebe in an interview with K.A. Appiah, 1995:103)

Understanding being a scholar – what and
who shaped us, shapes us and will shape us…
The higher
education context
• The broader higher
education context
• The move to digital and
networked identities
• The (changing) rules of
performing research
The notion and
practices of the
quantified/
qualified self
The scholar
as
quantified/
qualified
self
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How my past
shaped/shapes my
scholarship…

My story of becoming and being a scholar*…
1948 – eleven years before I was born, the National Pary came
into power
Image credit:
http://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/europeans-
only.jpg
Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid
* Adapted from Prinsloo, O. (2014). Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin : researcher identity
and performance. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10500/14415
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[(habitus)(capital)]
1956 – the Bantu Education Act of 1955
"There is no place for [the Bantu] in the
European community above the level of certain
forms of labor ... What is the use of teaching the
Bantu child mathematics when it (sic) cannot
use it in practice?“ (Hendrik Verwoerd, Minister
of Native Affairs)
15
Three years before I was born…
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When I was two years old…
Image credit: http://ificould.co.za/human-rights-day-2013-commemorating-
the-sharpeville-massacre/
• 69 Black South Africans
murdered
• 187 people wounded
• ANC and Pac banned
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When was born in 1959 and classified as
“white” and “European”
Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid
In a town with a siren that went of
at 9 pm at night after which
everyone who was non-White had
to be outside of the boundaries of
the town.
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In 1961 – South Africa became a Republic – with the
majority of its population not being citizens
In 1965 – I started school – two years earlier than Black
children of the same age. White and Black children had
different syllabi – Black children were taught gardening and
music…
From 1966-1971 – 3 million South Africans were
resettled in reserves
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I matriculated in 1976
… with Soweto burning
with 575 people killed
Image credit: http://kgothatsomanale.blogspot.com/2013/06/soweto-uprising-16-june-1976.html
1976 was also the year my dad
died, and I started to waiter and
be a petrol attendant to make
ends meet…
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In 1977 I enrolled …
Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Logo_University_of_Pretoria.PNG
As Afrikaans speaker, I had 19 universities to choose (of which six
had Afrikaans as language of tuition) from compared to 2
universities dedicated to colored students, 2 for the exclusive
enrollment of Indian students and 6 for the exclusive use of Black
students…
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21
Acknowledging white privilege and the way it shaped my
education and provided me with opportunities is not
surrendering to the notion of victimhood and suffering that is
prevalent in the much of the current white, Afrikaner
discourse. There is a vast difference between recognising the
“historic burden of whiteness” and self-abasement or lame
apologies (O’Hehir, 2014). Personally, it is impossible and
disingenuous to ignore how my race and gender shaped my
opportunities, and provided me with social, cultural and
economic capital. My race and gender, and the
socioeconomic circumstances of my family allowed me to play
on a field while many others were excluded from playing.
(Also see Bowler, 2014; Crosley-Corcoran, 2014; Gedye,
2014).
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Being a scholar – where my past, present and
future meets
A proposition to
understand being a
scholar as an embodied,
entangled, relational,
networked, amidst a
mediated context and
mediating context-specific
capabilities and choices
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Some questions to consider:
• How does the dominant auditing and managerialist culture in
higher education, and the current quantification fetish obsessed
with measuring outputs & performance, impact on my identity &
performance as scholar?
• What do we measure? Who does the measurement & why,
based on what criteria?
• What is not measured & how does this impact on my final score?
What am I worth? My sense of self?
• How do I (increasingly) track my own performance in an unending
obsession & anxiety about whether I do enough/am good
enough?
• How does all of this impact on my identity, my self-worth &
sense of wellbeing?
(See Prinsloo, 2014)
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Higher education should…
• Do more with less
• Expect funding to follow performance
rather than to precede it
• Realise it costs too much, spends carelessly, teaches poorly, plans
myopically, and when questioned, acts defensively
(Hartley, 1995, p. 412, 861)
We need to take note of the impact of the dominant models of
neoliberalism and its not-so-humble servant – managerialism – on
higher education (Deem, 1998; Deem & Brehony, 2005; Diefenbach,
2007; Peters, 2013; Verhaeghe, 2014)
The broader higher education context (1)
Image credit:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mcdonalds_logo.png
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There is talk of “academic
capitalism” (Rhoades &
Slaughter, 2004) where
academics “sell their expertise to
the highest bidder, research
collaboratively, and teaching
on/off line, locally and
internationally” (Blackmore
2001, p. 353; emphasis added)
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dollar_symbol.jpg

“The research universities will have three classes of professors, like the
airlines. A small first-class cabin of researchers, a business-class section
of academics who will teach and do some research, and a large economy
cabin of poorly paid teachers” (Altbach & Finkelstein, 2014, par. 16;
emphasis added)
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Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_seat_map

“… the academic precariat has
risen as a reserve army of
workers with ever shorter,
lower paid, hyper-flexible
contracts and ever more
temporally fragmented and
geographically displaced hyper-
mobile lives” (Ivancheva, 2015,
p. 39)
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Image credit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_food_worker_strikes

In 2012, of the 1.5 million professors in the US, 1 million are
adjunct professors appointed on a contract basis (Scott, 2012)
Higher education is therefore in the process of becoming
unbundled and unmoored (Watters, 2012)
Image credit: http://pixabay.com/p-485222/?no_redirect
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The move to digital & networked
scholarly/researcher identities
• Porous/disappearing boundaries between
personal/professional/private/public
• Changing conventions of definition of
knowledge, ways of knowledge production,
dissemination, peer-review & measuring
impact
• Alternative metrics
• Inhabiting spaces/performing scholarship
Image credit: http://www.philips.nl/e/nederland-blog/blog/de-marketingspecialist-moet-digitaal-zijn.html
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Hartzing’s Publish or Perish
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The (traditional) rules of performing research
Unisa’s Strategic Plan 2015 clearly states the intention: “To position Unisa
in the Top 5 universities in South Africa in terms of research outputs per
academic by 2015 (Placed 6th in 2004 in numerical outputs)” (Unisa, 2015,
p. 17).
Research criteria:
• Publish my own research whether as articles or chapters. To score a 3 out
of 5, I need to have published 7 individual articles in the last 3 years, or 10
individual articles in the last 5 years. If I co-authored the article with
another researcher – I only get half the points
• A further 15% weight is allocated if I submitted a grant application to an
external funding agency. To score 3 out of 5, my grant should have been
successful.
• 10% of the total weighting is allocated to being a rated researcher. A ‘C-
rating’ guarantees me a 3 out of 5.
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But… the rules of performing research
are changing …
Image credit: http://blog-
blond.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html
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Goodier, S., & Czerniewicz, L. (2012). Academics’ online presence. A four-step guide to taking control of your visibility. Retrieved from
http://www.academia.edu/2279505/Academics_online_presence_A_four-step_guide_to_taking_control_of_your_visibility
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https://www.flickr.com/photos/cmichel67/9309088371/ http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_Self
We monitor ourselves. We monitor each other.
We are monitored…
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I am my data.
I am what I share.
If I did not share it on Facebook, did it happen?
Image credit:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bot%C3%B3n_Me_gusta.svg
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Jennifer Ringely – 1996-2003 – webcam
Source: http://onedio.com/haber/tum-zamanlarin-
en-etkili-ve-onemli-internet-videolari-36465
“Secrets are lies”
“Sharing is caring”
“Privacy is theft”
(Eggers, 2013, p. 303)
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Five modes of self-tracking (Lupton, 2014c)
1. Private self-tracking: Achieving self-awareness, improving
life-quality – what I did, how I did it and what I’ve learned
2. Pushed self-tracking: Voluntarily but encouraged/rewarded
3. Communal self-tracking: Sharing your numbers – the
quantified us – “I ran so far…”, “I took so many steps”, “I have
so many new Twitter followers”, etc
4. Imposed self-tracking: Compulsory, productivity self-tracking
devices
5. Exploited self-tracking: Commercialisation of personal data
(Also see Lupton 2014a, 2014b)
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The quantified (digital) self: some considerations
• The potential & limitations of “self knowledge through
numbers”
• Collecting my data & tracking myself as a way “to talk back”, to
“contest”, to formulate counter-narratives
• The dangers of exploitation of my data
• The nature, use & misuse of digital, (a)synchronous peer-review
• The virtue of forgetting in a digital age…
• The bias of algorithms
• The secret lives of our data-doubles (Lupton, 2014a)
• I am more than what I share, what can be counted – I am more
than my data
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Deviants or heroes:
The net effect of being
quantified & classified
“Academic labor and performance anxiety”: where the “shame [of not
performing] becomes a central tenet of everyday academic life”
(Richard Hall (2014a, par. 2)
Academics “overwork because the current culture in universities is
brutally and deliberately invested in shaming those who don’t
compete effectively…” in stark contrast with the heroic few who do,
somehow, meet the shifting goalposts (Kate Bowles, 2014, par. 7-8)
Image credits: http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Superman_S_sym
bol.svg
We cannot & should not
discount the exhilaration, the
abundance, the networks, but…
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(Re)considering scholarship: From quantified selves to
qualified selves…
• We cannot & should not ignore our context in the context of the
quantification fetish in higher education
• As a scholar, I am much more than my data, my citations, the number of
followers on Twitter, the number of hits on my blog
• I can, however, use my networks & online presences to play the field,
increase my impact & reach
• “Scholarship is not just about publication, but about interaction,
interpretation, exchange, deliberation, discourse, debate, and
controversy” (Gray, 2013, par. 5). Scholarship is therefore “not just the
production of text” but in its essence about “the way in which
constellations of people and objects produce meaning, understanding
and insight, through interaction, acts of interpretation” (Gray, 2013, par.
6)
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Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactome
I am here…
Beginning date:
unsure
Up to present:
2015
Understanding my being a scholar as embodied, entangled, relational,
networked, amidst context as mediated and amidst mediating
context-specific capabilities and choices: A personal journey…
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Understanding being a scholar – what and who shaped us,
shapes us and will shape us…
The higher
education context
• The broader higher
education context
• The move to digital and
networked identities
• The (changing) rules of
performing research
The notion and
practices of the
quantified/
qualified self
The scholar
as
quantified/
qualified
self
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How my past
shaped/shapes my
scholarship…
(In)conclusions

THANK YOU
Paul Prinsloo
Research Professor in Open Distance Learning (ODL)
College of Economic and Management Sciences, Office number 3-15, Club 1,
Hazelwood, P O Box 392
Unisa, 0003, Republic of South Africa
T: +27 (0) 12 433 4719 (office)
T: +27 (0) 82 3954 113 (mobile)
prinsp@unisa.ac.za
Skype: paul.prinsloo59
Personal blog: http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com
Twitter profile: @14prinsp
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References and additional reading
Altbach, P.G., & Finkelstein, M.J. (2014, October 7). Forgetting the faculty. InsideHigherEd. Retrieved from
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/10/07/essay-way-many-reformers-higher-education-are-
ignoring-faculty-role
Appiah, K.A. (1995). African identities. In L. Nicholson & S. Seidman (eds.). Social postmodernism: beyond
identity politics (pp. 103—115). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Blackmore, J. (2001). Universities in crisis? Knowledge economies, emancipatory pedagogies, and the critical
intellectual. Educational Theory, 51(3), 353 — 370.
Boellstorff, T. (2005). Between religion and desire: being Muslim and Gay in Indonesia. American
Anthropologist 107(4), 575—585.
Bowles, K. (2014, March 5). Walking and learning. [Web log post]. Retrieved from
http://musicfordeckchairs.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/walking-and-learning/
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of diaspora: contesting identities. London, UK: Routledge
Deem, R., & Brehony, K.J. (2005). Management as ideology: the case of ‘new managerialism’ in higher
education. Oxford Review of Education, 31(2), 217—235. DOI: 10.1080/03054980500117827
Deem, R. (2011). ‘New managerialism’ and higher education: the management of performances and cultures
in universities in the United Kingdom. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 8(1), 47—70. DOI:
10.1080/0962021980020014
Diefenbach, T. (2007). The managerialistic ideology of organisational change management. of Organisational
Change Management, 20(1), 126 — 144.
Du Toit, C. (2014, October 8). Perspektiewe op ‘self’ en ‘identiteit’. [Web log post]. Retrieved from
http://www.litnet.co.za/Article/perspektiewe-op-self-en-identiteit
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Goodier, S., & Czerniewicz, L. (2012). Academics’ online presence. A four-step guide to taking control of your
visibility. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/2279505/Academics_online_presence_A_four-
step_guide_to_taking_control_of_your_visibility
Gray, J. (2013, October 25). Recomposing scholarship: the critical ingredients for a more inclusive scholarly
communication system. [Web log post]. Retrieved from
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/10/25/gray-recomposing-scholarship/
Hall, R. (2014a, March 5). On academic labour and performance anxiety. [Web log post]. Retrieved from
http://www.richard-hall.org/2014/03/05/on-academic-labour-and-performance-anxiety/
Hall, R. (2014b, August 22). On chronic fatigue and being increasingly anxiety-hardened. [Web log post]. Retrieved
from http://www.richard-hall.org/2014/08/22/on-chronic-fatigue-and-being-increasingly-anxiety-hardened/
Hartley, D. (1995). The ‘McDonaldization’of higher education: food for thought?. Oxford Review of Education,
21(4), 409-423.
Ivancheva, M. P. (2015). The age of precarity and the new challenges to the academic profession. Studia
Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Studia Europaea, (1), 39-48.
Lupton, D. (2014a). Self-tracking cultures: Towards a sociology of personal informatics. Retrieved from
http://www.canberra.edu.au/researchrepository/file/89265416-5c81-4d4c-bed3-
948c2d9a0734/1/full_text_postprint.pdf
Lupton, D. (2014b). You are your data: Self-tracking practices and concepts of data. Available at SSRN.
Lupton, D. (2014c). You are Your Data: Self-Tracking Practices and Concepts of Data. Available at SSRN.
Peters, M.A. (2013). Managerialism and the neoliberal university: prospects for new forms of ‘open management’
in higher education. Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice, 5(1), 11—26
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Prinsloo, P. (2014). Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin: researcher identity and performance. Retrieved from
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Prinsloo/publication/267395307_Mene_mene_tekel_upharsin_re
searcher_identity_and_performance/links/544f2f200cf29473161bf642.pdf
Rhoades, G., & Slaughter, S. (2004). Academic capitalism in the new economy: markets, state, and higher
education. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Scott, D.L. (2012, October 16). How higher education in the US was destroyed in 5 basic steps. AlterNet. [Web log
post]. Retrieved from http://www.alternet.org/how-higher-education-us-was-destroyed-5-basic-steps
Sen, A. (2006). Identity and violence. The illusion of destiny. London, UK: Penguin.
Spitzer, S. (1975). Toward a Marxian theory of deviance. Social problems, 22(5), 638-651.
Verhaeghe, P. (2014, September 29). Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us. [Web log post]. TheGuardian.
Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/neoliberalism-economic-system-
ethics-personality-psychopathicsthic
Watters, A. (2012). Unbundling and unmooring: technology and the higher ed tsunami. EDUCAUSEreview, [online].
Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/unbundling-and-unmooring-technology-and-higher-ed-
tsunami
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This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
International License.
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(Further) Reflections on Scholarly Identities: From quantified selves to self-qualifying selves

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(Further) Reflections on Scholarly Identities: From quantified selves to self-qualifying selves