Conceptual transgressions: Furtive explorations in the
scholarship of academic development

This symposium brings together members of the Challenging Academic Development (CAD) Collective to explore how the idea of a 'conceptual transgression' can extend what we understand the scholarship of academic development to mean, be and do. We locate 'conceptual transgressions' within the spirit of what Erica McWilliam has described following Foucault, as the intellectual work of "thinking against", or of the way "something... can and must be thought". As academic developers, we translate this into rethinking the practices, activities and contexts which constitute our work from slightly odd, wonderfully absurd or seemingly incongruous starting points. It is about bringing the scholarship of academic development into dialogue with the kinds of discourses that unpack, disrupt and help us move around in the orthodoxies and hegemonies in which our work has been cast. We argue that these counter-narratives are legitimate and important aspects of the scholarship of academic development project, and ought to be fleshed out more fully as part of our own ongoing professional and intellectual efforts.

We set out to introduce a range of different kinds of 'conceptual transgressions'. Each transgression seeks to reframe an aspect of academic development work, together with the professional identities of academic developers in some way. Margaret Hicks' paper 'Academic

development: the need for new conceptual frameworks' demonstrates the merits of combining the work of Bourdieu with the insights of critical discourse analysis. She shows how such an approach can reveal critical insights into academic development work, and through an analysis of the discourses used explore the power relations that exist in the field of academic development. Heather Mackenzie, Kim McShane and Susan Wilcox's paper 'Performative Fabrication and the Ethical Work of Academic Development' invites a reflexive engagement of the work we perform as institutional change agents. They ask, how it is that we might cultivate authentic and ethical relationships in our work as developers? Taking a slightly different perspective, Catherine Manathunga's paper 'Unhomely academic developer identities: post-colonial transgressions on academic development' draws on the work of Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall to engage with a reading of 'liminality' and 'hybridity' as a framework for interrogating a number of the key tensions which underpin academic development work between teachers and learners, between academics and managers, and between teaching and research. Peter Kandlbinder then turns our attention to the manner in which the scholarship of teaching creates a public sphere for academic development. His paper 'The academic development public sphere' borrows from the work of social philosopher Jürgen Habermas to argue that university practice can only achieve legitimacy in a public space where issues of teaching and learning are openly discussed. It describes the concept of the public sphere to articulate the differences between public and private in relation to university teaching. From there, we move to Tai Peseta's paper 'On the production of 'useful' research: integrating arts-based inquiry within the scholarship of academic development' which explores a rationale for different textual representations of academic development practice, research and scholarship. Following Linda Brodkey, she seeks to tease out what academic development might be if we gave ourselves "permission to experiment" with our writing practices. Finally, Barbara Grant's paper 'The mourning after: academic development in a time of doubt' asks what it means to work as an academic advisor/developer in zones marked by uncertainty, ambiguity and repression. Drawing on her recent experience of writing a PhD on the pedagogy of graduate supervision, she ponders the dilemmas that arise when the very practices we are supposed to be advising on become insubstantial under our gaze. What do such dilemmas mean for our identities as academic developers and for our relations to those with whom we work?

These transgressions are our attempt at working and thinking against the more common tropes - 'impact', 'effectiveness' and 'outcomes' that both characterise and often reign in the conceptual possibilities for the scholarship of academic development. While we do not seek their disavowal, we do want to engage more explicitly in troubling their neutrality and innocence. As academic development has needed to display, demonstrate and defend its institutional relevance, our focus on 'conceptual transgressions' is about enacting intervention, disruption and being improper. We want to reclaim this spirit for the work and scholarship of academic development specifically, but also for higher education more generally.