Henderson, Emily F. and Reynolds, P. J. (2023) Mobile, hierarchical, normative, decadent and conflict prone : understanding academia through fictional conferences. Higher Education, 85 . pp. 1201-1218. doi:10.1007/s10734-022-00885-x ISSN 0018-1560.

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Abstract

Representations of higher education in fiction-based sources contribute to forming public perceptions of academia, and so are a form of public pedagogy. Within popular culture representations, understandings of academics are constructed using particular tropes which build shared meanings of the profession. Conferences are one of these tropes and can thus be used as a focus to explore the construction of the academic profession in popular culture representations of higher education. This paper draws on a research project which explored representations of conferences in narrative fiction texts (novels, graphic novels, short stories). In this paper, we analyse references to conferences for what they teach us about the academic profession. The paper is based on analysis of 98 symbolic references to conferences from a sample of 23 fictional texts. Symbolic references are short references which serve as a shorthand to signal aspects of the academic profession, and in this paper, they have been analysed in terms of what they portray and where they position the reader. The paper argues that popular culture representations of academia are pedagogical, in that they show the profession to be desirable to others but encourage a disidentification with academics, reinforcing the exclusionary nature of the profession.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for Education Studies (2013- )
Journal or Publication Title:	Higher Education
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
ISSN:	0018-1560
Official Date:	June 2023
Dates:	Date Event June 2023 Published 14 June 2022 Available 1 June 2022 Accepted
Volume:	85
Page Range:	pp. 1201-1218
DOI:	10.1007/s10734-022-00885-x
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access (Creative Commons)
Date of first compliant deposit:	6 June 2022
Date of first compliant Open Access:	1 July 2022
Related URLs:	Publisher

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