Fraternal academic mobility itineraries down under: autoethnographies, ecologies of practice and professional learning by three Australian university lecturers

Abstract

[Abstract]: Deploying the principles of autoethnography, this paper reflects on the authors’ respective and shared itineraries as mobile academics in two Australian non-metropolitan universities. These itineraries traverse the two universities and within one of them two campuses, differently configured faculties and divisions, several disciplines and paradigms and the multiple roles of academics. Conceptually the paper is framed and informed by the notion of ecologies of practice. This notion highlights the commonalities and divergences evident among system and institution-level policies, campus and faculty practices and academics’ own subjectivities. It provides therefore a useful theoretical lens for analysing the professional learning being carried out by the authors in their mobilities across and within the two universities – focused specifically on their work as ateleological decision-makers, double agents and transformative researchers – as well as for making explicit both the potential of and the limitations on that learning.