Faculty promotion as a site of identity negotiation and critical imagination in flagship universities

Purpose This paper re-imagines the promotion of faculty in flagship universities. Instead of framing promotion as the dispassionate, objective process of identifying academic excellence, which is how the majority of mainstream discourses portray it, I treat it as a complex set of practices (i.e. as technologies of identity) which constitute, transform and govern academics' subjectivities. Design/methodology/approach Methodologically, the paper draws on Ricoeur's notion of a hermeneutic circle to conceptualise a “call to provocation”: one which takes a stance against interpretive proceduralism, and which frames the work of interpretation as critical, and, ultimately, an ethical act which actively unsettles dominant practices and taken-for-granted assumptions. Findings Based on the hermeneutic rereading of existing literature, my findings suggest that promotion operates to negotiate three dimensions of academics' identities: the temporal, the ways in which promotion regimes value, evaluate and discipline the academic self across past, present and future, generating temporality regimes of inequality and anticipatory subjectivities; the spatial, the ways in which the self oscillates precariously between belonging to the institution and critical distance, especially for those in minoritised positions and the relational, the ways in which peer evaluation functions as collegial acknowledgement and disciplinary scrutiny. Originality/value My paper: (1) reconceptualises promotion as a key site in academic identity work; (2) conceptualises a new hermeneutic methodological approach; (3) calls forth critical imagination in theorising transformation and (4) attends to the material and symbolic inequalities inherent in contemporary academic work.