Academic and associational life in Australian health and physical education: a collaborative autobiographical narrative inquiry of/as knotting

In this article, we explore the intersection of academic and associational life in Australian HPE by examining our experiences as HPE academics of being organisationally active within the Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (ACHPER). The intellectual warrant for doing so rests on the lack of research on this topic despite recent calls for increased scholarly attention to be paid to both HPE associations and HPE academics' service work. It is also based on the contribution relatively privileged, insider accounts of participation in HPE associations can make to understanding, and where necessary challenging, the conditions that characterise the intersection of academic and associational life. Using collaborative autobiographical narrative inquiry and drawing on the metaphor of a knot, we illustrate a series of representative complications created by and through our organisational activity. We do so by depicting our experiences in terms of our own and others' efforts to tie, untie, and/or retie the narrative threads of our and their academic and associational work. Tracing the interwoven individual, social, and institutional narrative threads of our stories, we then show how our findings support, nuance, and add to existing research on HPE academics' participation in HPE associations, particularly regarding the interconnected importance of personal dispositions towards associational work, existing social ties within academia and associations, and the constraining and enabling role of institutional policies and priorities. As we do this tracing work, we identify key considerations for associationally-minded HPE academics to reflect on regarding own participation as academics in associational life.