Abstract
Why does the notion of imposter syndrome persists in higher education, who acknowledges feelings of imposterism, and how does imposter phenomenon affect work practices (Breeze in Imposter Syndrome as a Public Feeling. Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University. Springer, 2018)? The inquiry is framed empirically through participant narratives from an ‘insider’ research study (Trowler in Doing Insider Research into Higher Education. Amazon Kindle, 2012) carried out in a research-intensive university in Australia exploring relationships at the so-called teaching-research nexus (e.g. Neumann in Australian Journal of Education 40:5–18, 1996). Critical auto-ethnographic reflections (Boylorn and Orbe in Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life. Volumen 13 de Writing Lives—Ethnographic Narratives. Left Coast Press, 2013; Denzin in Interpretive Autoethnography. Sage, London, 2014) influenced by Archers’ (The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2012) notion of reflexivity are included. A playful adoption of mythic archetypes suggests that imposterism is better viewed as agile, malleable or mercurial tendencies, where feelings, position the ‘imposter’ in a diversity of liminal spaces, thereby, creating a critical awareness of strategies for academic staff (Hutchins and Rainbolt in Human Resource Development International 20:194–214, 2017).
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Acknowledgements
This research was approved by the Human Ethics Committee at the University of Sydney (HREC approval 2013/759). All research participants gave informed consent prior to data collection and interview. We are indebted to the women and men who shared their stories and insights, allowing us into their lives for our lessons and inspirations. Melinda Lewis gratefully acknowledges Professor Goodyear for supervision during an earlier phase of the research.
Funding
There was no direct funding supporting this work, however, Melinda Lewis was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship 2012–2015 to undertake fieldwork research.
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Lewis, M., Quinnell, R. (2022). Marginalising Imposterism: An Australian Case Study Proposing a Diversity of Tendencies that Frame Academic Identities and Archetypes. In: Addison, M., Breeze, M., Taylor, Y. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86570-2_6
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