To Örebro University

As academic developers and higher education researchers, we, the authors, have pondered why engaging in public discourse is often found to be difficult by academics and how we can conceptualise and help prepare for the role of academic citizen in general and in more discipline-specific terms. Rather than approaching citizenship as an extraordinary task or role for the academic, we find that it may be best understood and approached as integral to being a researcher and teacher. We use perspectives on the knowledge society and the concept of co-production of science and society to suggest some conceptual inroads for understanding what shape the task of academic citizenship might take.

I Jämställdhetsintegrering i högre utbildning diskuteras och problematiseras jämställdhetsfrågor utifrån olika perspektiv, ämneskulturer och utbildningssammanhang. Boken riktar sig till lärare, pedagogiska utvecklare och pedagogiska ledare i Sverige. Vid svenska lärosäten finns starka åsikter om jämställdhetsintegrering, men även nyfikenhet och engagemang - dessutom en viss förvirring. Denna antologi ger förslag på sätt att tänka och konkret arbeta med jämställdhetsintegrering i högre utbildning.

In universities worldwide, there is an increased reliance on academic developers to contribute to enhancing higher education. As critical-constructive agents within their universities, academic developers have the potential to contribute to changes on the institutional level as well as on the level of educational practices. While such a role has been discussed in previous research, there are few empirical studies showing what it may look like in practice and how it may be nurtured and sustained. In this article, we explore the growth of an academic development unit over time, tracing its incremental shift from a constricted position with limited legitimacy and agency but emergent critical-constructive voices in 2016, to a centre holding an integrated and strategic position with a critical-constructive focus on the educational and societal mission of the university in 2021. The study contributes (1) an empirical example of how an increasingly integrated, influential and critical-constructive academic development unit may be nurtured; and (2) a conceptual framework to understand and enhance the critical-constructive potential of academic development.

In this chapter, we explore potentials and challenges for academic developers in their roles as deliberative leaders. Deliberative leadership in this context involves contributing to academics’ understanding of, reflection on and enactment of teaching and learning as – and for – public good. Furthermore, it implies performing educational leadership by means of deliberative communication. We study two ADs as they prepare, conduct and reflect on a course session with the aim of nurturing academics’ professional responsibility, through a discussion about learning outcomes and constructive alignment in relation to professional responsibility. We start by situating the case within current research on academic development as well as the recent implementation of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) in Norwegian higher education. As brokers between external polices, institutional leaders and fellow academics, academic developers are continuously faced with the considerable political and pedagogical challenge of creating spaces for imaginative and creative engagement between policy and practice. Deliberative leadership is identified as a means of seeking out legitimate compromises – consistent with professional responsibility – within these complex webs of commitments. The case, however, repeatedly demonstrates just how challenging deliberative leadership is in practice.

The concept of teaching and learning intellectual virtues, such as curiosity or courage, has emerged (or reemerged) in the recent literature as an important purpose of higher education. Chapter 5 takes the current trend as a starting point to propose several intellectual virtues for leading higher education. We focus on the use of deliberative communication in teaching and research because both are relevant for academic staff in their daily work, regardless of discipline or university. The chapter lays out how the conversations and reflection that occur through deliberative communication can be a resource for bringing to light intellectual virtues that academics may not realise they possess, or acknowledge that they need. We show how ADs might use deliberative communication to provide colleagues with opportunities for collective and individual reflection on intellectual virtues, as well as how the approach might have potential for everyone, including leaders, in the university communities.

This article traces a number of key moments in the formation and development of Sverges kommunistiska parti, sektion av Kommunistiska Internationalen (Communist Party of Sweden, section of the Communist International or SKP) through the lens of its major periodicals. The chronological scope is the transition of the party from a breakout group of the major parliamentary Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti (Social Democratic Worker’s Party or SAP) in 1917, through its Comintern days, splits, bumps, new directions, and battles with social democracy, to the height of its public support during the latter part of the Second World War. The history of the first three decades of Swedish communism is tightly bound up with the history of a small number of energetic individuals and the periodicals with which they were powerfully identified. Zeth (Zäta) Höglund and Ture Nerman were the two major figures in the foundational years and until the first party split in 1924. Later party leaders then took over the charge of the major publications. The spectrum of periodicals was broad, reaching from newspapers to magazines to reviews, some loyal others dissident, but all crucial for working out the forward path for the party at times of tumult and strife within its higher ranks. This article demonstrates the closely-knit links between party, people and periodicals during the rise of communism in Sweden. In their rich textuality and compositional complexity, each periodical provides a kaleidoscopic lens through which to study the ideas it mediates.