Interweaving academic and professional power in higher education.

In this chapter we trace the strands of academic and professional power that we have experienced when working in higher education. These strands interweave within the academy and with our own sense of academic identity in many complex ways. From our initial entry to higher education (HE) and completing PhDs to working as lecturers on professional and other programmes, we explore how these changing roles and identities influence our notions of being an academic and how this shapes our work. The teaching, research, scholarly and managerial roles we have undertaken involve negotiating an intricate mix of academic and professional demands that can result in us feeling more or less powerful at different times and in different contexts.