Better late than never: the ‘up the hill backwards’ academic

Stringer, Mark (2023) Better late than never: the ‘up the hill backwards’ academic. In: Robinson, S. and Bristow, A. and Ratle, O. (eds.) Doing Academic Careers Differently: Portraits of Academic Life. Routledge, pp. 313-318. ISBN 9781032212609.

Abstract

Why would someone who has spent nearly 40 years in a business career find themselves striving to become an academic? This brief chapter provides an opportunity for a personal reflection in exploring the experience of aiming to enter the world of academia late in one’s career. Questions on motivation and desire are explored. Alongside this, there are existential questions proposed about meaning, place and time. These reflections may be described as a growing sense of coming to, despite the fact that by ‘doing an academic career’ late and in a non-traditional manner, there is a sense of not only moving ‘up the hill backwards’ but in how to respond to unconscious desire and the individual liminal state that this has created. A brief snapshot then of a journey through a career within the world of business to starting a completely new journey within Academia. Journeys that echo with a need for acceptance, both personal and by peers. Using an autoethnographic approach and framed within a pseudo-psychoanalytical Lacanian-inspired session set during the first Covid Lockdown in the UK, the resulting conversation begins to bring to the surface these issues around identity, desire, lack and acceptance.

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