Embracing an academic career within context, choice and agency in selected South African universities

Abstract

The study examines the life narratives of ten in selected South African universities using qualitative interviews and purposeful sample technique, taking into account their motivations for choosing an academic profession as well as the outcomes they aspired to achieve. In doing so, the study drew conclusions from the intersecting contexts model and put out the argument that a variety of intersecting contexts, whether encouraging or discouraging, have an impact on whether, when, and how people choose to pursue academic careers. The family, professional experience, and working settings are some of these interlocking contexts. Based on the individual or collective agency, these various overlapping circumstances may be motivating or demotivating. Thus, the study looked at the role of agency in how different individuals negotiate their subjectivities and produce identities. In order to make a claim that circumstances that are in line with both the academic career and the individual's feeling of developing subjectivities enable a greater sense of academic identity, we look at the interaction between people and their environments in depth. According to the identity-subjectivity-agency theory, the study discovered that intersecting contexts are crucial for creating powerful academic identities.