Paper short abstract:

Education, research, and community engagement – constitute an important context for understanding of academic identity and career development. The aim of this study is to explore how researcher identity-narratives are shaped and how they interact with the broader society.

Paper long abstract:

Universities are complex organizations, composed of academics with shared and competing values. These academic communities are often linked by strong or loose ties to a particular field of study (Sterling, Blaj-Ward, Simpson & Crawford, 2023). Nærgård & Bengtsen (2015) describe academic citizenship as "the intertwining of participation in, engagement between, and mutual responsibility of, universities and society”. Participating, engaging, and taking responsibility for contributing to knowledge production and societal development form various understandings of the concept of academic citizenship. Skjervheim (1996) understands these concepts as different ways of encountering other through language. The role of the researcher encompasses the tasks a researcher has and performs, involving both individual career ambitions and belonging to academic and institutional communities, where researchers share knowledge and resources. Mcflarne (2008) describes how activities related to the concept of academic citizenship often are underestimated and poorly rewarded in academic environments. By identifying new academic career frames and roles, we can investigate how new identity narratives are formed and appear in society. This study aims to examine researchers’ roles. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with researchers from scientific disciplines, tasks related to the researcher role in an energy transition process are identified. What different roles do researchers assume? What expectations are placed on researchers by society? What tensions exist between the different roles? By better understanding the researcher role, we can also develop better strategies to support researchers career development and promote a more holistic understanding of their contributions to knowledge production and society engagement.