Academics (Un)Anonymous: Enacting Our Academic Identities Through Dramatic Knowing

Academic identity is shaped and characterised by what we know, how we know it, and what we do with that knowledge within the context of our practice. For us as theatre academics, our identity encompasses our roles as theatre-makers, theatre-teachers, and theatre-researchers—each of which has its own demands. In this chapter, we explore how we locate our complex identities within theatre’s epistemologies, drawing on our disciplinary ways of knowing to chart our pathways through the academic labyrinth towards a place of holistic understanding and belonging. In particular, we discuss how four key strategies from theatre practice provide touchstones for negotiating our academic identities: collaboration, empathy, critique, and resilience. Methodologically, we employ the theatrical frame of a play text to conduct our study, and utilise tenets of Stanislavski’s acting system as tools for analysis and discussion. In this way, theatre becomes not just the discipline in which we work, but also an arts-based research method in itself, enabling us to navigate the liminal spaces between the different aspects of our academic identity.