“Teaching, my passion; publishing, my pain”: unpacking academics’ professional identity tensions through the lens of emotional resilience

In the global competition of higher education, an increasing emphasis has been placed on university research excellence. Accordingly, academics have to engage in both research and teaching activities. The multiple and fragmented identities of academics can sometimes be contested, leading to identity tensions, and impeding their professional development. This raises the issue of how, and whether at all, academics integrate their professional identities in a culture of performativity. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study explored how a specific group of Chinese academics negotiate identity tensions as teachers and researchers through an emotional resilience lens. The narrative frames and interviews with 10 college English teachers yielded four types of identity negotiation in the continuum from identity conflicts to identity integration mediated by emotional resilience, including the disheartened performer, the miserable follower, the strenuous accommodator, and the fulfilled integrator. Emotional resilience as a mediator in professional identity tensions is discussed. Our findings offer a nuanced understanding of the complexity of academics developing an integrated professional identity. Policymakers should recognize the potential of emotional resilience in integrating academic professional identities and jointly support academics to cope with their identity tensions. However, if identity tensions are too complex for academics to solve, the policymakers should consider tensions as signals that the existing institutional policies may be counterproductive and need to be revised, rather than merely calling on academics’ resilience.