Reflexive backstories of academic engagement with policymakers and practitioners: affective engagement, emotionality and betrayal

Description

This paper discusses academics’ engagement with policymakers and practitioners. Drawing on data from reflexive accounts about our engagement with policymakers and practitioners, we explore what we term the backstories of this engagement. We adopted Frigga Haug’s (1999, 2008) memory work to interrogate how academics navigate emotions within frameworks that juxtapose collaboration and conflict. Our discussions highlighted a range of emotions, where our reflexive accounts unveiled the centrality of the unspoken and the hidden as central dimensions that shaped our engagement and subsequent experiences with practitioners and policymakers. The paper contributes a more nuanced understanding of academic-policymaker/practitioner relationships, showing the usefulness of interrogating them as multi-layered sites of simultaneous conflict and collaboration. The paper has practical implications for the reflexive praxis of academics; encouraging academics’ reflexivity on their engagement with policymakers and practitioners to focus not just on expected outcomes but adopting a more holistic approach that includes the co-construction of relational dynamics and collaboratively develop rules of engagement to frame their interactions and understand their diverse positionalities.

Period	22 Apr 2026
Held at	Nottingham University Business School, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	National