ABSTRACT
This whole collection presents identities and roles in higher education in such a way as to throw light on issues that practitioners take for granted, take in their stride – or grumble about endlessly. Above all it endorses the point that higher education is for many the world within which they must work out their lives. The privilege it offers academic practitioners in particular is the in-built opportunity to use professional knowledge to reflect on one’s own conditions of existence. Perhaps this comes most readily to social scientists, and their colleagues in the humanities, but it is not confined to them.
