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Criticisms have been levelled at academics at a time when funding of universities is increasingly tied to private and corporate purposes and when academics are held accountable through a hierarchy of functions. Claims are also made that academics work within narrow specializations and are removed from real-world experience and problems. Boyer's model of scholarship offers four categories of scholarship that remain relevant to understanding and guiding the work of academics, including how they engage with communities. To explore the nature of academics' work, we draw on data provided by a group of academics who participated in a research project using both sociological elicitation and visual arts-based research methodologies. The participants were asked to explore what various aspects of current academic work mean for them by providing an image and text, akin to creating a postcard. In this article, we focus on responses they provided to the prompt 'Community engagement is … ' The postcards show how community engagement can be interpreted in diverse ways and that, along with teaching and research, community engagement are all integrated, mutually reinforcing drivers and outcomes of academic work.

Measurement of academic work has become more significant than the intellectual, pedagogical, cultural, political and social practices in which academics and students engage. This shifting emphasis creates paradoxes for academics. They experience a growing sense of disconnection between their desires to develop students into engaged, disciplined and critical citizens and the activities that appear to count in the enterprise university. As measurement discourses preclude the possibilities of human emotion and hinder intellectual labour, we embarked on an arts-informed research project that established new creative spaces for our colleagues to illustrate the pleasures and paradoxes of their academic work. In the research project, we developed critical pedagogies through art and poetry that enabled academics to speak back to university management--and each other--about how they experience their work. In this paper, we draw upon poststructural "micro-physics" of power, the poststructuralist "politics of reinscription", and art, poetry and drama as critical pedagogies to interrogate the potential of arts-informed research to speak back to the measured university. The key contribution of this article is to recommend arts-informed methodologies as a forum for dissent and resistance at a time when the spaces of collegiality, pleasure and democracy in the measured university are under attack.

Universities are built upon the collaborative work of academic staff and students, yet the nature of this work has been undergoing profound and rapid change. Pressures within Australia's higher education sector have led to a fracturing of traditional academic roles and growing feelings of disconnection. While there have been many narrative, ethnographic and autoethnographic explorations of academic work, few studies have employed visual arts-informed methodologies to interrogate the ways in which academics represent their teaching, research and community engagement work. In this article we outline findings about academics' views of their teaching work. These findings surfaced from an arts-informed participatory research project, that sought to open up a space for (re)presentations of academic work. With a focus on teaching, three through lines emerged during the analysis: "voicing absences and resistances"; "initiating layers of reflexive moments" and "expressing complexity through collage". We argue that the academics' responses allow us to trace the emotional terrain of contemporary academic work. They also open up ways to unpack, express and make visible academics' complex thoughts, feelings and ideas about teaching practices.