Troubling our desires for research and writing within the academic development project

In this paper, I speculate on the work ‘usefulness’ does to regulate the research and writing of the scholarship of academic development project. My argument is not that academic developers ought to repudiate a fidelity to usefulness; rather, I want to expand our ideas for the possibilities of research and writing beyond purposes of institutional performativity that so often dominate the agenda. In essence, it is an argument for redeploying how we see usefulness. My search has led me to traditions of arts‐based inquiry. It is that form of inquiry that invites the academic development community to consider the narratives that constitute, organize, and render its scholarship meaningful. It is also that form of inquiry that supports academic developers’ inhabiting, perhaps even desiring, a creative space in which to examine and re‐imagine what can be legitimately written about the project of academic development