“You become academic royalty once you’ve published”: A social practice exploration of identity in academic writing

Academic publishing plays a visible role in the lives of academics in the contemporary university. This paper, located in the academic literacies field of critical enquiry, illustrates the complex ways in which two South African academics understood and discursively constructed their identities through their writing for a recently published book exploring lecturers’ teaching and learning contexts and practices. The autoethnographic sensitivity of the research enabled the elicitation of critical selfreflective accounts, presented through detailed individual reflective sketches. The analysis uses the concepts of autobiographical self, discoursal self and affiliation (Ivanič, 1998; 2005) to show how these writers were able to discursively represent themselves in the book. It further highlights how continued disparities and inequities that characterise academic publication are experienced by the writers. The findings demonstrate the value of the social practice view of writing and its capacity to make visible how writers enact various linguistic, rhetorical and stylistic resources as they discursively construct their alignment to their scholarship community. In particular, it illuminates generative spaces where academic development practitioners can lead dialogues to re-examine current publication practices, their consequential nature for writers and explore possibilities to support emergent SOTL authors.


Introduction
Academics face enormous pressure to become active participants in knowledge construction and dissemination. The ubiquitous 'publish or perish' mantra gives expression to how the worth, status and reputation of individuals and institutions become correlated to their levels of publication production (Canagarajah, 2002;Thomson & Kamler, 2013;Hyland, 2016;Nygaard, 2017;Curry & Lillis, 2018;Tusting, 2018). Academic publication offers academics the primary means of contributing and interacting with their broader disciplinary and intellectual communities (Curry & Lillis, 2013;Heron, Gravett & Yakovchuk, 2020). However, this aspect of an academic's role has become aligned with the commodification of knowledge production (Curry & Lillis, 2018) and "performative" (Thomson & Kamler, 2013:5) and "evaluation regimes" (Lillis (2012) in Curry & Lillis, 2019:1). While these pressures are acknowledged as a reality of academic life, a small body of research is interrogating the publish or perish trend and its consequences (Curry & Lillis, 2013;2014;2019;Nygaard, 2017;Tusting, 2018;Heron et al, 2020). This research offers insight into the experiences and responses of academics and institutions to these performative publication regimes. Studies make visible key distortions associated with such regimes, such as, how the majority of publications are produced by a small minority of researchers and significantly, the inequitable effects on individuals, especially on groups such as women, multilingual researchers and those from non-English countries, as well as on institutions (Curry & Lillis, 2013;2014;Thomson & Kamler, 2013;Nygaard, 2017;Tusting, 2018). In the South African context, for example, Soudien's (2014) review lays bare how these commodification drivers shape universities' academic publication practices, which can reinforce some of these inequities for particular academics.
From within this critical tradition, this study assists in expanding understandings of the ways in which academics engage in and take up their writing-for-publication roles in the university. The contributions of academic literacies researchers like Curry and Lillis (2013;2014), Nygaard (2017) and Tusting (2018) confirm the centrality of the interplay between writer identity, power relations and ideologically framed understandings of knowledge construction in the process of writing for publication. This research shows how gender, rank, disciplinary hierarchies or the privileging of anglocentric language registers position academics differently, often irrespective of their geopolitical location at local institutions in the global south or within competitive global publication networks.
Viewing academic writing as a social practice, academic literacies researchers present a credible argument to illustrate how scholars enact and negotiate a variety of strategic socio-political, discursive and individual identity resources when engaged in academic publication activities (Curry & Lillis, 2013;2014;Burgess & Ivanič, 2010;Nygaard, 2017;Tusting, 2018). These researchers show that the reasons why academics do not participate in academic publication are multiple. Frequently these reasons have little to do with individual language or academic writing proficiencies, rather pointing to "broader discursive practices" (Hyland, 2016:66) or how writers' linguistic and communicative resources index marginal writer identities (Curry & Lillis, 2018).
Our study is interested in "how writers construct their identity at the moment of writing" (Ivanič, 2005:7), providing insight into how brought-along perceptions of academic writing can become an affordance or create barriers to academic writers' engagement with publication activities. Our argument relies on the analytical concepts of the autobiographical and discoursal self (Ivanič, 1998) and affiliation (Ivanič, 2005). They illuminate how identity in writing is perceived and enacted as we attempt to establish and confirm our association with particular discourses and knowledge communities. Our findings are based on an ethnographically-orientated extended inquiry between the two authors to elicit critical self-reflective accounts of our perceptions as two chapter authors of a published scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) edited collection. The findings illustrate how our identities in writing were both constructed and reconstructed by the particular situational realities which surrounded the book publication project. We further illustrate the complex interplay between our prior social and discoursal histories (autobiographical selves), how we meet and resist the conventions of the scholarship community we were writing for, and how wider socio-political pressures aligned to the commodified discourses of academic publication practices impact on us. Instead of acting as an incentive and motivator, pressures to publish appears to engender responses of reticence and reluctance to participate in writing for publication. Vorster (2020) notes that some key characteristics of SOTL research is its consideration of context and the requirements to attend to practitioners' reflective accounts of their teaching and research practices. By centring the social and structural realities that frame and give shape to our identities in writing, while also reflecting on our roles through empirical research, the study and its findings display such attributes. The findings of this study are therefore particularly relevant for academic development practitioners in 'southern' contexts charged with providing academic writing support to emergent academic authors (Naidoo & Thesen, 2018).
The catalyst for this research was our (Lynn and Amanda) involvement in a 2018 edited collection exploring the reflective insights of lecturers in the extended curriculum at various universities in South Africa. Extended curriculum programmes (ECP) have been a feature of the teaching and learning support agenda at most local universities for almost two decades, yet students and academics in this domain remain on the university periphery. Academics are frequently assigned marginal status due in part to low publication outputs in ECP as they tend to engage in other research dissemination practices, like conference and seminar presentations and their research takes a decidedly SOTL rather than disciplinary focus (Leibowitz & Bozalek, 2015;Leibowitz, 2017;Vorster, 2020). The book was an attempt to create a publication platform for ECP academics, support the shift from "scholarly teaching" to "scholarship" (Naidoo & Thesen, 2018:110-111) and strengthen the significance of academics' "teacherly identity…through the engagement with and in the scholarship of teaching and learning" (Vorster, 2020:10).
As contributors to the book publication, Amanda had little prior publishing experience and this was Lynn's first experience of editing a book. Initially the publication project was framed by its strong ethos of exploration, collaboration and development support for authors, many of whom were novice writers. As the project evolved and moved closer to its publication deadline, attention shifted to editorial and production rigour.
Below the concepts of autobiographical and discoursal self (Ivanič, 1998) and affiliation (Ivanič, 2005) are discussed before the study's methodology is presented. The findings are then reported through two reflective sketches. These sketches capture the main thematic threads of the study: the pivotal influence of writers' dispositional characteristics, or autobiographical selves, brought along to the writing activity; how wider contextual realities shaped perceptions of the publication project and SOTL in the South 5(2): September 2021 Coleman & Morris finally the nature of choices and decision made at the level of writing style, convention and language; and how these served to signal or enact affiliation with the selected scholarship community.

Writing as a social practice
The basic premise of a social practice understanding of writing suggests that writing always acts to fulfil a certain function or purpose (Ivanič, 1998;Burgess & Ivanič, 2010;Crème & McKenna, 2010;Curry & Lillis, 2013;2014). In the absence of a specific purpose or social context, the act, form and nature of a piece of writing will remain undefined: a writer being asked to complete the writing task will be unable to do so. The purpose of a specific writing task can however, be interpreted differently and foreground specific goals which can privilege some writers over others. Academic literacies research assigns primacy to the socio-cultural contexts and lived experiences of academic writers be they students or lecturers (Lillis & Scott, 2007;Blommaert, Street & Turner, 2007). It is also closely associated with "an ideology of transformation" (Lillis, 2019:6) challenging and questioning dominant practices associated with academic writing. These characteristics, argues Lillis (2019: 5), encouraged the field's uptake in different geo-historical contexts and fostered rich "intellectual transnational conversations", especially between researchers in the UK and South Africa (also see Lillis (2019) for a detailed reference list of this scholarship in South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and Peru).
Issues of identity and meaning making are also regarded as central to academic writing (Lillis, 2001;Lea, 2012). The identity dimension of writing is particularly salient for academics as the label 'scholar' is typically reserved for those involved in writing for publication (Curry & Lillis, 2013;Thomson & Kamler, 2013). The scholar is required to enact and display not only their disciplinary knowledge and understanding but also their disciplinary identity and membership through how they represent themselves in their writing (Boz, 2009;Burgess & Ivanič, 2010). Becoming a member thus requires engagement in practices which involve copying, mimicking and adapting the work and practices of others (Ivanič, 1998;Boz, 2009). However, researchers have argued that it is at this level of selfrepresentation and identity in writing that academics writing for publication encounter many dilemmas (Boz, 2009;Thomson & Kamler, 2013;Nygaard, 2017). As Ivanič argues "although dilemmas about self-representation in relation to readers are rarely made explicit, they are at the heart of most acts of writing" (1998:2). These dilemmas are seen as "social struggles" in which one's identity is at stake (Ivanič, 1998:2), but often remain invisible and hidden (Arnbjörnsdóttir & Ingwarsdóttir, 2018).
Research exploring these dilemmas are essential to "enable proactive and agentive responses from academics to meet the pressures associated with writing for publication" (Curry & Lillis, 2018:17).

Identity in writing
In this paper, writer identity is understood to result from the complex interplay between the socially constructed nature of language and the discursive choices available to the writer as they respond to a particular writing context or task. Identity is thus regarded as a socio-cultural phenomenon characterised by varying degrees of flexibility allowing an individual to enact or take up different positions in response to social contexts and activities. This plurality and fluidity does not suggest that an individual is able or free to adopt any identity they choose. Rather we each have a store of socially available identity resources we can draw on in different contexts when engaged in different tasks (Ivanič, 1998;Matsuda, 2015). Ivanič (2005:21), in her later theorisation, proposed the use of the SOTL in the South 5(2): September 2021 Coleman & Morris concept of "identification" to accommodate the fluidity, processual and continuous making and remaking of identity through social activity thereby challenging more static conceptualisations of identity. Ivanič's (1998;2005) frameworks about identity in writing emphasise the relational aspects of writing as a social rather than individual activity. In this paper, we deploy the concepts of autobiographical self, discoursal self and affiliation drawn from Ivanič's (1998;2005) frameworks of how writers construct identity. Ivanič describes the autobiographical self as "the identity people bring with them to an act of writing, shaped by their prior social and discoursal history" (1998:24). Thus the cumulative experiences writers have had, the values, meaning and significance they assign to their biological and social markers and their perceptions of the writing activity and audience (Ivanič, 2005;Matsuda, 2015) all play a part. The writer's autobiographical self-references the foundational dispositional characteristics that see a writer act and respond to each new writing activity in particular, but fluid ways (Ivanič, 1998;Matsuda, 2015).
Ivanič's concepts of discoursal self (1998) and affiliation (2005) both attempt to account for ways in which writers represent or create an impression of themselves. A writer's discoursal self represents the coming together of what they bring to the writing context. This includes their perception of how they need to sound to be recognised by their perceived readers and the discoursal choices they make in order to be recognised through that text (Ivanič, 1998;Burgess & Ivanič, 2010). As an analytical tool, affiliation emphasises the relational and processual nature of how, as writers, we align with particular discourse communities by foregrounding processes of engagement. When using and replicating particular language and other semiotic resources and practices, we show affiliation and signal identification "in order to become like others with whom [we] identify" (Ivanic, 2005:22).

Research methodology
Our study was designed to capture the critical self-reflective process we were going through as authors -contributors to a book located in the marginal fields of ECP and SOTL. The ethnographic framing of the research design foregrounded the interdependence of the researcher and participant roles, but also gave primacy to our researcher reflexivity (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2008;Blommaert & Jie, 2010) and enhanced the critical self-reflection (Brookfield, 2010) elements. Our data collection, analysis and presentation of the findings placed emphasis on autobiographical reflection, reflexive writing and analysis of the socio-cultural setting in which we were actors (Delamont, 2009). The aim was not to write a traditional autoethnographic narrative; and the data collection did not focus on "personal epiphanies" (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011), or "introspections, emotions and personal life" (Delamont, 2009:57). Yet we were positioned "both as objects of research and subjects researching their own situated contexts" and therefore our methodological orientation has clear autoethnographic sensitivities (Olmos-Lopez & Tusting, 2020:265).
The multiple data collection activities (see Table 1) ensured that the participant-centric or emic views (Walsh, 2004) of our writer identities were amplified. A loose 'researcher'-'participant' continuum emerged during data collection and analysis allowing the insights to benefit from both emic (participant) and etic (researcher) perspectives; further enabling the reflexivity generated by these activities.

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The main research questions further capture the ethnographic focus of our study: • What perceptions do authors have of their writer identities during their participation in the publication of the edited collection?
• What were some of the enabling or disabling factors that contributed to how authors' writer identities developed over the duration of the publication's development?
Multimodal data collection activities were structured around five data moments (see Table 1). These data moments were tied to focal points broadly linked to the analytical tools of the research and some key milestones of the book production timeline, such as different draft submission deadlines or peer and editorial feedback received. Structuring the interviews around these focal points also served as helpful prompts for the critical self-reflection focus and gave the written drafts a central place in our inquiry into our writer identity.
Ethnographic interviews (Walford, 2007), aimed at fostering dialogical interaction between ourselves as co-researchers and co-participants, were the primary data collection vehicle. Our shifting positions as both research object and subject were therefore amplified (Olmos-Lopez & Tusting, 2020).
Brookfield's (2010) view on critical reflection was adopted and we brought written reflective accounts of our previous interview engagements and shared these at the start of each new interview. In this way we sought to push beyond merely recalling events, identifying perceptions of events or accounting for consequences of actions and behaviours. Table 1 illustrates how texts, such as draft chapters and "visual metaphors" (Prior, 2004:179) in the form of our writing histories (also see Images 1 & 2) were key features of the interview strategy. Such text-based or text-mediated interviewing (Tuck, 2018) acted as a catalyst for in-depth commentary on and reflection of our assumptions and intentions as writers, thus grounding our dialogic engagements in our writing practices for the book.
The processual and relational character of Ivanič's (Burgess & Ivanič, 2010) concept of identification, aligned with the study's analytical focus on writer identities and perceptions of writing. As a result, our study foregrounded the interview data and did not seek to provide detailed textual analysis of the draft chapters. The findings are presented through individual reflective sketches for each author. These sketches represent the findings through the analytical markers of autobiographical self, discoursal self, affiliation and situational factors related to the book publication. The use of the reflective sketches as the means of presenting the main thematic threads of the study, as noted previously, further give expression to the autoethnographic sensitivity of the study. Additionally, the sketches offer rich and layered representations of the complexity in which our writer identity was made and remade during and after the book project.

Reflective sketch -Amanda
I do have the sort of aspirational views around publication, you know and as much as I might kick against it and say I don't want to perform in that manner, I do aspire to be recognised I think…So I've got this little crown…on the side here to say you become academic royalty once you've published. (Data Moment 1 (DM) 1)

Autobiographical influences
Amanda, an experienced teacher of graphic design and visual communication, frequently constructs and represents herself as academic writer through the metaphors of tension and resistance. She assigns a primary position to her teacher role and juxtaposes this with what she sees as the performative, 'aspirational' and status-conscious leanings of how the academic writer/author role is positioned in the university. In the illustrated writing history in Figure 1, Amanda gives a positive representation of her teaching role in the ECP domain through the inclusion of sunbeams, while her writing activities take on darker tones and negative icons like a no-entry sign and a cross. She sees the teacher role as more accommodating of 'writing and talking about what you do, it is very different to publishing and I think that's where the tension lies for me, you know…the conventions, the restrictive nature' (DM 3). The crown atop the 'publication' label (to signify becoming 'academic royalty') and the gift-box containing the 'PhD' on the far right-hand side of her illustration represent the culmination of her writing journey and the perceived prizes awarded when these milestones are reached.
As an Afrikaans language speaker, and someone who followed a Technikon and University of Technology study pathway, she feels she has not been able to sufficiently develop or project enough confidence and fluidity in the 'type' of English language use and style privileged in publication writing.
I have anxiety about my writing because…with my second language I almost always, I will go over and over and over the thing [piece of writing] and then I know, even when I think it is the best it can be, that it probably still falls short…Are people going to be able to understand what I want to say (DM 2) When describing her undergraduate study years, the mainly visual affordances of the graphic design professional field meant insufficient attention was given to practicing and developing particular academic writing conventions. Instead of the theory-informed discursive writing she associates with traditional university essay writing, she labels the type of writing she undertook as an undergraduate student as 'procedural', noting that what was required 'was a report of what I had done and why I had done it…it was procedural writing' (DM 1). In her illustration, the discursive writing privileged at traditional universities is depicted by the cursive font with the overlaid no-entry sign and 'academic report' label used to suggest which written genres were given prominence during this study period.

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Amanda identifies her masters' studies as the 'the first time I had to write in an academic way, but also states 'I got that very bad vibe around academic writing' (DM 1). Amanda represents this study period with the black cloud and cross in her illustration, adding how 'the black cloud…follows me everywhere'. Yet she also notes how writing was relegated to a background activity: 'I was not at all focused on the writing…it was almost background to what I was trying to find out, what I was learning from my research. So it was almost just this thing you did at the end' (DM 1).
Furthermore, when describing her engagement and participation in conferences, unlike the more personal qualities of the conference presentation (given a prominent place in Image 1) where she feels able to 'share my practice…in a way that I feel comfortable with', the demands of the performative space of academic publication means that 'you are almost totally non-existent in your writing to some extent' (DM 1). The kind of academic writing demanded from the publication regimes is thus seen as 'something quite cold and isolated'. Amanda views academic writing as capable of stripping away one's identity from the text and creating a physical separation from the more communal and collaborative reflective spaces made possible by the conference presentation. She is thus expressing areas of loss and what she had to give up in order to position herself more fully as part of a scholarly community. It would appear that such losses are inevitable as she is compelled to buy into these less localised systems of value.

Contextual realities surrounding the book publication
Her perception of the ECP context seems to mirror Amanda's personal narrative as academic writer. She acknowledges how the book project represents all the hallmarks of scholarly traditions but also comments on how the developmental writing processes early on supported her desire for academic writing as an activity capable of expressing more communal and less individualistic or performative values. She contrasts the book project with the normative 'writing for publication as something quite cold and isolated' but also describes the writing environment as 'nurturing'. Amanda was able to identify a clear shift in the ethos of the project: initially it felt 'developmental' or like a 'community writing project' but this changed as the project moved towards publication: it was also initially more like a community writing project within the confines of ECP teachers. In the latter stages of the project it felt more like an actual academic piece of writing as the performative traits of the academy became more apparent and the "communal" and "shared" activities declined.

(Written Reflection)
There is some recognition that the editorial and production practices were able to maintain a 'nice balance between sort of academically credible and developmental' (DM 2) ideals. However, she raises a caution that the audience might incorrectly align the development agenda of the project with 'low quality'.
In describing her impression of herself as writer, Amanda adopts a modest stance and when evaluating her feedback and peer review practices, suggests that the experience made her see herself as 'very much like an emergent writer'. She elaborates:

Signalling affiliation
In accounting for the changes in the drafts of her co-written chapter, Amanda identifies how the structural and stylistic changes made to the chapter were done to accommodate the rhetorical shift from the reliance on the deeply experiential and narrative focus of the first draft to the need for a stronger academic argument in the final version.
I think the shift that I spoke of previously definitely happened. You know that shift from being very self-focussed to it being a lot more about the publication, about the book. I imagine it happened when we submitted draft two, you know that it had then become not less of us but you know it had made that shift from being a very sort of personal narrative to being something almost a bit more like fitting the bill, you know like fitting into the mould of what something going into this publication, should look like. (DM 4) The main explanation for this shift is to ensure alignment with the academic community and conform with the writing conventions and style which would be more readily recognised as 'fitting into the mould' of what would be seen as publication quality. She is aware of how an over-reliance on the 'narrative nature and content of our chapter' at the expense of 'empirical research' might be construed as 'avoidance of doing real research' and therefore assign the chapter a 'non-academic' or 'non-publication standard' label. Amanda acknowledges how much editorial support was required to ensure that the writing met the standards of an acceptable publication.
A continuing dilemma for Amanda is located between the competing needs of having to conform to academic publication conventions and her abilities and confidence as an 'emergent writer' and her impressions of herself as writer. She uses the analogy of 'mourning' to capture this discomfort: you get to the writing bit and you're like, "Oh, maybe I can't do it." But then eventually, you do it and then you feel good again and then you're like, this is like mourning…, it's like you die every time you do a draft….

Autobiographical influences
Lynn's academic career has stretched over various professional, academic and student support roles.
At the time of working on the book publication, she was in an academic developer role in an ECP unit. Lynn's illustrated writing history (see Figure 2), created during the first interview session, also expresses ambivalence in the 'love/hate' relationship she uses to describe her affiliation to academic writing. This relationship is shown in the following: the inclusion of the star which records the many successes associated with her academic writing activities and roles in the university; the 'ladder-ofsuccess' linked to her studies, which is then juxtaposed with the dip associated with her PhD studies, labelled 'lots of lows', and the attainment of her degree is described with the words 'anti-climax with success'. While Lynn has a healthy publication record, 'Publication' is underlined by the label of 'new barrier' and the inclusion of an extended list in bullet-form that expresses the unpleasant aspects linked to her publication writing. The illustration shows the central part played by books in how she sees herself as student and academic. Except for a 'failed' first undergraduate essay at university, she comments on being 'mostly unaware of my writing. I just did it' (DM 1). The shift to a more contested relationship with academic writing only starts to appear during her PhD studies and subsequent academic publication activities and signals the conflict theme in her academic writing narrative (represented through the use of multiple negative labels next to the 'PhD' box on the top right. Lynn admits she is 'comfortable with my writer identity' (DM 2) despite experiencing these tensions noting how writing becomes an activity that provides a form of solace in the workplace.

Contextual realities surrounding the book publication
Like Amanda, she too feels the context of higher education is 'constraining…it's performative'. In her view, the status and rank of individual lecturers (and universities) is tied to publications. She regrets that 'you have to write and there's this pressure' (DM 1), which in her view confirms the ways in which the university is becoming more performative. Lynn recognises how the journal article has become 'the gold standard' and critiques the practice at her university where academics accrue a portion of the research subsidy for publication as it reinforces the scramble to 'find any journal as long as its accredited'.
As the book's editor and author of the introductory chapter, Lynn goes to great lengths to explain that the intention of the publication project was to offset the 'marginal, peripheral status of ECP' because 'we're not publishing'. She hopes the book will assist academics in ECP to 'get recognition for [their] scholarship' (DM 2) while also gaining the accompanying and much valued output credits. As editor, Lynn's key motivation was the need to produce a credible and credit-bearing final written product. She also stressed the high stakes that accompanied their attempts to meet these prescriptions: the only way they're going to take us seriously, is if this thing [the book], has all the legitimate markers. It must signal in its form, its function, its styling; it must signal and must be recognized as academic… (DM 2) So, the idea was that the credibility would come from rigorous peer review…which is the standard by which all academic publishing is meant to be measured. (DM 5)

Signalling affiliation
During the interviews, much of Lynn's reflections foregrounded her role as editor. Her acute awareness of how the broader university viewed ECP academics was a key driver for adopting a 'doing the right thing' attitude that in her view would ensure that the necessary markers of a credible and legitimate publication were clearly visible to the book's multiple audiences.
You know this is not just something that you just "sommer so, gooi together" [just carelessly throw together], so it must signal that high, rigorous academic quality…doing the right thing was strongly, strongly, strongly formed. (DM 5) Lynn notes that her identity shifted towards an editor who 'became like a quality assurance somebody … That positive encouraging commentary, that developmental, nurturing-self' had changed into 'this' editor' (DM 5). Her commentary during the interviews, and certainly the final written reflection, was peppered with quality assurance and performative discourse markers such as 'professional standards', 'rigorous peer review', 'attention to detail', 'legitimate markers', 'credible', 'credit-bearing' and 'good quality' as she became a custodian of 'the right thing' with respect to ensuring the book met the necessary publication standards.
An inescapable need to 'sound a particular way so that you can fit in' (DM 5) appears throughout her reflective insights. As a result of the constant attendance to 'professional standards' she notes an almost pedantic reliance on various editorial checks and processes as a means to 'elevate the final quality of the book'. Lynn felt that the margin of error that 'anyone [might] point out a spelling, grammatical or layout mistake' had to be very low (Written Reflection). Such 'mistakes' were seen as a reputational risk the book, its authors and editor could ill-afford to take. Yet is also signals the more overt ways in which more local academic registers had to be suppressed.
The book was published internally without a publisher imprint which is necessary in order to guarantee the output credit count. This increased the pressure on her as she took on the responsibility for this 'work': so when people look at it and they say oh, that's a crap chapter. The crap chapter is not the author. This, this is me. The crap chapter is the editor that allowed that crap chapter in. (DM 3) Lynn sees the fact that that 'All the 'i's' were dotted and the 't's' crossed' as a proud accomplishment (Written Reflection). In becoming a 'quality assurance somebody', she has given up her more teacherly self as she takes on the performative pressure on behalf of others.

Discussion points
The reflective sketches offer a glimpse into the complex ways in which identity in writing is both perceived and enacted by academic writers. They also show how writers are both enabled and constrained by the linguistic, communicative and socio-cultural resources available to them. As the writer constructs their discoursal self in the act of writing, the interplay between what the writer brings along to this act along with the contextual realities which surround that writing, further act in powerful and often prescriptive ways. These processes in turn impact on the possibilities for how the writer is discursively constructed, not only because of the fear that they may not 'come up to scratch' but because other possibilities of selfhood have to be abandoned. Additionally, this interplay influences the kinds of identity resources available to individual writers, and furthermore shapes which available resources a writer can enlist or would best serve them as they seek to align themselves and their writing within the dominant discursive practices of scholarship.
The autobiographical elements of our writer identities played a pivotal role in how we viewed the writing task and our willingness to participate. Our reflective sketches illustrate the rich, complex and contradictory identity positions -the "sense of ourselves as writers" (Ivanič, 1998:33) -we brought along to the book publication. This allowed Amanda to recognise areas of alignment between the initial developmental and collaborative intentions of the writing project and her personal and professional values. Writing for the book did not require the suppression of her 'teacher' or 'emergent writer' identity positions. Yet our previous encounters with academic writing and our publication histories, as ECP scholars in a vocational university in the global South, mark us as inhabiting less privileged subject positions because of how we perceived the linguistic resources available to us. The analytical insights in the sketches draw attention to how, in an attempt to avoid negative judgement, the affiliation work centred on ensuring that as individual authors (and the book collectively) we adhered to what we perceived to be the language and communication norms of a credible published academic work. These linguistic and rhetorical features of the writing became a proxy for the 'scholar' label we wanted conferred on us and on the book, and thus helped to fulfil our 'academic royalty' aspirations. The high stakes associated with the need to create a favourable impression of our language and rhetorical competencies confirms Ivanič's assertion about how central these resources are when writers attempt to "construct their affiliations, in order to become like others with whom they want to identify" (2005:22).
The peripheral position of the extended curriculum domain and our position within it, had a significant influence on how, as authors, we perceived and enacted our academic writer identities through the book publication. The "stigmatised and marginalised" position of the field within the university means that academics in these spaces frequently have less access to disciplinary and knowledge practices around publication (Leibowitz & Bozalek, 2015:12). Researchers have noted how important it is for tentative or early career writers in particular to practice using the linguistic and communicative resources valued by established scholars (Ivanič, 2005;Boz, 2009). It is through these language and communicative resources that affiliation through the construction of the discoursal self is best accomplished (Ivanič, 2005;Burgess & Ivanič, 2010). Yet as the reflective sketches illustrate, the construction of a discoursal self, also involves costs in terms of academic labour, the loss of possibilities for different writer identities and the attribution of a deficit identity to ourselves as writers. Additional resultant consequences of these affiliation attempts, not least the uncomfortable losses, are also the reassertion of reified hierarchies of teacher versus scholar and SOTL versus disciplinary scholarship. Our reflective commentary attends to the enactment of this affiliation work, surfacing Naidoo and Thesen's (2018) assertion that tentative writers need the support of guides more familiar with publication practices. Similarly, Curry and Lillis use the concepts of "literacy" (2013) and "academic literacy brokers" (2019) to describe these 'guides' or academic colleagues. Guides, or academic literacy brokers, share insights about disciplinary knowledge practices, offer linguistic or rhetorical feedback on texts in development, and coach tentative writers through the multiple stages of the publication process. They therefore represent ways of bridging the personal and contextual by diminishing or offsetting the barriers that might otherwise restrict these writers from full participation in scholarly practices.
Our analysis of the interplay between our autobiographic selves, discoursal selves and affiliation activities as we attempted to meet the writing requirements of the book, makes visible the delicate and conflicting nature of how identity is discursively constructed. Also evident are the way our writer identities changed over time, even during the publication of this book, which reaffirms the fluidity and processual qualities associated with writing identity expressed in Ivanič's (2005) notion of identification. This analysis also highlights inequality within the academic writing playing field. In this field, informed by what Canagarajah regards as the "Anglophone grip on the publishing industry" (2002:34), certain academic writers, conscious of how their English linguistic resources might be valued or (mis)recognised, are almost always pitted against the prevailing language and communication norms and conventions. The somewhat over reliance on 'text-based' solutions (Curry & Lillis, 2019) that framed our affiliation work, and aiming to ensure adherence to 'standard' English, confirms the dominance and pervasive reach of these language ideologies. Even in the local setting of the ECP book project, where the main audience would be other southern scholars, primacy was assigned to matching perceived universal linguistic and rhetorical conventions. This does raise some uneasy questions about the almost 'unspoken' expectation that anglo-normative linguistic and rhetorical academic writing registers have to be co-opted as a main mechanism to ensure recognition and legitimation. Such questions serve to highlight the crucial role of particular kinds of academic literacy brokering work needed, especially within southern-based teaching and learning research and scholarship practices. Such work will need to show sensitivity towards academics' linguistic and language registers and open up or reframe notions of acceptable 'standard' English. As Ivanič argues, "a person cannot draw on a discourse to which they have not been exposed: discourses are differentially available to people according to their social circumstances" (2005:16).
As authors, we both experienced dissonance between the personal, professional and writer identities we value and the dissemination avenues we would prefer to pursue (such as through conference presentations, narrative and reflective practitioner genres) and those valorised by current institutional publication cultures. The widespread acceptance of "journal publication as primary currency of academia" (Curry & Lillis, 2013: 10) at the expense of other publication genres like book chapters, is a pivotal site of dilemma and tension for many scholars (Canagarajah, 2002;Curry & Lillis, 2018;Tusting, 2018). Amanda's expressions of mixed feelings related to academic writing because of what she perceives as its 'restrictive nature' and ability to strip away her identity, provide powerful commentary on academic values regarding what "counts as academic writing" (Tusting, 2018:477). This dissonance is often at the heart of the types of negotiations and conflicts around whether or not, or how best, to participate in publication activities including questions of genre, language and register choice (Nygaard, 2017;Arnbjörnsdóttir & Ingvarsdóttir, 2018). The reluctance voiced by Amanda further challenges the more optimistic observations made by Heron et al (2020) who suggest more agentive possibilities for academic writers. Their argument fails to recognise that writers like their study participants, who are already familiar and confident with their scholar label, are more likely to embrace the mantra of 'publish and flourish'. Our findings, on the other hand, provide evidence for the compelling arguments made about the inequitable effects of dominant performative publication discourses on academics on the margins (Curry & Lillis, 2013;2014;2019;Thomson & Kamler, 2013;Hyland, 2016;Nygaard, 2017;Tusting, 2018). While the research did not explicitly seek to explore the influence of our location as researchers in the global South on our writer identities, the findings do point to the amplification of recognition work especially evident in the editorial efforts that looked towards global norms, which are in effect the norms of dominant Anglophone rich economies.

Conclusion
In this paper we illustrate the complex and delicate ways in which our identities as academic writers researching our teaching and learning practices are discursively constructed and reconstructed. Using the analytical concepts of autobiographical self, discoursal self and affiliation, the findings, presented through our individual reflective sketches, show the central role played by the situational realities that both defined the immediate purpose of the writing task and also shaped how we anticipated the writing would be recognised as legitimate by the wider scholarship community. The centrality of academic writing and publication within the university cannot be ignored, but neither can the awareness that for many academics this activity is experienced as the antithesis of enabling. Our study therefore contributes to the understanding of how academic writers respond to and negotiate various socio-political, discursive and individual identity resources when they approach publishing, while also illuminating some of the struggles, potential identity losses as well as gains. Also highlighted is the analytical power that the writing as social practice lens brings to the study of academic writer identity. The detailed ethnographically enabled accounts of how our identities as writers were made and remade as we engaged and tussled with the rhetorical and situational boundaries of the writing project provide rich and evocative insights into the consequential nature of our scholarship practices. They also illuminate the productive spaces where essential academic development work, aimed at the re-examination of such practices, might begin. While our argument provides little by way of 'readymade' solutions, it does point to areas where productive dialogues about scholarship practices can begin. The pivotal role of academic developers as 'guides' offers possibilities not only for the acknowledgement of writer agency and agility in how performative scholarship regimes are taken-up, but also ways in which shifts and breaks from the normative fabric of these practices can be encouraged and supported.