Abstract
This developmental paper explores the sustainability of current workload at post-92 universities and its effect on the knowledge creation in the UK higher education sector.
The semi-structured interviews revealed themes of unrealistic workload allocation models, heavy teaching workloads and disproportionate administrative burden compared to their peers from research intensive institutions which prevent academics employed at post-92 institutions from conducting research.
Additionally, by employing an intersectional lens the study further revealed that migrant academics and those with caring responsibilities face additional hardships when looking to be research active in their mainly teaching roles.
Following the initial stages the project intends to explore the raised issues in more depth, as well as to expand its reach to include participants from across more UK universities. This will be done in order to evaluate their experiences of the identified themes and to gage their proposed solutions.
In the long term, the project seeks to develop a blueprint for sustainable solutions towards improving research opportunities for academic colleagues employed at post-92 institutions who wish to be research active, without them being forced to choose between creating original knowledge and their private lives.