Claiming Space for Honest Work Academic integrity as Third Space labor

Abstract

Academic integrity (AI) work is widely recognized as fundamental to all college and university endeavors. Outside of its own scholarly and professional niche, however, less is known about people who carry out this work. Our chapter, which reports on a document-based interview study conducted with nine AI professionals across nine different institutions, seeks to fill this gap by providing embedded, on-the-ground perspectives on how these professionals go about building intellectual capital and credibility. Our study also addresses how AI professionals fit with their respective campuses and colleagues, with participants throughout illustrating affordances and limitations of Third Space as a conceptual frame to describe AI work. By bringing Third Space and AI into more deliberate conversation, we invite professionals across both areas to critically reflect on discrepancies between work members of their communities think they do versus work they actually do. We foreground how AI professionals make sense of their own labor, drawing implications for how such calculations have affected (and may continue to affect) institutional belonging as well as the personal, emotional, and professional sustainability of AI and other Third Space work.