This study examines the socio-material interplay between the learning
management system (LMS) and lecturer professional identities. Increasingly
prominent in higher education institutions, LMSs were especially foregrounded
during the swift transition to remote learning in the wake of the pandemic. There
has been an abundance of international scholarship related to the LMS, including
research into implementation strategies, adoption patterns and online teaching,
yet less empirical attention has been paid to lecturers’ additional pedagogical and administrative LMS practices. Even rarer are studies which incorporate a sociomaterial sensibility to trace not only the discursive renderings of identity
positioning, but to simultaneously explore how materiality is implicated in
producing lecturer selves. Responding to this gap in the literature, the study
harnesses a novel theoretical approach, integrating positioning theory, the
metaphor of imbrication and the mangle of practice. The social constructionist
ethno-case study design permits the research to zoom in on a specific platform,
Blackboard, and its contextualised use in a United Arab Emirates (UAE) college.
The UAE is a particularly insightful location to study lecturer professional
identities given its unique, yet unstable, occupational environment for educators.
Blackboard is one of the most prevalent LMSs worldwide, consequently providing
a relevant, rich and informative instantiation for a socio-material analysis of an
LMS in practice. Visual elicitation interviews with lecturers, interviews with
specialists and managers, observations and a document review provide a
nuanced account of how lecturer positioning is negotiated through the
imbrications of discursive resources, material agencies and power relations
resultant to the mandated use of Blackboard. As these socio-material
imbrications rewrite narratives of lecturer professional identities, three key
storylines are constructed from the data. The first illuminates the LMS as a
pervasive force through its ubiquitous availability across time and space, and in
its enrolment in the monitoring of lecturers. Secondly, the LMS as a conduit of
self-image discusses how the desired self may be projected through course
customisation and reveals the identity tensions that lecturers navigate when enacting pre-packaged course materials. Finally, the LMS as a digital
interference compels lecturers to perform as technical stewards with
unpredictable material breakdowns subverting lecturer intentions in the mangle
of Blackboard practice. The thesis presents some original terms derived from the
analysis and a range of subject positions, including the obsessive workaholic, the humanised creator and the expelled social actor. Evidencing a much more
complex framing of the lecturer than a mere ‘user’ of a neutral technology,
identities are negotiated through a myriad of tensions, albeit with some
opportunities for empowering identity work. The thesis concludes by addressing
some limitations and proposing potentially fruitful avenues of further research.