Postdoctoral research fellowships are a recent phenomenon in teacher education and little has been documented about them. This paper presents findings from a study in which the experiences of research fellows in a rural university were investigated. The data were gathered as audio recordings from peer mentoring meetings, notes from these meetings, individual reflective journals, and interviews conducted with six key informants. The analysis highlights that the experience of research fellowships was marked by a need to negotiate four competing, though not necessarily exclusive, demands related to the institute’s research productivity, its research culture and teaching, and personal professional goals. A range of institutional practices and individual characteristics mediated these negotiations. 1. Introduction Within a larger context of new public managerialism and increased casualisation of the workforce, there are increasing accountability demands placed on universities, usually measured in terms of research output and income [1]. For example, in Sweden and Finland along with other countries, new public funding tools tend to measure research excellence in a quantitative manner [2, 3]. At the same time, in Australia, the context of the present study, there is a predicted loss of experienced academics due to demographic reasons [4]. These contextual factors result in a need for universities to retain and sustain their existing academics, increase their research productivity, and recruit the next wave of research leaders [5]. One strategy to meet these current demands, employed by a Research Institute within a regional Australian university, was the recruitment of four, three-year term, early career postdoctoral research fellows (hereafter referred to as research fellows, the authors of this paper) located within a Teacher Education community at the Faculty of Education. This paper presents findings from a study in which the activity of being postdoctoral research fellows was investigated using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a tool for analysis. 2. Literature Review Much of the research to date on postdoctoral research fellowships (PDRF) has been in the natural sciences where they have been common since the 1970s. This research reveals a general lack of consistency in the definition of the PDRF, great variation in how it is conceived, and differences in the title by which fellows are known [6]. Despite these differences, typically, research fellows require or must be close to completion of a PhD. PDRFs are usually temporary positions, often
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