The age of precarity and the new challenges to the academic profession (original) (raw)
Related papers
Precarity is endemic to academia
Social Anthropology, 2019
The terror of the neoliberal markets and the terror of politics both threaten academic freedom – sometimes subtly, sometimes more openly. In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers’ biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum also invites its contributors to reflect on concrete interventions from their respective positions.
This book provides an in-depth qualitative report on casualised academic staff in the UK, mapping shared experiences and strategies for resistance. Bringing together testimonial data spanning seven years, it offers evidence of how precarious labour conditions have persisted, shifted and intensified. The book is a valuable resource for students and scholars in the fields of education, human resources management, labour studies and sociology, as well as trade unionists and university policymakers.
The higher education sector in Ireland has undergone major changes under the effect of neoliberalism including severe budget cuts, transfer of research funding to external agencies, reduction in permanent contracts and increased reliance on part-time, temporary staff for teaching and research roles. The neoliberalisation of the university, as in other countries, has dramatically changed the nature of work undertaken on behalf of the institution. Permanent jobs increasingly disappear in favour of low-paid, temporary employment. Such work comes without security, proper remuneration or benefits, and renders invisible the precarious workers whose labour the university relies on to function. Based on the results of an outreach project on casual academic labour practices, this paper reports on the discernable patterns in the work of the precariat in Irish higher education. Our results indicate that casualisation in the Irish context is systemic, gendered, and not the preserve of junior academics. We also suggest it predates austerity and has become so endemic that there are now few exit points out of precarious work and as such, many are now trapped in a hamster wheel of precarity.
This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-today basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable 'deliverables.' Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they undertook as part of a broader research group of emerging Canadian scholars working in different international contexts between 2012 and 2015. The research conversation began in academic roundtables in 2013, and was furthered through a content analysis of articles collected from scholarly and general interest blog posts, newsletters, and magazines published online from July 2012 to April 2014. In this article, the authors explore emerging themes and document pressures to conform to neoliberal practices within the corporatized university, as well as suggest pathways for dissent and reinvention of academic labour.
This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-today basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable 'deliverables.' Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they undertook as part of a broader research group of emerging Canadian scholars working in different international contexts between 2012 and 2015. The research conversation began in academic roundtables in 2013, and was furthered through a content analysis of articles collected from scholarly and general interest blog posts, newsletters, and magazines published online from July 2012 to April 2014. In this article, the authors explore emerging themes and document pressures to conform to neoliberal practices within the corporatized university, as well as suggest pathways for dissent and reinvention of academic labour.
Work, Employment and Society, 2022
This article investigates the political potency of 'precarity' as an organising axiom in contingent workers' grassroots organisations. It studies a nationwide network of precarious researchers in Germany and deploys Frame Analysis to illuminate how the Network articulates diverse criticisms as parts of a coherent struggle against precarious academic work. Empirically, the article substantiates the postulate of 'precarity as a mobilising source' by depicting the construction of precarity on strategic, organisational and individual levels, drawing on protest campaigns, coordinative work and in-depth interviews, respectively. On a theoretical level, it contributes to the literature by proposing a refinement of the concept of 'master frame'. Arguing that 'precarity' creates a broader class actor with branches in different sectors, to which the contingent academics link their struggle by derivatively describing themselves as the 'academic precariat', the article proposes the novel category of 'class-formative frame' in difference to operational (diagnostic/prognostic) or relational (supportive/oppositional) frames.