Feelings of Change: Alternative Feminist Professional Trajectories (original) (raw)

Locked In: Feminist Perspectives on Surviving on Academic

2016

ABSTRACT: While increasing media attention is given to examining the status of contract faculty on university campuses there is little note made of the pervasiveness of women in these positions. This paper, by drawing on Marxist and feminist theory ties the gender precarity faced by academic contract female workers to the historical practices of industries to use female labour to reduce labour costs. The textile piece worker system of the 19th century has found a 21st century form represented in the unlikely position of the female academic contract worker. The argument builds on the autoethnographic narratives of two contract women to demonstrate how the university administration’s “economic pressure ” justification is an economic myth to occlude the exploitation of female workers.

Unsettled lives? Academic precarity, gender, and personal life

Connect: The Magazine for Australian Casual and Sessional Academic Staff, 2017

It is common to hear about academics’ personal lives in terms of a lack. We know, for instance, that academics have fewer children, marry less, and work longer hours than those in other ‘professions’ (Mason et al. 2013; NTEU 2015). The growing population of precariously employed academics is understood as especially afflicted, with couples and families needing to move or separate for work, and living with low, irregular pay and limited or no leave. These issues disproportionately impact women, and particularly young women, as this group is overrepresented in precarious academia (May et al. 2013).

Locked In: Feminist Perspectives on Surviving on Academic Piecework

New Proposals Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2014

While increasing media attention is given to examining the status of contract faculty on university campuses there is little note made of the pervasiveness of women in these positions. This paper, by drawing on Marxist and feminist theory ties the gender precarity faced by academic contract female workers to the historical practices of industries to use female labour to reduce labour costs. The textile piece worker system of the 19th century has found a 21st century form represented in the unlikely position of the female academic contract worker. The argument builds on the autoethnographic narratives of two contract women to demonstrate how the university administration's "economic pressure" justification is an economic myth to occlude the exploitation of female workers.

Betwixt and Between: Academic Women in Transition

Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 2008

University culture is increasingly being infl uenced by globalization, competition, the commercialization of research, and external demands for accountability. Corporate managerial practices that value individualism and productivity bump up against more democratic and collaborative practices inherent in the traditional academic culture and governance. Tensions result as faculty members are left on their own to make sense of the shifting political, economic and social landscape of higher education and to understand the implications for their professional identity within their Faculty. In an unstable institutional culture that lacks rules or mechanisms to shepherd faculty through this process, individuals can feel anxious, confused or incompetent as they negotiate the contradictions in their professional lives and deal with issues of power and resistance.

Ivancheva, Lynch and Keating 2019 accepted version-Gender,_Work_&_Organization.pdf

Precarity, Gender and Care in the Neoliberal Academy

This article examines the rise in precarious academic employment in Ireland as an outcome of the higher education restructuring following OECD, government initiatives and post-crisis austerity. Presenting the narratives of academic women at different career stages, we claim that a focus on care sheds new light on the debate on precarity. A more complete understanding of precarity should take account not only the contractual security but also affective relational security in the lives of employees. The intersectionality of paid work and care work lives was a dominant theme in our interviews among academic women. In a globalised academic market, premised on the carefree masculinised ideals of competitive performance, 24/7 work and geographical mobility, women who opt out of these norms, suffer labour-led contractual precarity and are overrepresented in part-time and fixed-term positions. Women who comply with these organisational commands need to peripheralise their relational lives and experience care-led affective precarity

Mobilization among Women Academics: The Interplay between Feminism and the Profession.

2003

Semi-structured individual interviews and document and observational analyses from two feminist faculty grassroots networks provide an understanding of how faculty confront an inequitable campus climate. From these data, the author shows that two subtly different strategies emerge to help women mobilize and address issues of discrimination and bias. One organization is a professional organization of feminists while the other is an activist organization of professionals, which in both cases help define academic feminism and the faculty profession.

‘Not one of the family’: Gender and precarious work in the neoliberal university

Gender Work an Organization, 2019

Gender inequality within the university is well documented but proposals to tackle it tend to focus on the higher ranks, ignoring how it manifests within precarious work. Based on data collected as part of a broader participatory action research project on casual academic labor in Irish higher education, the article focuses on the intersection of precarious work and gender in academia. We argue that precarious female academics are non-citizens of the academy, a status that is reproduced through exploitative gendered practices and evident in formal/legal recognition (staff status, rights and entitlements, pay and valuing of work) as well as in informal dimensions (social and decision-making power). We, therefore, conclude that any attempts to challenge gender inequality in academia must look downward, not upward, to the ranks of the precarious academics.

Mobilization among women academics: The interplay between feminism and professionalization

NWSA Journal, 2008

The Challenge of Neoliberalism and Precarity for Gender Sensitivity in Academia

The Gender-Sensitive University A Contradiction in Terms?, 2020

Over the last 20 years, scholarship on gender and academia has analysed the diverse range of obstacles to the attainment of gender equality in higher education institutions. In the context of neoliberalism, there is a growing trend towards precarity at entry to academic careers, which has adverse and highly gendered outcomes. Academic institutions seek to promote gender equality and diversity through Gender Equality Plans to address the gendered division of work. In this context, management and senior leadership is constructed as ‘male’ work while other under-recognised roles, such as teaching, administration, pastoral care, are constructed as ‘female’ work. This chapter focuses on how gender equality and intersectionality can challenge this gender regime and the role of feminist scholarship in meeting this objective.

Feeling precarious: millennial women and work [Full text from link]

In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler writes about how a shared sense of fear and vulnerability opens the possibility of recognizing interdependency. This is a wider understanding of precarity than is often present in human geography – recognizing the consequences and possibilities of feeling precarious. Focusing on work and the workplace, I examine the working life stories of millennial women in Canada, a labour market where unemployment and underemployment are common experiences for young workers. Using work narratives of insecurity, I argue that one potential consequence of understanding precariousness is the recognition of our social selves, using millennial women’s stories of mutual reliance and connection with parents, partners and friends to contrast assumptions of the individualizing, neoliberal, Gen Y worker. I use a feminist understanding of agency and autonomy to argue that young women’s stories about work are anything but individual experiences of flexibility or precarity – instead, I explain how relationships play a critical role in worker agency and whether work feels flexible or precarious. Overall I consider what a feminist theorizing of interdependence and precariousness offers geography, emphasizing the importance of subjectivity and relationality.

Feelings of Change: Alternative Feminist Professional Trajectories (original) (raw)

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