Isolation in Globalizing Academic Fields: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Early Career Researchers

This study examines academic isolation – an involuntary perceived separation from the academic field to which one aspires to belong, associated with a perceived lack of agency in terms of one’s engagement with the field – as a key challenge for researchers in increasingly globalized academic careers. While prior research describes early career researchers’ isolation in their institutions, we theorize early career researchers’ isolation in their academic fields and reveal how they attempt to mitigate isolation to improve their career prospects. Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, we generate and analyze a dataset focused on the experiences of ten early career researchers in a globalizing business academic field known as Consumer Culture Theory. We identify bricolage practices, polycentric governance practices, and integration mechanisms that work to enhance early career researchers’ perceptions of agency and consequently mitigate their academic isolation. Our findings extend discussions on isolation and its role in new academic careers. Early career researchers, in particular, can benefit from a deeper understanding of practices that can enable them to mitigate isolation and reclaim agency as they engage with global academic fields

Arbitrating Risk through Moral Values: The Case of Kenyan Fair Trade’, in Hidden Hands in the Market: Ethnographies of Fair Trade, Ethical Consumption, and Corporate Social Responsibility

This chapter examines the Kenyan Fairtrade flower as a site of value making, one that provides a constructive lens into how moral obligation and ethical accountability are shaped by risk perceptions and become visible through the process of transnational commodity exchange. Specifically, it argues that while Fairtrade labeling responds to the risks of corporate capitalism through consumption practices predicated on extending care and compassion to distant communities, it is also embedded within commodity chains that advance liberal ethics as a mode of “governmentality” over African producers. These ethics are associated with new technologies of information gathering, regulation, and surveillance that simultaneously assuage consumers’ anxieties and channel their sympathy-based humanism into new forms of ethical normativity. Fairtrade's relational ethic, for example, is accompanied by a private regulatory assemblage that authorizes certain knowledge forms, thereby circumscribing the social and economic rights available as well as the form of personhood through which they can be claimed. Thus, although Fairtrade is cast as morally unproblematic, it can also serve as a mechanism through which specific interests are naturalized and circulated through a benevolent vernacular of economic and social rights