Early Career Researchers’ Experiences of Post-Maternity and Parental Leave Provision in UK Politics and International Studies Departments: A Heads of Department and Early Career Researcher Survey

© The Author(s) 2020. Supporting increasing equality and diversity in the recruitment and retention of Early Career Researchers from the widest pool of talent available is high on the agenda of universities and policy makers. Notwithstanding this, the demanding nature of academic careers has a disproportionate effect on Early Career Researchers, who may face indirect obstacles in their career development particularly following a period of maternity or parental leave. Our research seeks to expose the nexus of challenges, from job insecurity to the pressures of raising new families that Early Career Researchers face during this critical juncture in their career trajectory. Focusing on Politics and International Studies Departments in the United Kingdom, we document the institutional mechanisms that exist to support Early Career Researchers returning from maternity and parental leave through a Heads of Department and an Early Career Researcher survey to gain an understanding of needs and the impact of institutional measures. Adopting a feminist institutionalist analysis, we map gendered outcomes in the university, through formal and informal rules, which mitigate against those Early Career Researchers taking maternity and parental leave. We end by identifying specific measures which would help to ensure that the university is more supportive of Early Career Researchers taking maternity and parental leave

Equalities in Freefall? Ontological Insecurity and the long-term Impact of COVID-19 in the Academy

This intervention focuses on the impact of the global crisis resulting from the COVID‐19 pandemic on existing racialized and gendered inequalities within the academy and in particular our discipline of Politics and International Relations. We argue that responses to recent crises within the academy have exacerbated ontological insecurity among minoritized groups, including women. When coupled with increased caring responsibilities the current crises call into question who can be creative and innovative, necessary conditions for knowledge production. While University managers seek to reassure University staff of the temporary nature of COVID‐19 interventions, we argue that the possibilities for progressive leaps at a later state of institutional regeneration is unlikely when efforts to address structural inequalities are sidelined and crisis responses are undertaken which run counter to such work

Pluralism and political studies in the UK: a pilot study into who gets what in the discipline

How pluralist is political studies? How are resources distributed across the discipline? In this article, we turn one of the fundamental questions of politics – who gets what, when, and how – back on to the study of politics itself. Our focus is on two areas that are central concerns to pluralism: gender and sub-discipline. We pose two specific questions: What is the gender and sub-disciplinary composition of political studies? And how are various resources – ranging from jobs to prizes – distributed along gender and sub-disciplinary lines? In addressing these questions, we draw on a pilot and partial audit of departments, journals and other key indicators from 1998 to 2018. The article contributes to long-standing debates about the character of political studies and the extent to which the field is pluralistic or not

Diversity or decolonization? Searching for the tools to dismantle the ‘master’s house’

Within the literature on decolonizing the curriculum, a clear distinction is frequently made between diversity and decolonization. While decolonization entails dismantling colonial forms of knowledge, including practices that racialize and categorize, diversity is a policy discourse that advocates for adding different sorts of people to reading lists and the staff and student body. As a team of staff and students, we are committed to decolonization, but we are also aware that within our discipline of political science, calls for diversity are more likely to be understood and accepted. We therefore bid for, and obtained, funding to conduct a quantitative review of our department’s reading lists in order to assess the range not only of authors, but also of topics and ideas. We found that male White authors wrote the majority of the readings, with women of colour authoring just 2.5 per cent of works on our curriculum. Our reading lists also featured disappointingly little theoretical diversity, with very little coverage of feminist, critical race or queer theory approaches, for example. We therefore used the standard methodologies and approaches of our discipline in order to point towards the silences and gaps that a decolonizing approach would seek to remedy. In this article, we explain our approach and findings. The project has been educational in the best sense and has disrupted hierarchical relationships between staff and students. It has helped us think more deeply about how data and research inform, and sometimes limit, change, as well as how the process of learning about how knowledge, including reading lists, is generated can support decolonization in itself