Book chapter in "Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights and Failures" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, eds. Y Taylor, K. Lahad)

ABSTRACT
By 2008 concepts of precariousness, insecurity, temporary or episodic labor in the new political economy started describing the work and life situations of young academics in the United States (Armano and Murgia, 2013; Brophy and Peuter, 2007; Gerard and Murgia, 2012; Ylijoki, 2010). At the same time the terms 'all-administrative,' 'commercialization,' 'corporatization,' 'academic capitalism,' and ' neoliberalization' were signaling further changes in higher education institutions in the US (Derek 2003; Chomsky, 2014; Gill, 2010; Ginsberg, 2011; Mills, 2012; Soley 1995). This chapter addresses the trajectories of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) PhDs who left academia in search for professional lives that combine feminist scholarship with activism, service, and policy making

Lovin, C. Laura

English

Francesca Coin

Crossref

When Love Becomes Self-Abuse: Gendered Perspectives on Unpaid Labor in Academia

his book offers a contemporary account of what it means to inhabit academia as a privilege, risk, entitlement or a failure. Drawing on international perspectives from a range of academic disciplines, it asks whether feminist spaces can offer freedom or flight from the corporatized and commercialized neoliberal university. How are feminist voices felt, heard, received, silenced, and masked? What is it to be a feminist academic in the neoliberal university? How are expectations, entitlements and burdens felt in inhabiting feminist positions and what of 'bad feeling' or 'unhappiness' amongst feminists? The volume consider these issues from across the career course, including from 'early career' and senior established scholars, as these diverse categories are themselves entangled in academic structures, sentiments and subjectivities; they are solidified in, for example, entry and promotion schemes as well as funding calls, and they ask us to identify in particular stages of 'being' or 'becoming' academic, while arguably denying the possibility of ever arriving

University of Strathclyde Institutional Repository

Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University : Feminist Fights, Flights and Failures

Emily F. Henderson

Feminist Conference Time: Aiming (Not) to Have Been There

During the Seventies, feminist scholar Silvia Federici maintained that one of the main challenges in the Wages for Housework campaign lay in the fact that women's domestic labor was presented as an act of love, a natural attribute of the female personality that required no monetary compensation. Today, academic labor is often presented as a labor of love. Especially for young, female academics, scholarly labor is treated as a form of self-expression that fulfills an affective need, hence turning the actual conditions of labor into afterthoughts. In this chapter, I tell the stories of precarious academics in Italy: researchers, post-docs and adjunct professors who often work long hours in hopes for nebulous rewards such as co-authoring papers, receiving recommendation letters or vague promises of future employment. Drawing on data collected during an on-line survey administered to 1,864 precarious academics and 20 in-depth interviews, I show how adjunct professors and precarious scholars in Italy barely make a living, often live in overcrowded homes and on occasion turn to deviant behavior to make ends meet. Although the mainstream discourse tends to present academic labor as being both elitist and out of touch, the privilege of young scientists that “do what they love”, these interviews often portray academia as a de facto exploitative labor market where young women are expected to provide high-skilled labor for extremely low or no wages. Trapped in the urge to be competitive in the labor market, young women often endure financial hardships and long periods of isolation while they accept the promise of future employment as the affective currency of unpaid work (Bascetta, 2015). Rather than a labor of love, academic labor sometimes appears as an abusive relationship, an exploitative system chronicled by costly sacrifices and uncertain prospects.During the 1970s, feminist scholar Silvia Federici maintained that one of the main challenges in the Wages for Housework campaign lay in the fact that women’s domestic labor was presented as an act of love, a natural attribute of the female personality that required no monetary compensation. Today, academic labor is often presented as a labor of love. Especially for young, female academics, scholarly labor is treated as a form of self-expression that fulfills an affective need, hence turning the actual conditions of labor into afterthoughts. In this chapter, I tell the stories of precarious academics in Italy: researchers, postdocs, and adjunct professors who often work long hours in hopes for nebulous rewards such as co-authoring papers, receiving recommendation letters or vague promises of future employment. Drawing on data collected during an online survey administered to 1864 precarious academics and 20 in-depth interviews, I show how adjunct professors and precarious scholars in Italy barely make a living, often live in overcrowded homes and on occasion turn to deviant behavior to make ends meet. Although the mainstream discourse tends to present academic labor as being both elitist and out of touch, the privilege of young scientists that “do what they love”, these interviews often portray academia as a de facto exploitative labor market where young women are expected to provide high-skilled labor for extremely low or no wages. Trapped in the urge to be competitive in the labor market, young women often endure financial hardships and long periods of isolation while they accept the promise of future employment as the affective currency of unpaid work (Bascetta, Economia politica della promessa. Roma: Ilmanifestolibri, 2015). Rather than a labor of love, academic labor sometimes appears as an abusive relationship, an exploitative system chronicled by costly sacrifices and uncertain prospects

COIN, Francesca

Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Università degli Studi di Venezia Ca' Foscari

When love becomes self-abuse. Gendered perspectives on unpaid labor in academia

By 2008 concepts of precariousness, insecurity, temporary or episodic labor in the new political economy started describing the work and life situations of young academics in the United States (Armano and Murgia, 2013; Brophy and Peuter, 2007; Gerard and Murgia, 2012; Ylijoki, 2010). At the same time the terms 'all-administrative,' 'commercialization,' 'corporatization,' 'academic capitalism,' and ' neoliberalization' were signaling further changes in higher education institutions in the US (Derek 2003; Chomsky, 2014; Gill, 2010; Ginsberg, 2011; Mills, 2012; Soley 1995). This chapter addresses the trajectories of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) PhDs who left academia in search for professional lives that combine feminist scholarship with activism, service, and policy making

Lovin, Carmen-Laura

Feelings of change : alternative feminist professional trajectories

During the 1970s, feminist scholar Silvia Federici maintained that one of the main challenges in the Wages for Housework campaign lay in the fact that women’s domestic labor was presented as an act of love, a natural attribute of the female personality that required no monetary compensation. Today, academic labor is often presented as a labor of love. Especially for young, female academics, scholarly labor is treated as a form of self-expression that fulfills an affective need, hence turning the actual conditions of labor into afterthoughts. In this chapter, I tell the stories of precarious academics in Italy: researchers, postdocs, and adjunct professors who often work long hours in hopes for nebulous rewards such as co-authoring papers, receiving recommendation letters or vague promises of future employment. Drawing on data collected during an online survey administered to 1864 precarious academics and 20 in-depth interviews, I show how adjunct professors and precarious scholars in Italy barely make a living, often live in overcrowded homes and on occasion turn to deviant behavior to make ends meet. Although the mainstream discourse tends to present academic labor as being both elitist and out of touch, the privilege of young scientists that “do what they love”, these interviews often portray academia as a de facto exploitative labor market where young women are expected to provide high-skilled labor for extremely low or no wages. Trapped in the urge to be competitive in the labor market, young women often endure financial hardships and long periods of isolation while they accept the promise of future employment as the affective currency of unpaid work (Bascetta, Economia politica della promessa. Roma: Ilmanifestolibri, 2015). Rather than a labor of love, academic labor sometimes appears as an abusive relationship, an exploitative system chronicled by costly sacrifices and uncertain prospects

Archivio istituzionale della Ricerca -  Università degli Studi di Parma

NEUROSURGERY ENTHUSIASTIC WOMEN SOCIETY

Feelings of Change: Alternative Feminist Professional Trajectories

‘I was thinking, “I’ve travelled all this way, and I was looking forward to this, and my mind is somewhere else.”’ This is an excerpt from an interview with a feminist academic, taken from my ethnographic study of three national Women’s Studies conferences (India, UK, US). It is one example of the multiple temporalities that are experienced by feminist scholars when they make a break with the everyday and move their bodies to a conference (Henderson, 2015); anticipation layered with bodily presence in the here and now, layered with ongoing and future-oriented ‘somewhere else’-ness. This chapter explores academic feminist conferences as confluence points where multiple, competing, affective temporalities collide; I present a theorisation of ‘conference time’ that encompasses two competing temporal modes. Firstly, a feminist conference involves an embodied experience of being there, of being present in space and time, of taking time to think and take stock. However, ‘being there’ may also be experienced as an irritation that is impeding a more future-oriented modes of being: ‘having been there’, and/or ‘not having been there’. Both of the aspects of this mode involve ‘catching up’ with the future. ‘Having been there’ relates to the conference experience that is lived for the gains it will have brought, a line on the CV, for example. ‘Not having been there’ refers to the expectation that the conference attendee will be able to return home seemingly without having interrupted normal work patterns, having kept up with emails, for example. These modes, which may be experienced simultaneously, represent some of the tensions involved in occupying the subject-position of ‘feminist academic’ (Pereira, 2015): how to maintain a commitment to the field, to collegiality, to thinking, when academic success seems to demand an individualistic, performative, future-oriented approach

Henderson, Emily F.

Warwick Research Archives Portal Repository

Feminist conference time : aiming (not) to have been there

ZENODO

During the Seventies, feminist scholar Silvia Federici maintained that one of the main challenges in the Wages for Housework campaign lay in the fact that women's domestic labor was presented as an act of love, a natural attribute of the female personality that required no monetary compensation. Today, academic labor is often presented as a labor of love. Especially for young, female academics, scholarly labor is treated as a form of self-expression that fulfills an affective need, hence turning the actual conditions of labor into afterthoughts. In this chapter, I tell the stories of precarious academics in Italy: researchers, post-docs and adjunct professors who often work long hours in hopes for nebulous rewards such as co-authoring papers, receiving recommendation letters or vague promises of future employment. Drawing on data collected during an on-line survey administered to 1,864 precarious academics and 20 in-depth interviews, I show how adjunct professors and precarious scholars in Italy barely make a living, often live in overcrowded homes and on occasion turn to deviant behavior to make ends meet. Although the mainstream discourse tends to present academic labor as being both elitist and out of touch, the privilege of young scientists that “do what they love”, these interviews often portray academia as a de facto exploitative labor market where young women are expected to provide high-skilled labor for extremely low or no wages. Trapped in the urge to be competitive in the labor market, young women often endure financial hardships and long periods of isolation while they accept the promise of future employment as the affective currency of unpaid work (Bascetta, 2015). Rather than a labor of love, academic labor sometimes appears as an abusive relationship, an exploitative system chronicled by costly sacrifices and uncertain prospects

Coin, Francesca

Archivio Ricerca Ca'Foscari

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/100928/1/WRAP-feminist-conference-time-aiming-not-to-have-been-there-Henderson-2018.pdf

Feelings of Change: Alternative Feminist Professional Trajectories

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Crossref

University of Strathclyde Institutional Repository

Crossref

Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Università degli Studi di Venezia Ca' Foscari

University of Strathclyde Institutional Repository

Archivio istituzionale della Ricerca - Università degli Studi di Parma

NEUROSURGERY ENTHUSIASTIC WOMEN SOCIETY

Warwick Research Archives Portal Repository

ZENODO

Archivio Ricerca Ca'Foscari