Vulnerable relational knowing that matters

This paper explores vulnerable relational knowing, and in it we open up our own embodied habits and experiences as feminist academics. We discuss how displaying our academic bodies as naked, both symbolically and physically, enhances and appreciates—instead of hiding—vulnerability. We also discuss how our academic bodies entangle with a range of more-than-human creatures and material surroundings to highlight the multispecies and material nature of vulnerable relational knowing. Two detailed stories, “Intimate sharing of academic knowledge: A recumbent study circle” and “Keropirtti: A place and space to work differently” provide unique examples of the enactment of alternative ways of working in academia, and their analysis demonstrates the potential of vulnerability for embodied relational knowing in academia, which has, to date, been commonly analyzed in the context of writing.     

Disabled academics: a case study in Canadian universities

Though Canadian universities are legally required to accommodate disabled employees, disabled faculty still experience difficulties navigating neoliberal performance standards and medicalized conceptualizations of disability. Drawing on data from a qualitative study with Canadian university faculty, this paper explores the experiences of five disabled academics. Our analysis draws on post-structural understandings of neoliberalism, discourse, disciplinary power, and governmentality, as well as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concepts of the fit and misfit. Though the sample is small, this analysis suggests universities pose disabling contexts for academics. Disability is cast as individual responsibility, leaving disabled academics navigating accommodations without institutional support. The normative academic constructed through a discourse of efficiency and productivity is the measure against which disabled academics are evaluated, requiring self-governance to produce themselves as ‘good enough’ academics. Although higher education environments are increasingly diverse, disabled academics are still having to prove their right to exist in academia, hindering their abilities to participate fully.     

Gender,Foreignness and Academia: An Intersectional Analysis of the Experiences of Foreign Women Academics in UK Business Schools

This article explores the experiences of a growing but hitherto under‐researched category of academics employed within UK higher education: women of non‐UK origin. Drawing on an intersectional approach, we examine how gender and foreignness act as dynamic, interrelating categories in producing particular subjectivities in the context of UK business schools. We employ a qualitative methodology based on narrative interviews with 31 foreign women academics. In the analysis, we outline the broader global forces that have shaped their trajectories in choosing the UK as their destination, and the place of gender and foreignness in the participants' narratives of their experience. Our findings point to how the discourse of internationalization conceals intra‐categorical differences among non‐national staff, further supported by a merit‐based system that promotes an individualized view. However, participants' narratives provide examples of how gender and foreignness are mobilized in different ways by different actors — including themselves — in the production of social locations. As such, the paper contributes to critical debates regarding the academic workplace and the changing conditions of UK academia.     

Perceptions of gendered-challenges in academia: How women academics see gender hierarchies as barriers to achievement

Despite the egalitarian and collegial philosophy in its ideals, academic market is segregated and gendered where women receive fewer rewards than their male counterparts, are under-represented, segregated and excluded from participation in the formal and informal academic structures in academia. The country contexts, the gendered academic organizational settings as well as everyday interactions all play a major role not only in women's participation within academia, but also how they perceive their future in academic institutions. This research note, through an original survey with over 200 academics, attempts to study the latter assumption by looking at women academics' perceptions of their work life, their challenges, as well as aspirations. Our results show that those perceiving strong hierarchy in the realm of work are significantly more likely to believe that being woman in academia harms their job prospects. We also show that, not only were they pessimistic about the challenges facing them at the moment, but they were also more skeptical about women's potential in overcoming such challenges in the future.     

Informality,emotion and gendered career paths: The hidden toll of maternity leave on female academics and researchers

While the negative impact of child‐raising and caring on women's career progression in academia is well‐established, less is known about the role of academic women's lived experiences of maternity leave as an institutional practice. This article presents the findings of a qualitative study of the lived experiences of female academics and researchers in an Irish university. The analysis intrinsically links organizational structures and problems with the lived and felt dimensions of work. The findings point to the need for better structural accommodations for maternity leave which address the relationship between caring and career disadvantage within academia. The article adds to existing literature on the intersection of motherhood and academia by unpicking the specific role of maternity leave as both a lived experience and an institutional practice that can reinforce gender inequalities in academia.     

Gender discourses in academic mobility

Despite increasing geographic mobility among academic staff, gendered patterns of involvement in academic mobility have largely escaped scrutiny. Positioned within literatures on internationalization, physical proximity, gender and parenthood in academic mobility and understandings of gender as a process enacted through both discursive and embodied practices, we use discourse analysis based on interviews with academics in New Zealand to examine differences in language that create differing realities with regards to gender and obligations of care in academic mobility decisions. The findings reveal how academic mobility is discursively formulated as ‘essential’ to successful academic careers, with the need for frequent travel justified despite advances in virtual communication technologies. Heteronormative discourses are shown to disrupt and fragment the opportunities female academics have to engage in academic mobility. However, we also uncover ways in which these discourses are resisted, wherein fathers articulate emotional strain associated with academic mobility. The article shows how discourse works to constitute the essentialization of academic mobility, and the uneven gendered practices associated with it, whilst also giving voice to gender inequities in academic mobility from the southern hemisphere.     

‘Brain circulation’ and transnational knowledge networks: studying long‐term effects of academic mobility to Germany, 1954–2000

‘Brain circulation’ has become a buzzword for describing the increasingly networked character of highly skilled migration. In this article, the concept is linked to academics' work on circular mobility to explore the long‐term effects of their research stays in Germany during the second half of the twentieth century. Based on original survey data on more than 1800 former visiting academics from 93 countries, it is argued that this type of brain circulation launched a cumulative process of subsequent academic mobility and collaboration that contributed significantly to the reintegration of Germany into the international scientific community after the Second World War and enabled the country's rise to the most important source for international co‐authors of US scientists and engineers in the twenty‐first century. In this article I discuss regional and disciplinary specificities in the formation of transnational knowledge networks through circulating academics and suggest that the long‐term effects can be fruitfully conceptualized as accumulation processes in ‘centres of calculation’.     

Agents for Change and Changed Agents: The Micro‐politics of Change and Feminism in the Academy

This article explores gender politics and processes in the academy and investigates change from the perspectives of feminist academics. In particular, it explores the experiences of women academics attempting to effect change to the gendered status quo of their own institutions. Focusing on micro‐politics, the feminist movement is empirically explored in localized spaces of resistance and in the small but significant individual efforts at making changes in academic institutions. The analysis is based on interviews with female academics working in business and management schools and focuses on the challenges for change and how change attempts affect their personal and professional identities. The article explores the range of change strategies that participants use as they try to progress in their academic career while staying true to their feminist values and priorities through both resisting and incorporating dominant discourses of academic work. The analysis highlights such tensions and focuses on a contextualized, bottom‐up perspective on change that, unlike more totalizing theorization, takes into account mundane and lived experiences at the level of the individual.     

International Students Pathways Between Open and Closed Borders: Towards a Multi‐scalar Approach to Educational Mobility and Labour Market Outcomes

This paper explores the complex and changing relationship between academic capitalism that encourages global mobility of highly‐skilled international students on the one hand and recent changes to immigration policy in the UK that prevent such mobility on the other. The paper is based on a longitudinal study that traces the experiences and aspirations of postgraduates from three Asian countries and their pathways from the UK universities to post study work and realities. Taking a multi‐scalar approach, the analysis of international students’ narratives unpacks the unevenness of career opportunities, barriers to settlement and various “assemblages of power” that shape students’ life trajectories. The paper illustrates how the individual‐scale projects intersect with states’ policies of both receiving and sending countries and other institutions and structures of power that operate within and beyond the nation‐states.     

“Having a family is the new normal”: Parenting in neoliberal academia during the COVID-19 pandemic

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has made explicit the burden of care shouldered by academic mothers, in addition to juggling their scholarly commitments. Although discussions are abundant on the impact of caring responsibilities on the careers of women academics, neoliberal academia continues to minimize such struggles. Despite the disruptions to family routines caused by the health crisis, academic institutions have expected academic mothers and fathers to continue undertaking their professional responsibilities at the same level as before, disregarding their parenting demands. This paper contributes to the research on parenthood in academia by looking at how, throughout the pandemic, academic parents have negotiated the tensions between parenthood and academic demands, and by investigating the strategies they use to confront neoliberal culture of academic performativity, even amid the health crisis. The paper engages with the “space invaders” concept used by Puwar (2004) to analyze the “hypervisibility” of academic mothers' and fathers' “bodies out of place” during the pandemic, and to investigate their “renegade acts” against the uncaring attitudes of their institutions. Evidence is drawn from a qualitative study conducted during December 2020 and January 2021 among scholars affiliated to Portuguese academic institutions: 17 in-depth interviews conducted with women, and two mixed-gender focus groups. Our results research reveal how the experiences of academic mothers and fathers were not uniform during the pandemic. In addition, it shows how, despite their commitment to their academic responsibilities, these parents have crafted various resistance strategies to confront the institutional pressure to continue maintain their working routines, and instead positioning themselves as “more than just academics.”     

Ableism in academia: where are the disabled and ill academics?

Recent coverage in higher education newspapers and social media platforms implies that chronic conditions, illnesses and disabilities are becoming more prominent amongst academics. Changes to funding structures, increased globalisation, marketisation and bureaucratisation of higher education have resulted in a performance-driven working environment where teaching workload and pressures to publish are further intensified due to excellence exercises in teaching and research. The result is low morale and an ever-rising number of reported mental health issues, burnout and stress-related illnesses within academia. This article explores some of these issues in the context of higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. We draw on our research and our experiences as speakers regarding ableism in academia to provide food for thought, stimulate a debate and raise awareness of those academics experiencing chronic illness, disability or neurodiversity, whose voices are not heard.     

Excellent and gender equal? Academic motherhood and ‘gender blindness' in Norwegian academia

This article explores Norwegian female academics' experiences with academic motherhood in an organizational perspective. A main finding is that academia as an organization is greedy, uncertain, and has ‘blind spots' that reveal gender bias related to gender and parental status, especially mothers. By analysing the link between gendered organization of work and the legitimatizing of gender inequality, the article reveals ‘gender blindness' in the academic organization concerning gender and parental status. The article concludes that changes in academia — in line with academic capitalism — may indicate that the Norwegian model of work–life balance is under pressure. This article suggests that the organizational conditions for academic motherhood are important factors in order to understand the persistence of gender inequality.     

The Inclusion of Female PhD Students in Academia: A Case Study of a Swedish University Department

The article introduces a framework for understanding women's entry into the academic world and how it interacts with internal departmental structures and practices. It presents three specific strategies applied by a group of women to gain a doctorate and acceptance in their department. Few previous studies have stressed women's strategies to cope with the organizational setting in academia. The article draws on previous research on women in academia and how organizational characteristics influence women's careers. It is based on a case study of a Swedish university department. Sweden is often recognized for creating favourable working conditions for women. Yet the Swedish academic world is very male‐dominated at the top and even the medium level. It is also more common than in many other Western countries that academics stay on at the department where they graduated. Therefore, a PhD is often a first step in a career within that department.     

Lived experiences of women academics during the COVID-19 pandemic in Pakistan

This study explores the experiences of women academics while combining the challenging job of online teaching and familial responsibilities during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Pakistan. The aim is to outline the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on women academics. We employed a qualitative research design and collected data through in-depth qualitative telephonic interviews with thirteen women academics in four public sector universities in Pakistan. The findings show that women academics remained overwhelmed by the workload; lacked support; and endured a tiring struggle to manage their official duties and familial responsibilities. They were stressed and stuck in their children and family care and online teaching and had hardly any time for academic writing. The participants expressed being burned out, depressed, exhausted, angry, and in desperate need of personal time. Since women experienced the lockdown differently than men we suggest that they may be compensated at the time of tenure/promotions.     

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

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 labour 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.     

Academic “Centres,” Epistemic Differences and Brain Circulation

This article investigates the factors that shape how migrant academics engage with fellow scholars within their countries of origin. We focus specifically on the mobility of Asian‐born faculty between Singapore, a fast‐developing education hub in Southeast Asia, and their “home” countries within the region. Based on qualitative interviews with 45 migrant academics, this article argues that while education hubs like Singapore increase the possibility of brain circulation within Asia, epistemic differences between migrant academics and home country counterparts make it difficult to establish long‐term collaboration for research. Singapore institutions also look to the West in determining how research work is assessed for tenure and promotion, encouraging Singapore‐based academics to focus on networking with colleagues and peers based in the US and Europe rather than those based in origin countries. Such conditions undermine the positive impact of academic mobility between Singapore and surrounding countries within the region.     

Scientific Mobility, Career Progression, and Excellence in the European Research Area1

This paper explores the various aspects of mobility requirements and the relationship between competitiveness, excellence, and mobility in scientific research in the European Union (EU). The “expectation of mobility” in science plays an important role in shaping the European Research Area. Research argues that better economic opportunities and advanced migration policy in destination countries promote highly skilled migration. Empirical evidence shows that academics and researchers consider important determinants in the migration decision and destination to be the research environment and conditions, i.e. research support, infrastructures, demand for research and development (R&D) staff, and academics (Millard, 2005). While it can be argued that the European Research Area is designed to encourage the interchange of scientists, skills balance is essential to competitiveness in the European region. Despite the actions and measures taken in the context of the EC Mobility Strategy, unbalanced flows are still a weakness of the European Research Area. There is a need in Europe to coordinate science and migration policies at European and Member State level to enhance the attractiveness of European receiving countries and facilitate return of scientists to their sending nations. This paper, which focuses mainly on Austria, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, shows the uneven nature of scientific personnel flows within the European Research Area. The article argues that in Europe mobile scientists are often driven by necessity more than choice, and the longer they are away the more complicated it is to return. If the academic system proved impenetrable to return other opportunities in the private sectors might be explored by the researcher.     

“I had to get married to protect myself”: Gay academics’ experiences of managing sexual identity in China

Drawing on interviews with 40 gay academics, this article explores their experiences of managing sexual identity in Chinese universities. Three strategies of identity management are identified: passing via marriage or heterosexual relationships, self-distancing from people on campus, and demonstrating outstanding professional performance. This article argues that Chinese universities are heteronormative spaces in which queer identities are excluded. By highlighting gay academics’ transgression of heteronormativity within the closet, this research also unpacks gay academics’ expression of agency in subtle forms.     

Navigating the gendered academy: women in social work academia

ABSTRACT

Women fare less well than men across all academic disciplines: they are less likely to be promoted, they earn less, and many more professors are men. There has, however, been little analysis to date of the experience of women in social work education, a discipline that has historically had higher representation of female staff and students. This study set out to explore women in the social work academy through a case-study of social work education in Scotland. A mixed-methods approach was used, including a review of relevant literature; an online survey of women and men academics in social work education; and semi-structured interviews with female social work leaders, past and present. The study found that women in the social work academy faced the same pressures as other women in higher education; some of these pressures were also shared by men. Most significant, however, was the extent to which women in social work academia experienced twin challenges, firstly, as female academics and secondly, as female social work academics in a discipline that struggles for recognition in the academy. We conclude that this makes for a contradictory and, at times, ambiguous experience for women as they navigate the gendered academy.     

‘I’m a migrant,but I’m the right sort of migrant’: Hegemonic masculinity,whiteness, and intersectional privilege and (dis)advantage in migratory academic careers

Comparatively little attention has been paid to the international careers of many academics, with gender and ethnicity frequently ignored in discussions of migrant academics. Through the lenses of intersectionality, hegemonic masculinity and whiteness, this study explores experiences of migrant academics in Australia and New Zealand, understanding how gender and ethnicity intersect to shape experiences of relative privilege and disadvantage. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 30 academics at various stages of their careers in both Australia and New Zealand. The data reveals the complex patterns of (dis)advantage which characterize the experiences of migrant academics. While some migrant academics may experience disadvantage, for Anglo white male senior academics, considerable privilege is (re)produced through the migration experience. As such, this article suggests migratory experiences can be better understood through the intersectionality of hegemonic masculinity and whiteness to reveal how privilege is maintained.