Foreign women in academia : Double‐strangers between productivity, marginalization and resistance
Autor/in:
Strauβ, Anke; Boncori, Ilaria
Quelle: Gender Work Organ (Gender, Work & Organization), 17 (2020) 2, 867 S
Inhalt: This article examines the professional experience of foreign women academics working across geographic boundaries in today's neoliberal academia characterized by liquidity. Framed within an intersectional perspective, we use the concept of the ‘double‐stranger' to examine data stemming from 20 in‐depth semi‐structured interviews conducted with scholars at different stages of their career in the social sciences. This article advances understandings of academic careers theoretically by identifying a temporal and hierarchical dynamic in the intersection of two categories of difference (gender and foreignness) that constitute a position of simultaneous belonging and non‐belonging for foreign women academics; and empirically through a qualitative investigation that explores three areas in which academic professional experiences are mobilized for double‐strangers: (i) transnational career moves; (ii) productivity and performance in today's neoliberal academia; and (iii) self‐induced estrangement as a form of resistance.
The Never‐ending Shift : A feminist reflection on living and organizing academic lives during the coronavirus pandemic
Autor/in:
Boncori, Ilaria
Quelle: Gender Work Organ (Gender, Work & Organization), (2020)
Inhalt: This article offers a feminist reflection written as a nocturnal stream of consciousness exposing the embodied, emotional and professional experience of living and working during a pandemic outbreak. Framed within a feminist approach, this personal narrative provides an example of the effects of such unexpected and unprecedented circumstances on personal and professional academic lives. Developed during the first stage of the (inter)national coronavirus pandemic, my reflections address issues of privilege; emotional labour; the virtual invasion of the home space within the current increasingly ambiguous space of ‘the workplace'; workload; and wellbeing. Further, I consider how the newly enforced flexible work measures based on online tools have turned current work–life dynamics into a ‘Never‐ending Shift'.
Catching a glimpse: Corona-life and its micro-politics in academia
Autor/in:
Plotnikof, Mie; Bramming, Pia; Branicki, Layla; Christensen, Lærke Højgaard; Henley, Kelly; Kivinen, Nina; Kostera, Monika; Mandalaki, Emmanouela; O'Shea, Saoirsie; Özkazanç-Pan, Banu; Pullen, Alison; Le Lima, João Paulo Resende; Stewart, Jim; Ybema, Sierk; van Amsterdam, Noortje
Quelle: Gender Work Organ (Gender, Work & Organization), (2020)
Inhalt: The spread of COVID‐19 acutely challenges and affects not just economic markets, demographic statistics and healthcare systems, but indeed also the politics of organizing and becoming in a new everyday life of academia emerging in our homes. Through a collage of stories, snapshots, vignettes, photos and other reflections of everyday life, this collective contribution is catching a glimpse of corona‐life and its micro‐politics of multiple, often contradicting claims on practices as many of us live, work and care at home. It embodies concerns, dreams, anger, hope, numbness, passion and much more emerging amongst academics from across the world in response to the crisis. As such, this piece manifests a shared need to — together, apart — enact and explore constitutive relations of resistance, care and solidarity in these dis/organizing times of contested spaces, identities and agencies as we are living–working–caring at home during lockdowns.
The Differential Impact of COVID-19 on the Work Conditions of Women and Men Academics during the Lockdown
Autor/in:
Yildirim, T. Murat; Eslen-Ziya, Hande
Quelle: Gender Work Organ (Gender, Work & Organization), (2020)
Inhalt: That the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the work conditions of large segments of the society is in no doubt. A growing body of journalistic accounts raised the possibility that the lockdown caused by the pandemic affects women and men in different ways, due mostly to the traditionally gendered division of labor in the society. We attempt to test this oft-cited argument by conducting an original survey with nearly 200 academics. Specifically, we explore the extent to which the effect of the lockdown on child-care, housework and home-office environment varies across women and men. Our results show that a number of factors are associated with the effect of the lockdown on the work conditions of academics at home, including gender, having children, perceived threat from COVID-19, and satisfaction with work environment. We also show that having children disproportionately affects women in terms of the amount of housework during the lockdown.
Schlagwörter:academics; Arbeitsbedingungen; Arbeitsteilung; Befragung; child care; COVID-19; division of labor; gender inequality; Geschlechterungleichheit; Geschlechtervergleich; Hausarbeit; Kinderbetreuung; survey; Wissenschaftler; working condition
CEWS Kategorie:Vereinbarkeit Familie-Beruf, Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis
Subjectivation processes and gender in a neoliberal model of science in three Spanish research centres
Autor/in:
Vayreda, Agnès; Conesa, Ester; Revelles‐Benavente, Beatriz; González Ramos, Ana M.
Quelle: Gender Work Organ (Gender, Work & Organization), 26 (2019) 4, S 430–447
Inhalt: From a Foucauldian approach, neoliberal rationality in science can be understood as a form of governance of the self that produces mechanisms through which the subject is constructed and subordinated at the same time. In this study we examine subjectivation processes and gender in centres of research created under neoliberal scientific rationality. We analyse 19 semi‐structured interviews of men and women researchers conducted in three highly competitive centres of excellence — a context rarely addressed in the literature of academic subjectivities. Following a critical discourse analysis, we show how subjectivation processes of neoliberal rationality result in two main discursive mechanisms of subjection that prevent or hinder alternative subjectivities and collective resistance, especially for women, presenting a double turn that we call: a ‘turn on oneself’ and a ‘gendered turn on oneself’. We conclude that these centres are spaces which provide the conditions of possibility to develop a scientific entrepreneurial self, excluding ‘other’ scientific subjectivities and preventing possible resistances that could emerge from them.
Quelle: Gender Work Organ (Gender, Work & Organization), 46 (2019) 2, 411 S
Inhalt: 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.