‘From Bench to Stage’: How Life Scientists’ Leisure Groups Build Collective Self-Care

ABSTRACT

In today's research environments, scientists have to meet competitive demands in order to pursue a career successfully. Such demands are tangible including the need to move abroad, publish, or win third-party grants. Simultaneously, researchers experience an increasingly individualized and competitive work environment and a lack of collective working relationships. Many scientists in academia have difficulty coping with these demands. There is a need for spaces that allow scientists to cope with today's work life challenges. Two leisure groups on an Austrian science campus – a theatre and an orchestra group – are examples of spaces enabling practices to cope with the demands of academia. By acting and playing music, scientists can relate work and leisure. Through their participation, the scientists not only make room for leisure time in their work life but also construct a professional ideal of a creative and communally oriented scientist and establish a feeling of belonging to a place and its shared history. By aligning work and leisure outside of the laboratory, the leisure group members cope with their individualized and competitive work environment. Thereby, the scientists compensate for the lack of social and creative interaction and build a communally oriented, non-hierarchical, and a creative space in academia.

KEYWORDS:

• Academia
• leisure
• work life
• community
• care
• life sciences

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible first of all through the life scientists who generously agreed to talk to me and whom I shared invaluable moments of making music together. I thank the editors, Les Levidoff and Sharlissa Moore, for their helpful advises with the manuscript. I thank Sarah Davies, Christian Haddad, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner and Ruth Müller, who offered helpful thoughts and comments for this article; and Rosalind Attenborough who has helped to edit this article with lots of patience. I also thank Ulrike Felt for the supervision of the PhD project of which this article is a part and for sharing her invaluable comments when I first presented this work. Finally, I dedicate this article to two dear colleagues who shared their worlds with me: Christof Buchacher, who was the most talented piano player I know, and Karin Aistleitner, my dear friend who shared my passion for science.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Sarah Maria Schönbauer is a postdoc at the Munich Center for Technology in Society, TU Munich. Sarah received her doctorate from the Department for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. Her work focuses, among other things, on academic knowledge cultures in transition, identity work and subjectivation practices. She is currently investigating the social and political dimensions of the entry of microplastic particles into the environment.

Notes

1 In the empirical part, I rely on narrations of scientists, with one exception: in the third empirical section, I also draw on an interview with a former administration officer.

2 All quotes from the theatre show are quotes from a taped stage recording.

3 Note: the second violin usually has a supporting role, which, although highly appreciated internally, goes sometimes unnoticed in concerts (see Hackett, 1990).

Additional information

Funding

The writing phase for this article was supported by a Dissertation Completion Fellowship of the University of Vienna.