Feminist collaborations in higher education: stretched across career stages

ABSTRACT

Categorical career stages offer an institutional framework through which mobilities can be claimed and contested by feminists in academia. Inhabiting career stages uncritically can serve to reproduce neoliberal academic structures that feminists may seek to resist. Collaboration across career stages is a significant empirical case for understanding how feminists occupy academic space. We use auto-ethnographic methods to read career stages and feminist collaboration through each other, analysing the authors’ cross-career collaborations and mentoring relationship in a Scottish University. We ask how feminist collaboration can claim and disrupt the neoliberal temporal logics of competitively achieving individuals on upward career trajectories, where academic arrival can feel permanently deferred. As such we argue for more pluralised and fragmented understandings of ‘career stages’, which as fixed categories work to position academics as either precarious or privileged, and for a messier imaginary of academic work and careers.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• equality
• time
• women
• neoliberalism
• autoethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Maddie Breeze is Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of Education, University of Strathclyde. Previously she worked as a Lecturer in Public Sociology at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh and as a Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh.

Prof. Yvette Taylor is Professor of Education, and Research Director in the School of Education, University of Strathclyde. Yvette was previously (2011–2015) Head of the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University.

Notes

1 The AHRC’s (2017, 53) definition of ECR is within eight years of PhD award, or within six years of first academic appointment and these durations exclude career breaks. ‘First academic appointment’ is defined as the first paid full- or part-time employment contract, which lists research and/or teaching as primary functions.

2 The ESRC sub-divides ‘early career’ into three further ‘distinct stages’: ‘doctoral, immediately post-doctorate, [and] transition to independent researcher’ (ESRC 2017).

3 Such eligibility is often complicated by funders’ requirements that a candidate move institutions (e.g. Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships), countries (Marie Curie), or already be employed on an academic contract that will last the duration of the proposed project (e.g. Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grants) and the requirement that candidates identify a mentor at the host institution.

4 The ‘Chancellor’s Fellowship’ is a lecturer role which includes a contractual arrangement to achieve ‘fast track’ promotion to Senior Lecturer within five years of appointment.

5 The Early Career Feminist speaks in non-italic text, The Feminist Professor speaks in italic text.