Negotiating the different degrees of precarity in the UK academia during the Covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

This study explores how early career academics negotiate precarity in the higher education sector in the United Kingdom under the amplified uncertainties brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our preliminary findings based on the semi-structured interviews with nine early career academics (six women and three men) shed light on varying experiences of early career academic precarity with regard to working and life routines, and their participation in the job market. We argue that early career academics’ gender, employment status, and their university affiliations influence the degree to which they are able to instrumentalise and negotiate precarity during the pandemic in the UK.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• COVID-19
• higher education
• early career academics
• United Kingdom

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The Research Excellence Framework (REF) audits research quality at universities through nation-wide standardized indicators, such as quality of publications, (REF, 2020), which impact the funding received by the university, the ranking of the university, and its potential to recruit new students (Becher and Trowler, 2001: 10). Accordingly, being ‘REF-able’ indicates having enough publications to meet the requirements set by the REF (Murray 2018: 166).

2 This paper is a part of our on-going comparative research project exploring precarity in different academic contexts (at fee-based and publicly funded universities). So far, we have interviewed 15 early career academics across Europe, the UK, the USA and Canada.

3 Attendance of international students with Tier4 visas have to be documented (UK Government 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Canan Neşe Kınıkoğlu

Canan Neşe Kınıkoğlu is a lecturer at Istanbul Medeniyet University. She received her Ph.D. degree in sociology from the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include higher education, precarity, sociology of knowledge, nationalism, museums, and collective memory.

Aysegul Can

Aysegul Can is a lecturer at Istanbul Medeniyet University. She received her Ph.D. degree in urban studies from the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include precarity in higher education, academic knowledge production, gentrification, housing, and urban policy.