Un/making academia: gendered precarities and personal lives in universities

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on universities explores how academics’ families and partners restrict their careers and how academic labour limits these relationships, both in highly gendered ways. Such research less often considers how people’s close relations might unevenly support them in continuously relocating; dedicating unpaid time to ‘career development’; or taking on or influencing them to remain in short-term, poorly paid precarious roles. This paper explores precariously employed post-PhDs in Australia, investigating their gendered careers and personal lives. Drawing on interviews at three public universities, it shows how women with children and partners in particular raise concerns over how their relationships and work interact. Here, certain kinds of workers – men and single women, unencumbered by family responsibilities and restrictions on travel, and with access to financial resources – appear better able to navigate moves to more secure work. This paper argues that support from close relations is productive and restrictive for precarious academics’ careers.

KEYWORDS:

• Social anthropology
• employment
• family
• women
• men
• qualitative interviews
• higher education
• Australasia and the Pacific rim

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lara McKenzie

Dr Lara McKenzie is a Research Fellow in Social Science at The University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on gender, age, kinship, and cultural change, as well as inequality and difference in education. This includes a recent study on experiences of looking for stable academic work.