Resisting the “academic circle jerk”: precarity and friendship at academic conferences in UK higher education

Abstract

Academic conferences have a central role in shaping career trajectories, reproducing or resisting exclusions and moulding relations in and to academia, thus shaping academic networks. In this paper, we consider how precarious academics subvert and navigate conference spaces, including emerging online forms. Particularly, we explore how academic conferences generate and nurture friendship as an enduring political practice that undermines neoliberal economic, political and social structures. This is contextualised in UK higher education amidst mass job losses, increased precarity and the subsequent breaking of academic bonds. In interviews with academics and our own auto/ethnographical experiences, we explore how friendship emerges in and resists the exclusions of the conference space for precarious researchers. Finally, we explore how the nurture of friendship by precarious scholars at academic conferences promotes collective action to resist neoliberalism within the academy.

Keywords:

• Academic conferences
• neoliberalism
• precarity
• friendship
• resistance
• UK higher education

Introduction

In 2019 and 2020, University staff undertook strike action in disputes over pensions, pay, and working conditions (Sharma 2019). The end of this strike action coincided with the beginning of the pandemic, which transformed our ways of working, socialising, and organising, with national lockdown measures introduced just days after academics left the pickets. However, during the pandemic, the UK higher education sector has demonstrated its commitment to ‘business-as-usual’ (Lybeck et al. 2020): marketisation, and its effects on the growing academic precariat, are here to stay.

In 2020, strike action was followed by an intense period of social, physical and professional isolation (Bannerjee and Rai 2020). For early career academics (ECAs), this was compounded on top of a loneliness that has already been described as an ‘epidemic’ in academia (Sibai et al. 2019). As we write, thousands of university workers have once again committed to industrial action over the same issues.

Opening a paper on conferences with a synopsis of industrial action in the UK might seem strange, but it was during the 2020 strikes, after a frosty morning on the pickets, that we led a ‘teach-out’ for striking staff and students on academic conferences. In the teach-out, we talked about academic conference spaces as microcosms of wider male, pale, and stale spaces of academia (Oliver and Morris, 2020). The supportive atmosphere was in stark contrast to the competitive streak often found in academic conference spaces. Afterwards, we wondered if, and how, it would be possible to emulate this in the normal activities of the university. We concluded that, potentially, the strike became a radical space of care, kindness and solidarity (Burton and Turbine 2018) in its direct challenge to the neoliberal university.

Bundled up in our strike layers, a few hundred yards from the university we’d met at years earlier, we speculated that perhaps this space was built on friendship: to one another, to strangers, and to colleagues across the country and world. These explorations sparked the ideas in this article which explores the sometimes affirmative, sometimes nefarious ways that friendship shapes academic conferences, and thus academia.

The paper is structured as follows. First, we introduce our two methods: interviews and reflective auto-methods. There is then a critical literature review in which we introduce our conceptualisations of conference spaces; “academic circle jerks”; and friendship. The literature review situates the paper across sociology and critical university studies and includes a discussion of our own friendship. Our empirical work is structured across four sections: (1) a reflection on academic friendships; (2) on navigating conferences; (3) on subverting conferences; and (4) on troubling friendships. We conclude the paper by summarising what our research might mean in the context of the changing landscape of academic conferences and make recommendations about how these spaces should be transformed.

Ultimately, this paper serves to demonstrate the multiple networks operating at conferences through a dual lens of friendship: those of powerful networks, for whom the conference is comfortable; and those of precarious and excluded scholars, for whom the conference is hostile. Crucially, we also consider how the friendships of early career academics morph into powerful networks as (some) people progress in their careers. In so doing, we make broader conclusions about how the “male, stale, and pale” university is reproduced at and from the conference, and suggest what might be done about it.

Methods

In this paper, we use two methods. First, we draw on 11 semi-structured interviews with people working in academia in 2018. The employment status, career stage, and identities of potential interviewees were considered in selecting our participants, to understand a diverse range of academic experiences at conferences. Participants were asked questions about: their experiences of conferences, how conferences were part of their career, how they built academic networks, and what they would change about conferences. The interviews were manually transcribed and coded by both authors. The initial codes were: (1) narratives of comfort or discomfort; (2) negative experiences; (3) positive experiences; (4) disciplining the body; (5) exclusion; and (6) preparing for the conference.

After the publication of our initial research, and during conversations such as those on the picket-line of 2020, we returned to these transcripts and coded them again around three further themes: (1) navigating conferences; (2) resistance at conferences; and (3) friendship and solidarity. It is these secondary themes that are discussed in this paper.

Our second method is auto-ethnography, critically reflecting on our experiences of academic conferences. Specifically, we share experiences in different conference spaces: from radical workshops to big, disciplinary conferences. This method is conversational and reflective, drawing on Arendt’s (1998) work on narrative, where ‘stories (or narratives) are living realities.’ Over the past five years, we have talked in person, over the phone, and over text about how our friendship has been vital to our surviving academic spaces. In this paper, we have adopted an auto-methods approach that takes these reflections and conversations and interweaves them with empirical interview quotes.

We see this paper as encompassing a patchwork of ideas (see Günel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020), conversations, formal interviews and experiences that have shaped our time in academia. As Moss and Besio (2019, 320-321) note:

our conversations about core tenets of auto-methods—experience, memory, and data as well as audience, truth, and voice—need to change [to] think more carefully about the relationship between the idiosyncratic ways we experience the world

Weaving together auto-methods with the accounts of others positions us as carefully considering if and how our reflections match up with others. As Ettore (2016, 2) highlights, auto-ethnography offers the ability to transform ‘personal stories into political realities by revealing power inequalities inherent in human relationships.’ When thinking both theoretically and methodologically about friendship, power inequalities and dynamics are vitally important, and ‘methodology is itself theory’ (Skeggs 1997, 17).

Friendships rely on loyalty and trust (Hey 2002) and, where ECAs are encouraged to be in competition, our friendship has always been for us a site for both joy and resistance. This friendship has an ethic ‘of hope, caring, justice, even love’ (Tillmann-Healy 2003, 735), which is conducive to emotional encounters and relations. Our friendship has been an important part of our work’s method and theory, and critical reflections on this are where ‘we solicit fears and concerns, listen closely and respond compassionately’ (ibid., 745).

Through both methods, we weave together narratives of the conference as a site where friendships are forged, but also tested and, sometimes, lead to exclusionary elite networks. In the next section, we contextualise each of these within sociological, education, and critical university studies literature on the networks and spaces of higher education.

How conferences (put to) work; or, the academic circle jerk

Academia has always been the domain of privileged elites; this did not begin with the marketisation of higher education since the 1980s. In the UK, many of Britain’s Prime Ministers have begun their secondary education at Eton, Harrow, or Winchester: three of the most expensive private schools in the country, often before attending Oxford or Cambridge University, making a smooth transition to power (Walker 2019). In 2019, Boris Johnson became the 19th Prime Minister to follow this trajectory, with the majority of his Cabinet having similar paths (Harris 2021). It was only in 1920 that Oxford allowed women to take degrees, whilst Cambridge adopted this policy in 1948 (Oxford Royale Academy 2021), demonstrating how not just elitism, but structural exclusion is embedded into these institutions (Harris 2021)

The character of the neoliberal university over the past four decades has produced specific relations, power dynamics, and structures that are worthy of consideration as a distinct era of higher education (Tight 2019). Notably here, this has seen the co-opting of narratives of justice and activism into agendas of equality and impact (Phipps 2017).

Within these agendas, the conference becomes a marketplace in which to “sell” ideas and meet performance indicators, contextualising our work on conferences within the neoliberal policy agendas affecting higher education in the UK since 1979 (Hartung et al., 2017b). While our empirics and experiences reflect British higher education, they will be replicated in marketised higher education sectors in other national contexts and, to the extent that conferences can be seen as international (see Fregonese 2017), at conferences across the world.

In this section, we situate the conference within the neoliberal university, arguing that it produces academics as entrepreneurs, who must sell themselves and their research.

Conceptualising the conference & precarity

​​The academic conference serves multiple purposes, as a site for keeping up with disciplinary conversations, sharing research, and networking. While the latter is sometimes seen as secondary, it is actually a vital aspect of academic recruitment, professional identity-forming, and learning the rules of academia (Nicolson 2016). At conferences, there are two kinds of “network”: the first being powerful, already established, and secure (or tenured) academics; and the second being precarious academics for whom the conference is at once a stage for performing their academic “entrepreneurship” (Mountford 2014) in the search for job security, and a space that deliberately pushes them out. The former is what we call an “academic circle jerk,” through which academics create elitist networks of citation and collaboration (Mott and Cockayne 2017) which ultimately lead to the embedding of precarity (Fernandes et al. 2020).

The academic precariat has been defined as ‘politically, socially and economically ‘dangerous’, resulting in anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation … [are] those precariously positioned within the academy’ (Hartung et al. 2017a, 43). Members of the academic precariat are faced with under-employment and insecurity as a result of market-driven university policies and practices, cutting across career stages. This is directly related to the neoliberalisation of higher education, not least through what Bruila and Valero (2018, 74) identify as ‘neoliberal governing generat[ing] the effect of anxiety as a socially manufactured intensity connected to precarity.’

In this paper, we focus specifically on precarious early career academics (ECA), a term ‘variously defined by universities, funders, and government bodies [but] which is effectively a definition based on relative ‘newness’’ (Nicholas et al. 2019, 237). Being an ECA is defined in relation to the neoliberal higher education sector (Courtois and O’Keefe 2015), and can often be self-defined (Bosanquet et al. 2017). While the academic precariat and ECAs overlap, they are distinct groups within the academy.

In the conference space, precarity feeds into how easily the space and networks can be entered and navigated, often coupled with other exclusions, as outlined in the following section, to produce a space unequally accessible and experienced.

Diversity & exclusion at the neoliberal conference

No conference is open to everyone. Between travel, visas, costs for in-person conferences, and the problems of internet access or accessibility for neurodivergent people online, conferences are always exclusive. They are also, usually, contained to the academic community. Whilst being some way off being a “mega-event” (Muller 2015), academic conferences can bring similar problems to their host cities, excluding local communities (see Koster, Baccar, and Lemelin 2012), and adding to global emissions (Bonnett 2006).

Inside the conference, things often don’t look much better. Phipps (2017, 357) argues that the neoliberal university ‘suppresses the capacities required’ to create safe spaces for marginalised staff and students. At conferences, where the daily norms and rules of the workplace are often suspended, this lack of ‘safe space’ is heightened. With individuals competing for audiences, engagement, and the expansion of their networks (as well as, sometimes, quite literal financial or esteem-marker prizes), the conference has become not just a microcosm of the neoliberal university, but the literal manifestation of the marketplace of ideas.

Conferences have long been important events for academic communities. These are the spaces where, in theory, research is disseminated, connections made, and the boundaries of knowledge reconfigured. However, as Taylor and Lahad (2018, 2) note, the conference changes for the worse ‘when neoliberal policies are fused with the growing interventions from right wing, nationalist political leaders,’ meaning that ‘many scholars are subject to travel bans, others are forced to resign, and students are expelled and detained.’

Breeze, Taylor, and Costa (2019, 95) recently contended that ‘diversity is co-opted by power and institutions as a way of managing conflict and containing dissent.’ At the conference, ‘institutional preferences for the term “diversity’’ can indicate a lack of commitment to change allow[ing] universities to conceal the operation of systematic inequalities’ (Palmer 2016, 20). The academic conference space can be understood as both a microcosm of the neoliberal university, and the site of an event at which belonging is bounded.

In this paper, we further our previous work by turning to the multi-layered, and contradictory, friendship networks that shape and produce the conference space. Before doing so, however, we next outline how, exactly, conferences are exclusionary.

Conferences: producing networks of power

The academic conference is not experienced homogeneously. Academic conferences are usually thought of as extraneous to the everyday work of the university, becoming a stage for the performance of academic identities (Craggs and Mahony 2014). The university has long centred around white-ness and masculinity as the ‘norm,’ creating a space hostile to “outsiders” (Puwar 2004), with material impacts on marginalized scholars. For many, the academic conference is a site of anxiety that requires knowing how to ‘talk the talk’ (Addison, Victoria, and Mountford 2015), or risk being made even more “outsider.” In this section, we connect recent work on conferences and performances of ‘academics’ with (the re)production of networks of power.

Conferences demand heavily gendered and racialized academic performances, putting demands upon people to become fluent in rules and norms that reproduce the university (Bisaillon and Eakin 2014). Academic “outsiders” (Puwar 2004) are expected to re-mould themselves to “fit” in these spaces, or at least to blend into the milieu (Gannon, Powell, and Power 2018). Particularly contentious for many academics is the pressure to network intensively as a measure of success, where networking is touted as essential to career progression. For secure academics, maintaining a social network in academia can ‘support career success and work at the frontiers of academic knowledge’ (Storme et al. 2017, 405). When precariously employed, strong networks are seen as vital for scoring another position, producing the conference as an anxious space, much like Todd (2020) has elaborated in relation to fieldwork.

The neoliberal nature of contemporary higher education demands that ECAs prioritise self-progression over forming relationships with peers (Brechelmacher et al. 2015), entrenching academic hierarchies with elite networks at the top, and atomised ECAs at the bottom. The conference reflects and enhances the exclusions of the neoliberal academy, especially for ECAs and precarious scholars. This reproduction of the academic hierarchy is both implicitly and explicitly reproduced by senior scholars in something akin to an “academic circle jerk,” as we discuss in the following section.

Academic circle jerks

In 2020, a meme circulated on academic Twitter, showing four watering cans in a circle, filled with water so that each poured into the next in an ‘infinite loop’ (@pickover, 2020^[ii]) with a caption to the effect of “academic bros’ citational practice” (paraphrased, unknown credit). The meme illustrated the exclusivity of academia makes a serious point: success in academia relies on already knowing and networking with the “right” people (Deem and Brehony 2000).

The tweet, while playfully making fun of the practices of elite networks, tapped into something very real and damaging in academia: that networks and status are not neutral (Mott and Cockayne 2017), nor is academia a meritocracy. There is an insularity to citations, invitations, and opportunities in academia, producing disciplinary groupings that affect new and emerging scholars far more than senior academics. The lack of time - and, in some cases, willing - to seek out and promote the work of new scholars is, again, not divorced from the wider problems of neoliberal academia.

Thinking about the production and maintenance of academic networks, our minds wandered to a potentially unpleasant, and sticky (Ahmed 2004), comparison: the circle jerk. Here, an “academic circle jerk” refers to groups of (senior) academics who mutually reinforce one another’s opinions, reputations, and ideas taken from the more literal meaning of male group masturbation. The “academic circle jerk” is a widely recognised problem, usually talked about as “cliques,” with material consequences for whose work gets funded, whose papers are cited, and who can successfully - and easily - perform the ideal neoliberal academic archetype, progressing up the ranks of the academic hierarchy (see Ivancheva et al. 2019). We move away from the clique and to the concept of the circle jerk because of its metaphorical power in attending to the self-congratulatory tendencies of these groups, their usual make-up, and the mess that they make.

However, the conference space is not all-encompassing. Precarious scholars resist narratives that demand they work to reproduce neoliberal ideologies at conferences, particularly through developing and nurturing friendships with their peers. In the next section, we draw on auto-methods to theorise academic friendship.

Academic friendships: a reflection

In the neoliberal university, ECAs are pressured to research and teach in precarious working conditions. Success is often credited to hard-work and talent alone, despite luck, inherited wealth, and/or closeness to the “circle jerk” playing a large factor in securing positions (Ivancheva 2015; Res-Sisters 2017). Individuals are expected to sacrifice themselves (Webster and Boyd 2019, 45) and, consequently, the neoliberal academy promotes the image of an ideal academic who is ‘ready to devote an entire life to work, even in precarious times’ (Consea 2018). In this section, we draw on auto-methods to reflect on our own experiences to demonstrate the resistant power of friendship in the neoliberal academy.

We argue that friendship has the potential to undermine the dominance of neo-liberal economic, political, and social structures, and build trust (May 2012). However, in academia, friendship is a ‘surprisingly difficult concept to pin down’ (Webster and Boyd 2019, 46). While there are many asymmetrical relationships in the university, academic peer friendships blur the line between personal and professional. This makes them essential relationships for escaping the academic hierarchy and building peer solidarities, as reflected upon in our own friendship in a two-part vignette.

Vignette 1a: Reflecting on our friendship

We met in the first year of our PhDs, when we were both employed to teach on a field trip to Berlin, and quickly crossed over from colleagues to friends. We bonded over our shared humour, and our shared experiences in the academy: both of us were“young,” precariously employed, and engaged in constant battles with the University. We also both had mental health issues exacerbated by the isolation of doing a PhD and were frustrated by the institutional injustices we had encountered.

We often met in cafes, swapping stories about our experiences of the university, blossoming into a friendship. Whenever we struggled with the pressure and precarity of our jobs, we would meet up or ring each other, as we continue to do today. It was comforting to have someone else “in the same boat,” who we could turn to when we felt overwhelmed, both in the midst of the PhD and in our roles afterwards. The bond created from experiencing a PhD in the neoliberal institution is striking.

Existing in neoliberal institutions and society as an ‘outsider’ is exhausting work that demands constant awareness (Hall and Fine 2005). Ahmed (2014, np) writes that self-care ‘is warfare on the neoliberal academy,’ noting that ‘in directing our care towards ourselves, we are redirecting care away from its proper objects, we are not caring for those we are supposed to care for; we are not caring for the bodies or institutional tasks and responsibilities deemed worth caring about.’ Friendship is a space to reflect on and process academic violence, and to counteract them with care.

Vignette 1b: Friendship in the face of hostility

During our PhDs, one of us experienced bullying and harassment by senior male academics, and we both bore witness to the failings of departments and universities to protect us. This experience caused lasting damage to our sense of belonging, safety, and trust in colleagues, as well as anxiety at entering new workplaces causing and exacerbating mental and physical health conditions. Our friendship, support, and care was nothing short of life-saving in the face of institutional failures (Ahmed 2021).

We also experienced hostile encounters resulting from doing research that is deemed ‘un-REFable,’ as it critically explores issues of gender, race, disability. When starting as an enthusiastic postdoc, one of us presented our newly published book to the department. At the end of the talk, questions from colleagues felt derisive, delivered with a smirk. Leaving the experience hot with shame, the thought of it still brings up those emotions, alongside the desire to never talk about the book again.

These experiences, and others, led us to question whether things had really happened the way we had felt them, or if we were overly emotional or sensitive, comments often used to disparage women and femme academics. Speaking over these experiences with friends, shared anger made these experiences less isolating.

Friendship can be a form of care, here being ‘assembled out of experiences of being shattered, humiliated, bullied, and demoralized in the academy’ (Juergensmeyer, Nocella, and Seis 2020, 180). In this paper, we conceptualise these friendships as modes of subversion and resistance to the neoliberal academy. In prioritising friendship, there is a ‘collective action to resist neoliberal and elitist pressures from within the academy’ (Mountz et al. 2015, 1239). As Kaeppel, Grenier, and Björngard-Basayne (2020, 373) write ‘the bond of friendship also counters the effects of marginalization, allowing women to resist internalizing notions of inferiority,’ and these workplace friendships can push back against hyperindividualism.

Sociological research has shown the importance of friendship in the workplace (Rumens 2010), and the role of solidarity in surviving academic workplaces specifically (Macoun and Miller 2014). Bringing these two bodies of work together at the academic conference, friendship can be an essential mode of navigation and survival. However, it can also be a mode of exclusion, depending on its deployment, boundaries, and the power dynamics involved (Rumens 2010).

Over the next three sections of the paper, we share empirical research from our interviews and that compliments the sociological theory and ideas in this section. In doing so, we discuss conference friendships as: (1) networks for navigating hostile spaces; (2) friendships as subversion; and (3) friendships (of the powerful) as producing academic circle jerks.

Conference friendships: Networks, resistance & trouble

Navigating conferences

In this first empirical section, we begin with an auto-ethnographic vignette on our experiences as PhD students and ECAs, reflecting on how we felt invisible in our departments and how this led to feelings of isolation in conferences. Then, we bring in interviews to our critical reflections, illustrating the exclusion of precarious academics.

Vignette 2: Academic ghosts

PhD students and ECAs exist in a liminal space in academia: never fully integrated or belonging to the department and viewed as a transient population, whose contracts will see them leave in just a few years. Whilst they have a desk and a computer in the department office, they often have to pick up multiple jobs across institutions and outside of academia. This patchwork of incomes coupled with the lack of institutional support leaves ECAs feeling isolated, on the outskirts of academia (Fazackerley 2013).

When completing our PhDs, we jokingly referred to ourselves as “department ghosts.” Despite feeling invisible, we kept a lot of cogs turning. We both took on the work of more senior academics, without recognition. This was unpaid labour that was either a favour, promised to further our careers in the long-run, or work that we should be paid for, but weren’t. When teaching, we wrote whole modules which were then handed over to the university without credit. At conferences, this invisibility increased; not only were our colleagues ignoring us, so was everybody else. For example, we’d present work we’d spent weeks polishing to empty rooms in the basement of conference venues.

Our early experiences of conferences were as hostile spaces where not only were we not welcomed, but we felt actively ignored and separate from the “real” spaces of the conference. This strengthened our feelings of discomfort in our day jobs; the conference wasn’t an escape from the university but a reproduction of it. At conferences, ECAs are expected to attend and present in order to bolster their CV. ECAs have to network and collaborate with similar researchers (Malloy 2020) and whilst some institutions are willing to fund this expense, this is often done through academics paying upfront and awaiting reimbursement, producing yet more anxiety for the academic precariat. For Amy, an early career researcher, the conference was for making ends meet to tick a box on her CV:

Typically, I have to find some way of funding my conference fees, at the very least. With bigger conferences, I have worked there to cover my fees, which meant waking up very early, skipping breakfast, and missing the first session. This covered my fees but I still have to come up with £200-300 for travel and hotels, which means taking on more work at my second and third jobs.

When Amy is at conferences, she is also a service worker. This means her time is taken up by work, in order to attend: time that she can’t use to network, engage with research, or be part of the conference. This has long term effects on her ability to accrue cultural capital and adopt the expected academic habitus (Gaddis 2013). PhD students and postdoctoral scholars already navigate the conference as less-than full members of the academic community: denizens in the neoliberal university, always at risk of ejection.

As Amy’s experience shows, aspiring academics are expected, if not implicitly required, to make sacrifices to financially invest in their careers, further solidifying the academic project as an entrepreneurial one in the ‘everyday neoliberalism’ of the university (Mirowski 2013). For the academic precariat, especially those employed on precarious contracts, their own research is often unfunded and forced into the background, impacting their chances of escaping precarity in a sector where research is king (although by no means a guarantee of secure work, Weisshaar 2017).

At the conference, social hierarchies informed by financial and cultural barriers are important to navigating the conference. The inequities in accessing and navigating conferences play out saliently in the “extra-academic” spaces of the conference, such as dinner. One interviewee, Sandra, emphasised how she felt left in the ‘wilderness’ of academia at conferences:

I know how important conferences are. I get it, you have to get out there. But the experience is not always great, it is very lonely and isolating. There are a lot of cliques. There aren’t many spaces for your newly, up and coming academic careers. I think they are accessible in the fact that you can attend, but once you attend, there is a way that the conference makes you feel because of who you are and because of your intersections. It’s not always a pleasant feeling.

While Sandra’s experiences clearly also speaks to later discussions on the “academic circle jerk,” the feeling of being in the wilderness that she shares here relates to being an interloper entering ‘a field [and] the rules and values of which are upheld by those already present, who consider themselves its rightful members’ (Johansson and Jones 2019, 1531). Entering with a different habitus, Sandra ‘experiences a jolt’ (ibid).

Financial, social and cultural capital and status have long determined who has access to the university, before its current neoliberal formation. However, today, despite access and diversity agendas, there is little more than a surface level push to transform the sector (Phipps 2017). Indeed, in its neoliberal form, the university individualises the sense of failure rather than identifying its integrity to academia (Horton 2020; Davies et al. 2021). The loneliness that Sandra describes stems from the failings of diversity agendas, and the conference space exacerbates these pre-existing tensions in its cut-throat atmosphere.

Abrahams and Ingram (2013) draw attention to the ‘chameleon habitus’ of the dual lives of working-class students, and this ability or expectation that academics can ‘switch’ between selves persists into academic careers, leading to isolation in navigating these spaces and in some cases to active disgust:

I find the sucking up and the brown nosing to be quite sad and degrading. I tend to go outside and smoke a cigarette or have some beers with my own peer group instead of trying to network with higher ups in order to muscle in or find a job. Frankly, I find that sort of stuff disgusting.

Teaching fellow John’s disgust at conference networking was not uncommon in our interviews, although John was the most direct. This rejection of networking might be read as a rejection and a refusal to engage in the neoliberal demands of the conference space. John went on to say that he’d rather build connections outside of the conference space, and spend his time catching up with people outside of the conference. While there is a push for academics to network at conferences, to meet like-minded researchers and form connections across universities, the end-goal of networking often to secure favour with senior staff and seek out individual opportunities.

The conference creates an extraordinary confined academic community who are bound by a disciplinary belonging; this space is subject to gatekeeping, not least in the need to pre-register and pay expensive fees to be a participant. Thus, organisers can determine who can enter the space, but not whether they will be ‘welcomed.’ Being welcomed to the conference space relies on already knowing the ‘right’ people (Deem and Brehony 2005). As May (2012, 108) points out, ‘neoliberal relationships are economic ones’ and are ‘centred on consumption and investment,’ and networking views people as tools for climbing the academic ladder. Sandra, Amy, and John’s experience of navigating conferences, as well as our own, affirms the building of neoliberal relationships as economic ones, and our everyday affects (Anderson 2016) of discomfort, disgust, and dis-belonging are entangled with the neoliberal landscape of academia.

In this section, we have explored some of the distasteful affects and exclusionary experiences that the academic precariat have faced at conferences, all whilst implicitly being required to be there to try and build a future for themselves, financially and academically. The conference is a space for furthering one’s career, and they reproduce disciplinary inequality and hierarchies.

Borrowing from Charles Wright Mills’ “promise” of sociology to understand individuals within wider contexts (1959), the “promise” of the conference is one that has appeared as muddledand illusory through these interviews. In the next section, we turn to, perhaps, more hopeful spaces of subversion and solidarity at the conference for the academic precariat.

Subverting conferences

The neoliberal pressures and ideologies that permeate academia are heightened at conferences, and academics are pressured to utilise the conference to their advantage. For precarious and early career academics, this can feel like a “make or break” event, putting pressure on engaging intellectually, trying to belong, and presenting as “good” academics. In a sector where professors are less likely to mentor female and minority students (Milkman, Modupe, and Dolly 2015) and a now-redacted study declared that ECAs are likely to see a detriment when mentored by women (AlShebli, Kinga, and Talal 2020), these networks are clearly not working.

In the previous section, we explored the emotional and social experiences of those who feel out of place in conferences; in this part, we turn to look at the strategies people use to survive conferences, particularly through narratives of friendship that push back against hierarchical relationships and instead forge peer solidarities. Amy told us that the presence of friends in a similar conference circuit is ‘a relief’ as it lessens feelings of isolation:

I have some good friends in the same conference circuit as me, so that is a relief. I have entirely left conferences before just to walk over lunch as I don’t want to stick out as being alone. Unless I genuinely want to talk to someone, I find it difficult to force conversations, and exhausting.

Academic conferences put demands on “outsider” scholars. Counterbalancing this, ‘peer networks may offer critical political resources for responding to the ways that women’s bodies and concerns are marginalised in increasingly competitive and corporatized university environments’ (Macoun and Miller 2014, 287). By valuing friendships that aren’t about career progression, there can be space at conferences to exceed, overflow, and directly challenge the hierarchies and structures formalised by the university to help career progress. For example, teaching fellow Paul told us:

I think it’s important to network and meet people who aren’t at your institution. It can provide bits and pieces of support from elsewhere. I have quite a nice “network” of people who are in similar positions to me. A lot of us have taken on teaching contracts and it’s nice to know your institution is not the worst place in the world.

For Paul, the idea of ‘networking’ has been subverted from its neoliberal tendencies to get ahead, instead serving as a space acting against the neoliberal landscape (Rumens 2010). Friendship’s relational context and “safe” space can challenge neoliberal workplaces through their non-economic qualities, ‘condition[ing] the possibility for a politics of solidarity against the incursions of neoliberalism in everyday life’ (Rumens 2010, 1161). Friendships also create possibilities for people to reflect together on their social, political, and economic lives (Andrew and Montague 1998). For the academic precariat, friendships are important knowledge-sharing and support communities for often overworked, underpaid, and insecure workers. This also act as ‘whisper networks; small groups of trusted colleagues from similarly marginalized communities with whom we can share struggles, strategies, and victories’ (Jiménez and Hermann-Wilmarth 2020, 330).

Where ECAs are often atomised, conferences can become the place where their academic identity is solidified. These networks often sustain beyond the space of the conference itself, allowing for perspectives to be shared from different institutions revealing not only sector-wide problems, but also being a forum for support and also providing warnings around potential abusers and unsafe workplaces (Anitha, Marine, and Lewis 2020). Talking to another PhD student, Lucy, it becomes clear that the possibility for developing “safe” friendships depends on the ethics and politics of the conference itself:

The Queer and Feminist conference was really great. Very friendly atmosphere and none of the horrible, academic nonsense you have to experience at other conferences. There was none of the bullshit of networking, it was just chatting to people about their interests and enjoying other presentations

As Lucy recognises, some conferences focus on building relationships based on shared interests and advancing knowledge, which big ‘international’ disciplinary conferences can lack, as Sandra and John’s experiences in the previous section exemplified. The authors have both attended the Queer and Feminist conference that Lucy is referring to and also felt a relaxed atmosphere, compared to other experiences. The nature of queer and some feminist scholarship is to deconstruct gender binaries and to critically think about social structures and inequalities (Butler 1990; Valocchi 2005). In this case, the organisers infused this ethic into the conference space, allowing for genuine interest and connection to flourish.

In this section, we have recounted examples from ECAs about how the power hierarchies at conferences can be subverted and produce solidarity through friendships. However, thes ECA networks are not inherently or always “good.” Much like the networks they are subverting, these groups can be explicitly and implicitly exclusionary. Notably, once these friendship groups have formed, they can take up and overflow spaces, intimidating those who have attended alone. As Sandra shared,

I went to an Equality and Diversity meeting in this conference and it was just full of white academics, male and female, talking about diversity. I was like: I’m the only Person of Colour in the whole conference, how are we talking about diversity? I was very aware of my body, my existence, my skin complexion. When it came to lunch time, nobody came to talk to me. I felt so awkward. I got my stuff and I left.

Morimoto and Yang (2013) have found ECA friendship groups can often be gender and race based exclusionary friendship networks, with implications for the reproduction of racial and gender hierarchies in the sociological discipline, but also for incredibly isolating experiences. It is thus vital to note that ECA friendships, whilst subverting the conference space, are not necessarily neutral or inclusive networks. Talking to Sarah, this explicitly exclusive side of friendship networks, and how they reproduce inequities in academia, started to evidence how subversive networks can transcend into a burgeoning circle jerk of power.

There are things like really strong friendships that I managed to forge through social events [at conferences], across fields that I would never have expected. I feel like I’ve been able to bring people together a little bit more.

Sarah’s prioritisation of friends ‘across fields’ suggests she is less concerned with using the conference as a space to further her own career, and more interested in building friendships. However, she also told us that her supervisor is often ‘surprised’ that she is always in the know about new publications and job opportunities:

Nowadays, my supervisor, who is socially awkward is like, “have you heard about this?” And I’m like yeah, she messaged me the other day, and he’s like “how do you get to talk to these people?”

Sarah believes that if opportunities come to her through her networks of friends, this is a happy coincidence rather than an emerging space of exclusion. This, perhaps, points to how ‘academic circle jerks’ can emerge as well-intentioned means of surviving the alienating space of the academy. In the following section, we continue to exemplify the making of academic circle jerks at conferences, and attend to their effects on the academic precariat.

Troubling friendships: the academic circle jerk

In the previous two sections, we have looked at how precarious ECAs navigate the conference space, and how they build friendships as a subversion of this space that can survive beyond it. Now, we turn to consider friendships of the elite: the “academic circle jerk.” First, we look at how ECAs come up against the circle jerk, creating anxious and isolating experiences. Then, we draw on accounts from those who could be considered at the top of their field, which muddy stable or simple narratives of power hierarchies. Again, as Jenna (ECA) tells us, the academic circle jerk is most powerful not in the structured, organised sessions at conferences, but at less formal networking spaces:

You want to go to the dinner, but you have nobody to go to the dinner with. There are people from my university going, but they are academics, they are senior lecturers, they don’t reach out. There is no responsibility to take us under their arms. If you’ve got your clique, you are OK, but if you don’t have that then you are alone.

Jenna’s experiences show how the conference is always entangled with the everyday exclusions of the workplace: the emotional and social isolation imposed by her senior colleagues not inviting her produces anxiety (Todd 2020), signalling that she isn’t really considered a colleague. This disparity in social capital between junior and senior members of staff means ECAs are often left to ‘work out’ the conference for themselves. John, a teaching fellow, echoes Jenna:

I’ve not really enjoyed the conferences that I have attended. I find it quite difficult for early career researchers to be taken seriously or listened to in these conferences. They tend to be built around networks of academics who know each other very well. The higher academics tend to stick to themselves and academic hierarchies are in full effect.

The conference is not a neutral space. They are dominated by elitist networks that exclude ECAs from conference milieux, and thus the academic community. This taps into existing insecurities produced in the neoliberal academic workplace (Brunila and Valero 2018). While some of these academic networks undoubtedly are maliciously exclusive, our conversations with two senior scholars revealed a more complex situation, similarly imbued with personal anxieties and insecurities. Thomas, a Professor, reflected on how these social spaces and networks have transformed for him over the course of his career:

The social spaces are more difficult. I remember what it was like approaching people in the field who were professors. When you sit on my side, you think what was all the fuss about, why are people nervous? It is this weird neoliberal culture of competition and achievement in academia where there is almost a cult status, not saying around myself, around certain academics which comes with its own set of problems as well.

Thomas’ reading of the conference space speaks of the friendship networks between senior scholars that have emerged from feeling ‘outside’ at the beginning of their careers. Thomas recalled his first conference talk being in a basement with little to no audience, and that now he uses conferences to catch up with the friends from across his career, notably those from his early years which, he says:

I know is problematic, and I wouldn’t the only one who does it, which means that for new academics it can be quite an exclusionary space.

Thomas’ reflections entangle a sense of being disconnected from the neoliberal culture of competition, recognising his power, yet not actively changing his behaviour or challenging the individualist culture in which he has succeeded. Whilst in and of itself, one person’s exclusionary group is brushed off as old friends catching up, these actually are producing power networks that exclude those who don’t belong.

Darder (2012, 414) has noted that graduate school is ‘where future academics and public intellectuals are initiated into careerist orientations that alienate them not only from one another and from the world, but also from the critical foundations necessary for the construction of democratizing knowledge.’ The academic conference is where people are ‘initiated as tenuous agents of the neoliberal academy…conditioned into a culture of antidemocratic values’ (ibid) whilst simultaneously being infantilized, producing good neoliberal academic subjects.

Thomas also noted that there are ‘cult status’ figures in academia, but exclusions of the conference are far more commonplace than a powerful minority. Senior lecturer Natasha reflected on their own changing position in confronting academic hierarchies since being an ECA:

I remember my first few conferences being terrified. I’d keep going to the toilet for something to do because I felt like I had to look like I was doing something. Everybody else looks like they are flying around everywhere. Now I get it, because now I go and just don’t have a second to myself. But when you’re starting out, it’s really difficult. I try and remember that, so with my students or postdocs, I involve them in those discussions and they get to build their own networks of people.

Natasha, like Thomas, was aware of the problems at the conference and is trying to actively unpick them by introducing her own students to her friends. As a self-declared “introvert,” Natasha finds conference spaces difficult, and recognises how she participates in producing a neoliberal atmosphere of “being busy” at work (Graeber 2018). However, it is vital that we ask: is this response to the exclusions of the academic conference sufficient, or does it merely reproduce intergenerational networks of power, where the inner circle opens only to those with a connection?

As supervisors and mentors, facilitating access to networks is part of the duty of senior scholars, even if it is one that they dislike or find challenging. Van Rooij et al. (2021) recently found that a ‘good match’ between supervisor and student is vital to PhD and career success, providing invaluable connections in addition to training. With many lacking this support, or worse, the conference should operate as an alternate mode of networking with both peers and senior colleagues. However, without the dedication of senior academics to end the academic circle jerk, and the support of conference organisers in breaking them up, there is little hope of change.

Before our concluding remarks, we note that while the actions of individuals to resist the academic circle jerk are vital, it is not the responsibility of individual senior scholars alone to transform these spaces. Not least, this is because undoubtedly this “service” labour will not be equally divided along race and gender lines (see Miller and Roksa 2020). Individualising this problem rolls into the neoliberal architecture of the university that is producing atomised academic subjects, in competition with one another.

In the conclusion, we contend that understanding the multiplicity of friendships and networks producing the conference space is vital to resisting and transforming them.

Conclusions

While our research and reflections focus on conferences beyond the pandemic, it is vital to note how this time has reproduced academic circle jerks. National lockdowns, border closures, and social distancing, as well as the pressures of online teaching, have led to drastic changes in our working lives. The gendered impact of the pandemic has seen heightened caring responsibilities and early data suggests publication rates have lowered for women (Viglione 2020). During the pandemic, the adoption of online conferencing space has emerged as a potentially ‘accessible, international, affordable, and sustainable’ (Oliver, 2020) supplement to in-person research conferences, with the future of conferences looking increasingly hybrid.

As recently as 2018, when we undertook interviews, only one academic we spoke to had attended an online conference. The relative ‘ease’ of the online space to host large-scale events has led to a noticeable increase in keynotes and lectures from elite academics that might otherwise have been impossible to organise, but distinctly fewer opportunities for ECAs to achieve the benefits of in-person conferences. With Zoom fatigue and burnout rife, the valorisation or, as Professor Thomas called it, ‘cult status’ professors appear to have solidified their status, while precarious ECAs have lost their jobs, access, and opportunities.

As we showed in our empirical section, “subverting conferences,” traditional academic conferences can be vital sites for surviving the university (Macoun and Miller 2014). While online conferences have found a way to reproduce presenting and the Q&A, the informal sites of the conference that produce solidarities and networks are yet to be reproduced. This atomisation of ECAs has been expedited this year, but in a precarious sector, the possible longevity of friendships and solidarities is determined by whether ECAs can secure permanent employment. This has potentially transformative effects for those who can afford – financially and psychologically – to commit to an academic career, and thus shaping the future of “academic circle jerks.”

In the neoliberal academy, the nurturing of friendship by precarious scholars can be understood not only as a means of survival but promoting collective resistance to elitism. Where neoliberal institutions increasingly rely upon and promote precarious employment as a desirable model for academic labour, these friendships are often haunted by the knowledge that most ECAs will not have the opportunity to pursue long-term academic careers. What is perhaps most politically necessary in the neoliberal university is for securely employed, and especially senior, academics to reflect accurately and honestly on how they are pulling the ladder up after them. This also requires us to accept that our friendships can easily become exclusionary cliques as power dynamics shift as ECAs move up the academic hierarchy, and work to undo and open space to others.

The burden of social labour should not fall to ECAs trying to break into conversations at conferences, but on organisers and senior academics to create welcoming spaces of serious debate and honest conversation. To do this, organisers are responsible for looking outside of their own networks, and to be engaged with and learning about emerging scholars who, given the precariousness of the sector, might not be at conferences the following year.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants in our interviews, as well as one another for the many years of friendship throughout and beyond our university lives. In addition, we would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Rachel Handforth, Ben Bowman and especially Sarah Burton for their support and inclusion of our work, and all of the academics who generously spoke to us for interviews. We would also like to thank all the attendees and organisers of the teach-out we ran in 2019, and the organisers at Birmingham UCU for hosting us.

Funding

There is no funding attached to this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.