My best geographer’s dress: bodies, emotions and care in early-career academia

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we draw on our personal experiences with the perpetuating gender bias in (early-career) academia, more specifically within geography. We develop two main arguments. First, we argue that everyday academic practices stand in sharp contrast with the critical content geography, as a discipline, aims to study and teach – including its feminist, anti-colonial, and queer understandings. Strikingly, geography as a field does not seem able to apply its academic insights into its internal organization. Indeed, everyday academic practices within geography reproduce structural gendered inequalities. Consequently, geography reproduces the historical ‘maleness’ of the discipline, both in terms of who embodies it and through the methods and topics it focuses on. Second, we reflect on the strategies we develop to denounce and alter the unjust practices we are confronted with. Yet, these strategies reveal the double bind early career women face, as these very strategies may risk to undermine one’s own precarious position, or to give the skewed impression of reproducing the male, disembodied ideal we are fighting.

KEYWORDS:

• Geography
• gender
• emotions
• embodiedness
• international mobility
• early-career academia

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ruth Wauters for her constructive input and feedback in the early stages of this paper and Xhoana Ahmeti for her time and effort in proofreading our text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Valerie De Craene http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1820-3055

Anneleen Kenis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6106-6340

Notes

1 The gender action plan at KU Leuven, Belgium, states that 38.16% of assistant professors and 25.93% of full professors are women. Despite the ‘equal opportunities policy’ and a gradual increase in positions held by women (between 5% and 13% depending on departmental differences), the absolute number of positions beyond postdoctoral level still disproportionately go to men. (KU Leuven, Gender Action Plan 2014–2017).

2 We are conscious about our privileged position in this regard, and how such requirements are even more problematic for those without similar savings or support networks.

3 In the same email conversation, we also asked to make public the number of postdoctoral mandates which were awarded to respectively men and women. The vice-rector commented that ‘[M]ore postdoctoral mandates have been awarded to men, but this is because there were more applications by men.’ The fact that there was a significant disparity in the amount of applications by men versus those by women was not questioned.

4 Divya Tolia-Kelly (2017, 326) shares a similar story in her account of the everyday experiences of black female academics within geography. She exemplifies how students challenged the authority of the black female instructor in a class on the myth of race by googling for evidence while being in the lecture theatre.

5 As Divya Tolia-Kelly (2017) notes, also the ‘ethnicity’ of accent is often a source for discrimination and criticism. She sharply shows that white Irish, Australian, Canadian, and Scottish accents are not received in the same way, pointing to the intersections of ethnic accents and race.

6 This is for instance the case in many universities in European countries, e.g. in Belgium, the Netherlands and France.

7 We hereby allude to Esther Newton’s work ‘My best informant’s dress’ (1993).