Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Occupying academia: Stretching the meaning of ‘career’ by Yvette Taylor

SOCIAL THEORY APPLIED - May 6, 2016

At a recent Early Career BSA forum, organized by Dr Rachel Thwaites and Dr Amy Pressland, titled Early Career Academics’ Experiences of the Academy, the Saturday morning audience paused on some collective concerns, signs of hope, and shared understandings of the complexity of inhabiting academia in a particular time.  How to keep things constructive and positive in the educational climates we find ourselves in? To enable rather than dissuade even as ‘early career’ is ever extended across the career trajectory which means some never ‘arrive’?
I wasn’t speaking as a current ‘early career’ academic, although the stretch of that as up to 10 years post PhD is itself something to dwell on, as are the (dis)connections between, for example, early-mid-established career status. When I completed my PhD the category – and abbreviation – of ECR was rather unheard of, while of course there were always post-docs setting out at the beginning of their careers (and always vulnerable, impermanent academic workers, and those doing ‘jobs’ rather than thinking about ‘careers’). I have of course inhabited ECR status and have been that research assistant (and that teaching assistant) on a temporary contract: this feels important to say in recognizing these as constructed and changing categories, used to name and do different things (and to arguably mobilize around, or even feel an entitlement through…). In academic presentations across the career-stage, we are endlessly displaying and building our own value, with presence and permanence apparently announcing an arrival (even as we ask ourselves ‘what next?’, moving from ‘early’ to ‘mid’ to ‘established’ career). But it’s also important to recognize the past-presence-future of debates on career stage and academic labour (as emotional and material and as often happening on a Saturday morning), rather than as snapshot of fractured academic times. We see such snapshots in off-hand comments; ‘when did she get her PhD?’, ‘were you a professor in your last post?’, ‘who does she think she is?!’, ‘she’s very ambitious’.

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