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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