Being an Early Career Feminist Academic

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Being an Early Career Feminist Academic in a Changing Academy

   • Rachel Thwaites, Amy Pressland

   Pages 1-28

3. Introducing the Early Career Experience

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 29-29

      PDF

   2. A Precarious Passion: Gendered and Age-Based Insecurity Among Aspiring Academics in Australia

      • Lara McKenzie

      Pages 31-49

   3. Navigating Gendered Expectations at the Margins of Feminism and Criminology

      • Olga Marques

      Pages 51-69

4. Affect and Identities: Negotiating Tensions in the Early Career

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 71-71

      PDF

   2. Academic, Woman, Mother: Negotiating Multiple Subjectivities During Early Career

      • Agnes Bosanquet

      Pages 73-91

   3. Room for Confidence: Early Career Feminists in the English Department

      • Helena Goodwyn, Emily Jane Hogg

      Pages 93-108

   4. “Are You One of Us, or One of Them?” An Autoethnography of a “Hybrid” Feminist Researcher Bridging Two Worlds

      • Sophie Alkhaled

      Pages 109-128

5. Exploring Experience Through Innovative Methodologies

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 129-129

      PDF

   2. Exposing the “Hidden Injuries” of Feminist Early Career Researchers: An Experiential Think Piece About Maintaining Feminist Identities

      • Anna Tarrant, Emily Cooper

      Pages 131-139

   3. Reflecting Realities and Creating Utopias: Early Career Feminists (Un)Doing International Relations in Finland

      • Marjaana Jauhola, Saara Särmä

      Pages 141-165

6. Work, Networks and Social Capital: Building the Academic Career

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 167-167

      PDF

   2. Challenges to Feminist Solidarity in the Era of New Public Management

      • Klara Regnö

      Pages 169-194

   3. Inequality in Academia: The Way Social Connections Work

      • Irina Gewinner

      Pages 195-214

   4. Feminist Work in Academia and Beyond

      • Órla Meadhbh Murray, Muireann Crowley, Lena Wånggren

      Pages 215-235

7. Envisaging Feminist Futures

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 237-237

      PDF

   2. On Becoming “Bad Subjects”: Teaching to Transgress in Neoliberal Education

      • Katherine Natanel

      Pages 239-253

   3. Embracing Vulnerability: A Reflection on my Academic Journey as a Japanese Early Career Feminist Academic Abroad

      • Misato Matsuoka

      Pages 255-266

   4. ‘I’m an Early Career Feminist Academic: Get Me Out of Here?’ Encountering and Resisting the Neoliberal Academy

      • The Res-Sisters

      Pages 267-284

This book highlights the experiences of feminist early career researchers and teachers from an international perspective in an increasingly neoliberal academy. It offers a new angle on a significant and increasingly important discussion on the ethos of higher education and the sector's place in society.
 
Higher education is fast-changing, increasingly market-driven, and precarious. In this context entering the academy as an early career academic presents both challenges and opportunities. Early career academics frequently face the prospect of working on fixed term contracts, with little security and no certain prospect of advancement, while constantly looking for the next role. Being a feminist academic adds a further layer of complexity: the ethos of the marketising university where students are increasingly viewed as ‘customers’ may sit uneasily with a politics of equality for all. Feminist values and practice can provide a means of working through the challenges, but may also bring complications.




      

• Higher Education
• Feminism
• Neoliberalism
• Early Career Scholars
• Precariousness
• Gender

“This timely and important volume confronts that, offering honest and self-reflexive discussions of the material, emotional and affective demands and contradictions which early career academics face. … this book does the vitally important work of articulating the experiences of feminist early career researchers, and as such propels the conversation forward.” (Elizabeth Ablett, Sociology, Vol. 52 (1), 2018)

“I wish I had read this book earlier in my career. The challenges and pleasures of academia as feminist activity are engagingly discussed in an intellectually rigorous manner. Inspiring!!” (Heather  Savigny, Associate Professor in Gender & Politics, Bournemouth University)

“A profound and moving analysis that vividly articulates the challenges, complexities and precariousness of the lives of feminist early career academics in the neoliberal university.” (Elisabeth Kelan, Professor of Leadership, Director Cranfield International Centre for Women Leaders, Cranfield University)

• Canterbury Christ Church University, United Kingdom

  Rachel Thwaites

• Human Resources, DB Cargo UK, United Kingdom

  Amy Pressland

Rachel Thwaites is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Lincoln, UK. She has interests in gender, identities, higher education, health and illness, emotion work, naming, and qualitative methods.  She has published on British women's naming decisions on marriage and sense of identity, choice feminism, and older people's experiences of emergency admission to hospital.

Amy Pressland is International HR Projects Manager for DB Cargo UK working on an international research project called Women in Management. Previously she was Lecturer in Education at the University of East Anglia, UK and has published articles and book chapters on mixed-sex sport in HE, European media representations of gender at major sporting events, the surveillance of sportswomen's bodies in British newspapers, and the media coverage of women's boxing..