Walking the Tightrope: Precarious Intimacies and Intimate Precarities in Female Early Career Academic Narratives

• In Event: Transforming Early Academic Careers: Global Challenges and Individual Trajectories - II: Crafting the Academic Self

Abstract

This paper explores the links between precarity and intimacy as narrated by female early career academics in the UK context. Drawing on auto-ethnographic reflections alongside small-scale, in-depth narrative research, it pays particular attention to gendered, affective dimensions of navigating multiple forms of precarity and uncertainty which underpin efforts to forge careers in contemporary academia. Trying to balance ‘greedy institutions’ (Coser, 1974) of university and intimate lives, encompassing family and personal relationships, is undoubtedly challenging for many: Undertaking multiple forms of work, including ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 1983) to manage complex and demanding domains of life, such ‘labours of love’ take their toll. The requirement to be geographically mobile to achieve narrow definitions of ‘success’ in neoliberalised academia, or simply to stay in work, is an additional layer of complexity sometimes entailing impossible choices, illustrated through testimonies of academics at different stages of the life course. Those pursuing academic careers may not be at liberty to make ‘free choices’ in terms of either their intimate or working lives due to the interdependencies (Fineman, 2004), needs of significant others and priorities which shape their lives. Such priorities include caring responsibilities, commitments and obligations; needs to maintain community networks; health considerations and necessities of maintaining survival work. Yet to miss opportunities and stay local contains risks given the considerable time, money and personal sacrifice invested throughout educational trajectories. The paper challenges individualised conceptions of intimacy (Giddens, 1992) while considering precarity as multi-dimensional, entailing financial, physical, emotional, ontological and intimate precarities interlinked with job insecurity.

Author

• Charlotte Ann Morris, University of Sussex