Membership without citizenship ? Postdoctoral experiences in Switzerland

• In Event: Making Early Career Researchers' Voices Heard for Gender Equality II: Precarity, Mobility, Work-Life Imbalances in Research Career Development

Abstract

Irrespective of national and disciplinary specificities, access to an academic career is increasingly selective. In the competition for a limited number of stable or permanent academic positions, recent PhD graduates who want to pursue an academic career face two main challenges. On the one hand, they have to accept a succession of fixed-term, often part-time and badly paid, precarious positions (i.e. “postdocs”), that have become a prerequisite for potential selection to permanent academic jobs. On the second hand, they are usually required to undertake some form of transnational mobility, which may physically distance them from their existing professional and personal networks. In this contribution, we analyse the effects of the combination of precarious employment and geographical displacement on the citizenship experiences of postdocs working in Switzerland. We adopt the notion of ‘probationary citizenship’, initially developed by migration scholars, to provide new insights into the contradictory expectations placed on this particular group of early-career academics. On the basis of biographical interviews and ethnographic observations, we examine the citizenship challenges faced by postdocs from across the globe who are working in the Swiss academic context, and analyse their implications for the gendering of academic citizenship. We show that the main problem for female postdocs in the Swiss context is not 'exclusion' from the academic community, but rather something akin to 'membership without citizenship', and draw on these finding to suggest some ideas for the development of a more sustainable 'gender equality culture’ in the academic context.

Authors

• Nicky Le Feuvre, Lausanne Universizy

• Pierre Bataille, Grenoble Alpes University

• Marie Sautier, University of Lausanne/Sciences Po Paris