My best geographer’s dress: bodies, emotions and care in early-career academia

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on our personal experiences with the perpetuating gender bias in (early-career) academia, more specifically within geography. We develop two main arguments. First, we argue that everyday academic practices stand in sharp contrast with the critical content geography, as a discipline, aims to study and teachincluding its feminist, anti-colonial, and queer understandings. Strikingly, geography as a field does not seem able to apply its academic insights into its internal organization. Indeed, everyday academic practices within geography reproduce structural gendered inequalities. Consequently, geography reproduces the historical 'maleness' of the discipline, both in terms of who embodies it and through the methods and topics it focuses on. Second, we reflect on the strategies we develop to denounce and alter the unjust practices we are confronted with. Yet, these strategies reveal the double bind early career women face, as these very strategies may risk to undermine one's own precarious position, or to give the skewed impression of reproducing the male, disembodied ideal we are fighting.

Not just parenting in the field: Accompanied research and geographies of caring and responsibility

“…Despite growing acceptance of feminist epistemologies and methodologies over the past two decades, such rhetoric continues to shape the way scholars conceive of legitimate academic research (De Silva & Gandhi, 2019). The normalized image of a professional fieldworker, for example, still displays a considerable degree of bravado and machismo, and is easily mobile, ever energetic, able‐bodied, fit, and solitary (Bono et al ., 2019; De Silva & Gandhi, 2019; Frohlick, 2002; Gottlieb, 1995; Jokinen & Caretta, 2016; Lunn & Moscuzza, 2014).…”

Labour geography III: Precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure

“…It is both notable and telling that there has been an upsurge of publications since 2016/17 that focus on experiences of precarity in academic labour in the neoliberal university. Scholars have spotlighted structural gender inequalities and biases and the way precarious academic employment is gendered (Bono et al, 2019; Ivancheva et al, 2019), the implications of reproductive decisions and caring responsibilities on progression (Maddrell et al, 2019) in the context of assumed professional mobility (Manzi et al, 2019), and geography’s disciplinary whiteness (Faria et al, 2019), all of which impact early career scholars, especially racialized women, disproportionately. As Beverley Mullings and Sanjukta Mukherjee (2018: 1406) argue:Combined with the rise of populist, Islamophobic and white supremacist movements across much of the global North, racialized and Indigenous scholars are finding themselves in universities that are increasingly hostile to claims for equality and inclusion…within the context of the shifting landscape of an academy that has become more competitive, less generous and increasingly precarious.For geographers not based in Anglophone countries, and particularly for those outside Europe, competitive pressures of privatization, marketization, austerity and precarious employment in academia are heightened and compounded by the discipline’s Anglophone biases in publishing and conferences, and Eurocentric and Anglo-centric genealogies of knowledge production and theory building which marginalize ‘Other Geographical Traditions’ (OGTs) (Ferretti, 2019).…”

“…It is both notable and telling that there has been an upsurge of publications since 2016/17 that focus on experiences of precarity in academic labour in the neoliberal university. Scholars have spotlighted structural gender inequalities and biases and the way precarious academic employment is gendered (Bono et al, 2019;Ivancheva et al, 2019), the implications of reproductive decisions and caring responsibilities on progression (Maddrell et al, 2019) in the context of assumed professional mobility (Manzi et al, 2019), and geography's disciplinary whiteness (Faria et al, 2019), all of which impact early career scholars, especially racialized women, disproportionately. As Beverley Mullings andSanjukta Mukherjee (2018: 1406) argue:…”

Early-career women in geography. Practical pathways to advancement in the neoliberal university

“…In this special issue we contribute to the debates outlined above by presenting the challenging circumstances that early career geographers face (Maddrell, Thomas, and Wyse 2018;Bono, De Craene, and Kenis 2019) and ways that some women find to keep advancing in current neoliberal academia (Oberhauser and Caretta 2019;Puawai Collective 2019;Webster and Boyd 2019).…”

“…The neoliberalization of the university appears to be a seemingly corresponding set of practices across institutions in these countries. Formal evaluation based on number of publications, number of grants, students' evaluations and service expectations are frequently mentioned in these articles (Bono, De Craene, and Kenis 2019;Oberhauser and Caretta 2019). Together they also point to a system permeated by normativities such as class, racialization, language, and ableism found in the form of micro-aggressions, peer pressure and largely directed towards those who do not inhabit a male white able tenured body and hence do not fit the archetypical picture of a scholar (Maddrell, Thomas, and Wyse 2018;Puawai Collective 2019 Webster andBoyd 2019;).…”