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Time to think [Audio podcast episode]
‘Feminization’ is used either quantitatively to indicate an increased female labor market participation or qualitatively to refer to labor devaluation and to types of work that supposedly require “feminine” skillsets. This article cautiously hews to the qualitative interpretations but suggests an affirmative reconstruction of the concept in the context of collective action. It argues that contemporary grassroots academic labor movements rely more explicitly on collective emotions and aim at building long-term bases of solidarity, instead of performative activism and mass mobilizations. This ‘affective turn’ in academic labor activism is argued to signal a “feminization of resistance”, characterized by a pronounced propensity for affective and relational groundwork. This argument is substantiated in view of the Network for Decent Work in Academia (NGAWiss), a nation-wide precarious researchers’ network in Germany, and the New Faculty Majority (NFM), an adjunct advocacy group in the US. The aim is twofold: first, the article contributes to a better understanding of contemporary labor activism by elucidating the precarious collective’s incremental achievements, often ignored by the outcome-oriented labor movement literature. Second, by reframing it as a mode of affective resistance, the article extends the analytical scope of the term “feminization”.
At the Margins of Academia offers a broad approach to the challenge of academic labor precarity and the ever-growing academic migration from Turkey to European academic labor markets, based on the author’s own experiences and on in-depth interviews with the exiled Peace Academics. To this aim, it provides a detailed analysis of the systemic background of precariousness, the specifities of the case of the exiled Academics for Peace with regard to the precarization of academic labor force in general, and the socio-emotional expressions of being kept ‘in reserve’, drawing on the exiled academics’ own narratives.
The book consists of 5 chapters that start with the structural background of precariousness, then proceed to set a framework for understanding the relation between precariousness and subjectivity, and present insights on that relation with the help of the references made to individual and focus group interviews conducted with 11 academics in exile.