Abstract
This chapter explores feminist work in academia, couching personal experiences of early career feminist academics in methodological discussions of Dorothy Smith’s feminist approach to institutional ethnography. By using Smith’s expanded notion of ‘work’ which includes the invisible emotional and social labour that is essential to the running of the university, yet is often unpaid and underappreciated, the authors provide a feminist critique of the neoliberal university. Doing this, they identify issues such as casualisation, workload and preconceptions around the academic ‘lifestyle’ as feminist issues, especially for early career feminists in higher education. Reflecting on their own experiences as early career feminist academics, they explore the negotiation of feminist aims within institutional boundaries. Work carried out by women, casualised staff, and postgraduate students in higher education is essential yet often unacknowledged or valued as ‘proper’ academic work. By asking who organises the post-seminar wine reception, whose shoulders we cry on, and whether or not this is considered work, they highlight the gendered, racialised, and classed hierarchies of academia and their institutional reproduction. The authors of this chapter state that their work might be co-opted by the neoliberal university, thus becoming complicit themselves in furthering the institution’s aims. However, in identifying the spaces where invisible work is done and underappreciated, the authors argue that feminists can find space to resist and agitate for change. In combining feminist research with activism, specifically through teaching, collaboration projects with activists, and trade union organising in higher education, this chapter challenges the dichotomies of feminist theory and praxis, feminist academia and activism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bates, L. (2015, February 13). Female academics face huge sexist bias. The Guardian. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2015/feb/13/female-academics-huge-sexist-bias-students. Accessed 25 May 2015.
Bellas, M. L. (1999). Emotional labor in academia: The case of professors. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 561(Jan), 96–110.
Boston, S. (2015). Women workers and the trade unions (2nd revised ed.). London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Brown, R., & Carasso, H. (2013). Everything for sale? The marketisation of UK higher education. London: Society for Research into Higher Education.
Constanti, P., & Gibbs, P. (2004). Higher education teachers and emotional labour. International Journal of Educational Management, 18(4), 243–249.
Crabtree, R. D., Sapp, D. A., & Licona, A. C. (Eds.) (2009). Feminist pedagogy: Looking back to move forward. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139, 138–167.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Davis, A. (1981). Women, race and class. London: The Women’s Press.
Department for Business, Innovation & Skills.. (2015). GOV.UK. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-business-innovation-skills. Accessed 20 Aug 2015.
de Beauvoir, S. (2004). Existentialism and popular wisdom (Marybeth Timmermann,Trans.). In: Simons, M. A. (ed). Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical writings (pp. 203–220). Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
DeVault, M. L., & McCoy, L. (2006). Institutional ethnography: Using interviews to investigate ruling relations. In D. E. Smith (Ed.), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp. 15–44). Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Duncombe, J., & Marsden, D. (1995). ‘Workaholics’ and ‘whingeing women’: Theorising intimacy and emotion work—the last frontier of gender inequality? The Sociological Review, 43(1), 150–169.
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).. (2015). What we do. Available from: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/about-esrc/what-we-do/index.aspx. Accessed 21 Aug 2015.
Federici, S. (2008). Precarious labor: A feminist viewpoint, In: Team Colors Collective (ed). (2008) In the middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 convention protests, movement and movements. New York: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Available at: https://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/precarious-labor-a-feminist-viewpoint/
Federici, S. (2012). Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. Oakland, California: PM Press.
Freeman, J. (2013). The tyranny of structurelessness. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 41(3/4), 231–246.
Forrester, G. (2005). All in a day’s work: Primary teachers ‘performing’ and ‘caring’. Gender and Education, 17, 271–287.
Garden, A. (2015, April 21). Students, don’t rate me on my appearance but on my teaching. The Guardian. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/apr/21/students-dont-rate-me-on-my-appearance-but-on-my-teaching. Accessed 20 Aug 2015.
Gill, R. (2010). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of the neoliberal university. In R. Ryan-Flood & R. Gill (Eds.), Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections (pp. 228–244). London: Routledge.
Gill, R., & Donaghue, N. (2015). Resilience, apps and reluctant individualism: Technologies of self in the neoliberal academy. Women’s Studies International Forum. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2015.06.016.
Gillies, V., & Lucey, H. (Eds.) (2007). Power, knowledge and the academy: The institutional is political. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Giroux, H. (2003). Utopian thinking under the sign of neoliberalism: Towards a critical pedagogy of educated hope. Democracy & Nature, 9(1), 91–105.
Gutiérrez y Muhs, G., et al. (Eds.) (2012). Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women in academia. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Hartsock, N. (1983). Money, sex and power: Toward a feminist historical materialism. New York: Northeastern University Press.
Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart: The commercialization of human feeling (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. London: Routledge.
hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for everyone: Passionate politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Koster, S. (2011). The self-managed heart: teaching gender and doing emotional labour in a higher education institution. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 19(1), 61–77.
Leathwood, C., & Read, B. (2008). Gender and the changing face of higher education. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Lopes, A. & Dewan, I. (2015). Precarious pedagogies? The impact of casual and zero hour contracts in Higher Education. Journal of Feminist Scholarship. 7(8), 28–42. Available from: http://www.jfsonline.org. Accessed 29 May 2015.
Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Ithaca: Firebrand Books.
Mendelsohn, T. (2013, October 21). Teaching is not its own reward: Durham University in unpaid jobs row. The Independent. . Available from: http://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/teaching-is-not-its-own-reward-durham-university-in-unpaid-jobs-row-8894458.html. Accessed 21 Aug 2015.
Messner, M. A. (2000). White guy habitus in the classroom: Challenging the reproduction of privilege. Men and Masculinities, 2(4), 457–469.
Mies, M. (1986). Patriarchy and accumulation. London: Zed Books.
Morgan, J. (2013, September 5). UCU homes in on widespread use of zero-hours deals. Times Higher Education. Available from: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/ucu-homes-in-on-widespread-use-of-zero-hours-deals/2007035.article. Accessed 25 Mar 2015.
Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., et al. (2015, forthcoming). For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies.
Morley, L. (1998). All you need is love: Feminist pedagogy for empowerment and emotional labour in the academy. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 2(1), 15–27.
Ogbonna, E., & Harris, L. C. (2004). Work intensification and emotional labour among UK university lecturers: An exploratory study. Organization Studies, 25(7), 1185–1203.
Pereira, M. M. (2012). Uncomfortable classrooms: Rethinking the role of student discomfort in feminist teaching. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 19(1), 128–135.
Pereira, M. M. (2015). Struggling within and beyond the Performative University: Articulating activism and work in an ‘academia without walls’. Women’s Studies International Forum. doi: 10.1016/j.wsif.2015.06.008.
Phiri, A. (2015). Critical spaces: Processes of Othering in British institutions of higher education. Journal of Feminist Scholarship. 7(8), 13–27. Available from: http://www.jfsonline.org. Accessed 29 May 2015.
Reevy, G., & Deason, G. (2014). Predictors of depression, stress, and anxiety among non-tenure track faculty. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(701), 1–17.
Schueths, A. M., Gladney, T., Crawford, D. M., Bass, K. L., & Moore, H. A. (2013). Passionate pedagogy and emotional labor: Students’ responses to learning diversity from diverse instructors. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(10), 1259–1276.
Smith, D. E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Smith, D. E. (1994). A Berkeley Education. In K. P. Meadow Orlans & R. A. Wallace (Eds.), Gender and the academic experience (pp. 45–56). Lincoln: University of Nebraska.
Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Oxford: AltaMira Press.
Smith, P. (1992). The emotional labour of nursing. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education.
Tagore, S. (2009). A slam on feminism in academia. In J. Yee (Ed.), Feminism for real: Deconstructing the academic industrial complex of feminism (pp. 37–41). Ottawa: The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Tunguz, S. (2014). In the eye of the beholder: Emotional labor in academia varies with tenure and gender. Studies in Higher Education, 1–18. . Available from: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cshe20. Accessed 26 Aug 2015.
Wardrop, A., & Withers, D. (Eds.) (2014). The para-academic handbook: A toolkit for making-learning-creating-acting. Bristol: HammerOn Press.
Williams, R. (2013, January 28). The university professor is always white. The Guardian. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/jan/28/women-bme-professors-academia. Accessed 25 Mar 2015.
Wright, S. (2015). Knowledge that counts: Points systems and the governance of Danish universities. In A. I. Griffiths & D. E. Smith (Eds.), Under new public management: Institutional ethnographies of changing front-line work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: SAGE Publications.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Murray, Ó.M., Crowley, M., Wånggren, L. (2017). Feminist Work in Academia and Beyond. In: Thwaites, R., Pressland, A. (eds) Being an Early Career Feminist Academic. Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54325-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54325-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54324-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54325-7
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)