KNOWLEDGEINSTITUTIONSGENDER:an east-west comparative studyTimes and trajectories

Alice Červinková and Lisa Garforth

With contributions from : Marcela Linkova; Ulrike Felt; Ismo Kantola; Zuzana Kiczkova; Anne Kovaleinen; Seppo Poutanen; Lisa Sigl, Mariana Szapuová; Veronika Woehrer.

Why times?

• A way in to researchers’ experiences and meanings...

• ... working around / beneath top-down and official constructions of research activities and careers

• Resisting / revisiting spatial metaphors of epistemic life

• Reflexivity – the times of KNOWING

What times? A conceptual framework

• TIMESCAPES (Adam 1994)

multidimensionality; situatedness

– Timeframes

– Timing

– Tempo

• TRAJECTORIES narratives of past-present-future. Career times.

• EVERYDAY TIMES daily times in epistemic life spaces.

Trajectories Contexts: imagining excellence

– European and national policies

– Intense political prioritisation of research.

– Glittering futures of the knowledge economy.

– National narratives• lagging behind; catching up; staying ahead.

Trajectories The normative linear career

“I did a degree. I did a PhD immediately afterwards. One short postdoc and then one longer one... I got a nice comfortable well-funded position. And then I got a lectureship and I didn’t drop off the bandwagon.” [F bioscientist UK]

– Natural sciences– Discrete ages and stages; unbroken trajectory

“The apprenticeship is quite long and pretty intense. If you drop out it’s so difficult to get back in again.” [M bioscientist, UK].

Trajectories Patchworks and other ‘horizontal’ careers

“...one potential frightful scenario is that I don’t have the guts to leave this world, that I’ll be here hanging on in short term temp jobs...”

[M social scientist, FI]

“I am not going to stick around as some desperate university hang-around that you see [at the university], some grants here, some grants there, then you’re unemployed, and then you have a project for three years. If I can’t establish my own position [permanent position], I’m quitting.”

[F bioscience postgrad, FI]

TrajectoriesPatchworks and horizontal careers

• For many researchers, calendar time continued to run but career time was stopped or dispersed

• Women were more likely to be ‘left behind’ or ‘hanging on’ in their careers.

• Many struggled to narrate their careers – ‘past/present/future’ did not add up to the normative ideal – or their biographical narratives offered alternative criteria for success

• They often experienced lack of institutional recognition despite performing valuable work

• .

Everyday time

• “Trying to fit everything into your day...it’s like a parcel that you need to pack.” [F bioscientist, UK]

• “When I’m lucky, I am just about in time...But rather it is typical for my work that I always have too much and that I’m never done, and that always something new turns up [...] That’s typical for science.” [Social scientist, AT]

Everyday time:no time to think?

“Sometimes I think: again a day has passed and I haven’t managed to do a single experiment, ok? And at the same time I am my most efficient worker.” [Bioscientist, AT].

– Acceleration and overload; loss of slow, immersive times of reflection; loss of autonomy and collegiality

– BUT ‘time to think’ is also embedded in the daily times of material epistemic cultures, and ‘thinking’ is contingent and multiple

Gendering everyday time

Finding time and making time in the everyday is conflictual, gendered and political

“I think it’s fair to say that women in the department do a lot of invisible caretaking which frees up the time of these men in the department. [There’s] something about [women] not allowing ourselves to do that. Not being ahead of the game, saying you want to protect your time and absenting yourself to do that.” [F social scientist, UK]

Beyond work-life balanceTime disciplines in the audit academy

Taking time and moving time– Time autonomy and flexibility

Finding time and making time– But : “it’s output oriented”– Audit/performativity = internalised individual

time disciplines (career, excellence, competition)

Thinking across work and lifeThe vocational mode

“Watch out, I live sociology, which means I don’t work!” [social scientist, SK].

– Dissolving work-life boundaries, performing the epistemic self

– Long hours in the vocational mode

“It’s not about the amount of time you spend at work, but rather how you feel that this is a vocational job, so that the ones who feel that vocation act naturally in a way that meets their own norms...And again, if you don’t feel it as your vocation then you’re simply in the wrong field.” [bioscientist, FI]

Gender and the vocational modeFinding time to not think in epistemic life spaces?

• “... there is this sort of academic culture which I suspect men do more than women of working every hour God sends. And I have absolutely no desire to work every hour god sends...I want to have a life as well. If you look at academics who have got on ... they’re all-consumed by it. And they love it. I find it interesting but I want to have a life beyond it.” [F social scientist, UK].

• “If I had to choose, I would without question leave this and live a life, not bury myself in some science.”[F social scientist, FI].

Times and trajectoriesConclusions

• Adding it up?– Everyday times and trajectories:

incommensurabilities and conflicts

• Whose time regimes?– Vocation as a gendered mode of ordering

• Speaking to policy– Recognising and supporting patchwork, horizontal

and ‘moving’ careers– Work and life beyond the rational management of

clock time