This article presents the ways that women full professors in a Colombian public university (CPU) have developed practices of rebusque to try to offer conditions that can allow their undergraduate and postgraduate students to conduct academic research. Rebusque is a widespread term in Colombian slang. It refers to a strategy that entails a ‘struggle for survival through different mechanisms of action. In a literal sense, it is an incessant search for possibilities through which the lower-class sectors invent ways of living in the city in an informal way’ (Mendoza 2015: 39). The population that has practices of rebusque has the characteristic of being autonomous, based on a constant search for resources outside ‘the normative world of official work’ (Mendoza 2015: 41). This article also unveils how the precarisation of universities has repercussions for faculty members who are in a better position due to their working conditions but nevertheless experience the detrimental effects of neoliberalism. To my knowledge, no previous author has specifically analysed the experiences and practices of academics by using the concept of rebusque. Thus, this article makes an original contribution to the literature by showing how a practice associated with the lower classes in Colombia is translated into neoliberalised academia.
The professors’ practices of rebusque examined in this article are due to a lack of sufficient research funding resulting from the neoliberalisation of higher education, which has brought about the defunding of state universities and budget cuts to scientific research in Colombia (Castelao-Huerta 2021a; Castelao-Huerta 2023c; Tutkal et al. 2021). With the implementation of neoliberal policies and periods of economic recession in Colombia, there is a scarcity of resources for research, which affects students. As a result, the women professors in this study develop practices of rebusque to navigate this scarcity and the precariousness of their situation (Castelao-Huerta 2023b). Precariousness is understood as the politically induced condition that results in unequal exposure to ‘conditions that jeopardize the possibility of persisting and flourishing [...] through the radically unequal distribution of wealth’, as well as being exposed to greater violence (Butler 2009: 28). While women full professors can be considered privileged compared to occasional faculty, the women professors in this study still have to deal with unequal workloads to secure necessary material resources for advancement of their projects and to support their students’ development. As Professor S (PS) points out: ‘I do extension work when the laboratory has no resources, and I have to do it for them [her students] … At this moment I have to do an extension because we have no money.’ The expression ‘I have to’ shows that the professor carries out these activities for the benefit of her students, who rarely have a scholarship.
As I will argue in this article, in the face of the scarcity of resources due to the neoliberalisation of public higher education, women full professors at the CPU have developed alliances as their main method of rebusque, based on three specific practices: (1) being available to perform services required by public or private entities; (2) developing marketing strategies to obtain materials; and (3) cultivating relationships with colleagues to gain access to other laboratories through academic exchanges of their students. Even though I present the Colombian context in greater detail later in this article, it is important to point out that a lack of funding and institutional support for research activities; insufficient academic incentives and a lack of trained personnel; inadequate facilities including laboratories and libraries; limited means of publication and dissemination of results; and a lack of interest on the part of public and private sectors towards the research produced in universities were among the problems facing Colombian higher education before the implementation of neoliberal policies, as highlighted by Briceño (1991). This means that before the enactment of neoliberal policies, there were already deficiencies in funding the research carried out in state universities, but the application of neoliberal policies in this area has led to a worsening of the problems. At the same time, the enactment of these policies has made it possible for other situations to arise in which a lack of resources shapes the experiences and practices of people within universities, as I develop in this article. Thus, it is not that the conditions of public higher education institutions were ideal before neoliberalisation, but rather that the new policies worsened these previous shortcomings, reconfiguring the universities by exacerbating already existing problems.
Now, the professors’ rebusque practices are carried out in an attempt to raise economic capital (money, materials and machinery), cultural capital (new knowledge and research abilities) and social capital (connections with foreign colleagues) (Bourdieu 1986) to enable their students to continue developing their research. According to Bourdieu, both cultural capital and social capital are convertible, ‘on certain conditions, into economic capital’ (1986: 243). As a result, thanks to the efforts of the professors to obtain different types of capital, economic shortcomings that can hinder the research activities of early-career researchers can be overcome. This rebusque intensifies workloads because women professors continue to fulfil both their academic responsibilities and their domestic and care activities, which become a ‘second shift’ (Hochschild 2003), resulting in a double working day that causes a ‘leisure gap’ between men and woman similar to the ‘wage gap’ (Hochschild 2003: 4).
The structure of this article is as follows. First, I present the defunding process of Colombian public universities. Second, I explain my qualitative methodological approach. Subsequently, I point out how women professors have developed rebusque practices. I finish with reflections on the importance of rebusque in academia, while underlining the burden and challenges that these practices imply.
The neoliberalisation of public higher education in Colombia
David Harvey (2007) argues that neoliberalism results in political and economic practices based on the assumption that human welfare is best achieved by allowing the free development of individual entrepreneurial capacities and freedoms. Neoliberal policies come with constant vigilance and surveillance, put maximisation of profit above human needs and promote adopting the principles of the market economy in all social institutions (Tutkal et al. 2021). Neoliberalism as a governing rationality transmits values and measurements of the market to every sphere of life and interprets human beings exclusively as homo oeconomicus (Brown 2015). This concept has been used to define an individualist mentality prioritising cost-benefit analysis in actions and interactions, which has meant that the individual is ‘a partner of exchange’ (Foucault 2010: 225). This figure of the ‘partner of exchange’ became ‘an entrepreneur of himself’ with neoliberalisation (Foucault 2010: 226). Furthermore, Brown (2015: 33) explains that homo oeconomicus, while still maintaining aspects of entrepreneurialism, has been reshaped as ‘financialized human capital’ that aims to enhance its value or attract investors across every sphere of its existence.
The process of ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004) and its neoliberal rationality have transformed education into an ‘investment’ whose aim is to train people to succeed in the marketplace (Hernández Gutiérrez 2016). Neoliberal higher education policies result in constant vigilance, as well as a culture of competition and individualisation (Tutkal 2023). Moreover, there is daily pressure to treat students as clients, prioritising skills to improve ‘employability’, which undermines critical education (Ginn 2014).
The main features of neoliberal policies in Latin American higher education have been the establishment of academic performance evaluation systems and the reduction of institutional budgets (Castelao-Huerta 2021b). The scarcity of resources that are necessary to carry out research leads to having to go beyond institutional funding mechanisms, and thus rebusque emerges as a practice. In Colombia, Law 30 was approved in 1992, which considered public universities autonomous entities endowed with legal personality; academic, administrative and financial autonomy; independent assets; and the power to create and manage their budgets. This implies that the government only contributes a part of their resources, which has resulted in the defunding of public universities (Castelao-Huerta 2021a).
Previous research highlights how the implementation of Law 30 has been detrimental to universities, since it boosts demand by focusing on providing student loans, rather than increasing university funding (Tutkal et al. 2021). On the basis of Articles 86 and 87 of this law, institutions must generate a part of their income. This is also necessary because the basic budget for universities is the same as in 1993 (Cortés Piraquive 2013; Quimbay Herrera and Villabona Robayo 2017). Thus, the state's financial participation has decreased from 79 per cent to 48 per cent from 1993 to 2013 (Cortés Piraquive 2013: 18). This reduction meant that the state contribution to universities as a percentage of GDP decreased from 0.71 per cent in 2002 to 0.42 per cent in 2016 (Dirección Nacional de Planeación y Estadística 2018). As a result, the budgets of the institutions show a high deficit (Cortés Piraquive 2013; Quimbay Herrera and Villabona Robayo 2017), which has significantly affected infrastructure (Vega Cantor 2011), development of research and access to education. Colombian public universities lack sufficient resources for research and scholarships, and all students have to pay tuition fees, which are especially high for postgraduate students considering that scholarships for financial support are really scarce (Tutkal et al. 2021: 326–327).
The fluctuation of resources frequently leads to competing for funds, which means that some research projects may halt because finances are exhausted at the end of each funding call. Thus, processes already underway may be stalled or suffer setbacks, hindering research progress, as noted by Jaramillo Salazar et al. (2004). In this way, universities have an imperative to generate new knowledge with the aim of improving productivity and contributing to the country's economic growth, but they must balance resources between teaching and research, which is subject to public and private funding.
In this context, I have found that some women full professors have implemented practices of rebusque to navigate gaps in research resources and thereby support the development of their students. Practices of rebusque are relevant because they demonstrate that women professors have developed strategies that enable them to go beyond the conditions of scarcity, thereby supporting those who are in a much less privileged position than themselves: their students. Engaging in practices of rebusque becomes a way of survival and resistance, while at the same time enabling a new generation of researchers to access the resources and the support they need. These practices, along with other caring and careful practices (Castelao-Huerta 2023a; Lynch 2010), are feminised in the prevailing masculine, individualised, neoliberal academia (Angervall 2018; Burman 2003). However, practices such as rebusque also contribute to overburdening the professors. Thus, while these practices are crucial for the students’ development, they come at a cost to the professors: overwork and significant loss of leisure time. In this scenario, certain professors are combatting the lack of research funds, a direct result of neoliberal policies. Thanks to the professors’ efforts and overwork, the neoliberal university sustains itself.
Methodology
This article is part of a larger research project focused on understanding how neoliberal policies and gender shape the practices of women full professors. As gender is a social arrangement, this women-focused methodological approach allows me to distinguish the socially situated character of the experiences of women professors (Harding 2011), thus gaining insight into their experiences and practices. I am interested in women full professors because most of the literature around precarity in higher education focuses on analysing detrimental effects of neoliberalism on academics who are neither tenured nor at the top of the academic ladder (Ivancheva 2015). This article shows how the precarisation of universities also has repercussions for faculty members who are in a better position due to their working conditions but nevertheless experience the detrimental effects of neoliberalism.
I conducted fieldwork between June 2018 and December 2020 at the CPU in several stages. The first consisted of finding women full professors and quantifying their academic production. I searched for each woman full professor on a digital platform where faculty members register their academic products so that they can be assigned the appropriate number of salary points. Searching for each professor's registry allowed me to identify forty-eight women with the highest productivity rates according to the metrics adopted. The second stage was conducting semi-structured interviews with twenty-four of them between November 2018 and February 2019. Participants were professors from all areas of knowledge (sciences, health sciences, social sciences, agricultural sciences, engineering and the arts), aged 47–67 years, who had joined the CPU between 1974 and 2006. All encounters were recorded and transcribed via word processor. The information was subjected to inductive thematic analysis (Clarke and Braun 2017); I started from the participants’ experiences to later establish emerging categories related to their relationship with their students. Instead of having fixed research questions, I took a flexible approach by modifying the research question throughout coding and theme development, in which I identified, analysed and interpreted patterns of meaning within the interviews (Clarke and Braun 2017: 297). The content analysis process involved the revision and coding of transcripts in the RQDA programme to organise them by emerging categories. Then, I grouped the categories into main topics.
I conducted more in-depth interviews in July and August 2019 with three professors. I also conducted nineteen interviews with their students and colleagues in order to comprehend the perceptions of people working with them. Finally, in April 2020 I conducted further interviews with ten of the twenty-four professors and three of the students to delve into details central to the research arguments, including rebusque practices.
The rebusque emerged from the field when I asked the professors about the most complicated and most satisfactory aspects of being a professor, the importance of their research and how they managed to do research. For example, Professor O (PO) responded by saying:
in Colombia, generating knowledge, that is, doing research, is very complicated, because there are no resources; so you have to get resources to do something. You manage to do something, and you run out of resources, and the whole process falls apart, and you have to obtain resources again.
I find that this notion that ‘you have to obtain resources again’ is what has led to developing practices of rebusque: a way in which women professors both navigate the scarcity of resources and care for students by enabling them to continue studying, learning and conducting research.
Findings
Rebusque has a similarity with jugaad in India, which is recognised as a form of innovation that often implies that a problem was circumvented without necessarily being eliminated by making use of social connections and materials in a way that few people could have imagined (Philip et al. 2012). Nandita Badami (2018) conceptualised jugaad as resilience in the face of material scarcity. In the case of Colombian rebusque, some professors scrutinise all possible means that may allow further research activities. Rebusque is a practice that professors have used to navigate the shortcomings of neoliberal governmentality because the resources for research are not sufficient, and this action allows them to continue with their research, which benefits the education and training of their students.
Previous studies have reported on some practices that professor-researchers have instated to obtain research resources. Christoph Grimpe (2012) notes that, recently, competition for external grants has increased in European universities, and people have become economic agents whose strategy is to select grants for which they anticipate higher ‘returns’. This means that they consider the effort involved in the whole application process, the project management and administrative burden (if they receive the resources) and the amount of funding to decide which calls to apply for. Karin Link and Barbara Müller (2020) point to a trend towards multiple-party funding because competition for public resources is high. Thus, faculty are also simultaneously turning to private grants or partnerships with companies. Multiple-party funding is complicated, these authors point out, because it requires the integration of diverse demands and the pursuit of multiple, sometimes conflicting objectives, which fosters disagreements and tensions. Finally, another strategy in the face of difficulties in obtaining funding is crowdfunding. Rachel Wheat and colleagues (2013) and Dawn-Marie Walker (2017) mention that with this method of online fundraising it is feasible to collect many small contributions, rather than requesting a large sum from a funding agency.
Faced with scarcity of resources in public higher education in Colombia, some women professors have opted to turn to non-traditional sources, thus developing practices of rebusque. Rebusque is an emergent category and was recurrently referred to by one of the professors. Professor K (PK) points out that in order to carry out research ‘you have to rebuscar a lot’ (‘toca rebuscarse muchísimo’), as I present below. I show how establishing alliances involves being available to perform services, developing marketing strategies and cultivating relationships with colleagues. These are the three concrete actions with which these professors employ practices of rebusque.
Before continuing, it is relevant to emphasise that rebusque is a care practice within academia since the professors show concern ‘for the financial and material needs of their students’ (Castelao-Huerta 2023a: 240). Care work inside the university is frequently considered ‘domestic work’, ‘academic housework’ or ‘academic housekeeping’. This work is highly gendered, as women are disproportionately encouraged and pressured to do it, and it is also under-recognised and underappreciated, and therefore not considered useful for individual career advancement (Burford et al. 2020; Cardozo 2017; Castelao-Huerta 2023a; El-Alayli et al. 2018; Gaudet et al. 2021; Heijstra et al. 2017; Jackson 2019; Lolich and Lynch 2017). Interviewees also stated that care work is something that they do for ‘others’. As a result, ‘universities simultaneously repudiate and depend on feminized forms of labor’ (Gannon et al. 2016: 195). Rebusque was considered a care practice also by the interviewed students. For example, Ñ, a student of PO who was working with her at the time of the interviews, emphasised that rebusque is a care practice of this professor:
I have met professors who don't care about anything other than receiving their salaries. They are fine here because they are permanent staff; their salary is fixed every month, so they don't care about the students at all. But PO has this thing that I find so incredible. Look, projects and proposals are time-consuming and sometimes stressful for her, but she always does it to increase the knowledge, to help the community, to help her students. Not all professors do that. She could perfectly well be at home at this hour, but she is always looking for ways to do, to grow. I admire her for that, because she shows solidarity.
In this example, care is present in the concern about what happens to students, in identifying their needs and in working hard to ensure their well-being. Professors’ care is associated with concern for the financial and material needs of their students. Thanks to their rebusque, professors can provide the students with peace of mind so that they can continue their academic training, as is argued by the student Ñ.
Being available to perform services
One of the rebusque practices of women full professors is the willingness to provide services to governmental institutions or companies. Always being available (siempre a la orden) is a polite expression used in Colombia that refers to being at the disposal of other people. Rather than submission, this expression (a la orden) indicates a willingness for service (Montoya 2006: 23), and it is used for signalling openness and being available to collaborate (Casanova Godoy and Gómez Villa 2011). In the case of professors, it means engaging in activities that are not necessarily related to their ongoing research. These activities include preparing workshops, evaluating products, offering courses and related activities, which allow them to raise economic capital, mainly to invest in materials so that students can continue their education and research. This rebusque implies that professors are taking care of their students by supplying them with the minimum material conditions for research. This kind of work requires the professors to be ‘always available’. Professor Z (PZ) points out the importance of these conventions:
When we don't have big projects, we live with these small extension projects. So we try to maintain very good relations with insecticide companies, repellents, impregnated clothing, and all the things they sell for vector control. With the health secretariats as well: if they want workshops, we put them in through extension, if they want courses, we give them courses, if they want consultancy …
In PZ's comments, it is possible to emphasise that there is an adjustment to the needs of the entities from which she can obtain resources: whatever they ask her to do, she can do. This shows that in the face of scarcity of research funding, there is a practice of rebusque focused on always being available to offer services. This has the aim of having an income that makes it possible to buy necessary materials, so that the professors and their students can continue with their research, and their students can avoid having to leave the university for lack of resources. Carrying out activities that the professors have to do and are paid to do, but that are not necessarily part of their ongoing research, is a rebusque practice because they can continue conducting research with students in the face of government funding shortfalls.
For PZ, who has had to develop her public relations skills, rebusque allows her to continue her research thanks to small projects that bring in economic capital, enabling her to finance students and purchase materials, equipment and even furniture, which improves the physical conditions in which she works:
we have this policy of always including equipment and so we have equipped the laboratory, the offices, our computers, the chairs, all of this is purchased with extension projects … you can get a table with some chairs that you need from an extension project because they are not so rigid.
Thus, extension is a way to remedy the lack of not only specialised equipment, but also the furniture that could be considered essential to be able to work: a table with a few chairs. This shows that PZ is interested in making her workspace, where she trains students, a functional and welcoming place to work, thereby providing the right conditions for those who occupy that space. According to her, being available by doing extension work is a practice that benefits her and her students because, even though what they receive does not provide them with funds to develop in-depth research, the amounts granted by companies open up the possibility of both continuing to train students and adjusting their workplaces so that their workspace is more comfortable. After all, the physical space ‘can facilitate or hinder interpersonal relationships’ within higher education institutions (De Borba et al. 2020: 12), and it affects the well-being of academic staff (Agg and Khimji 2021: 683). By improving the physical condition of academic spaces, the professors care for and improve the working conditions and the well-being of their students and collaborating researchers.
Developing marketing strategies
PZ's comments indicate that the professors carry out public relations activities with companies and institutions that can provide them with resources – economic capital – which implies an investment of time in contacting people and carrying out liaison work. The term rebusque emerged from the field when PK mentioned that in addition to applying for various calls for proposals, she searches for external support that can bring in items that are useful for her and her students to continue their research: ‘I try to seek help. Yes, I try to look for help. –From whom? – From companies: they give me a brick, they give me I don't know what’. PK's practice of rebusque consists of developing marketing strategies in which she tries to sell research as work that is useful to a company, so that the company giving items in return would be an investment. This practice also involves public relations work when contacting companies. She has to strategically explain how the research is useful to them and then ask for the investment: materials needed for research. PK details the process of this practice of rebusque:
You meet a person, then you say, ‘I have a research project, we'd like to talk about it’, and they suddenly make contact with another person, and so on and so forth … I have to contact them, I have to talk to them, and I have to present the project to them. It's not easy, because we don't have the openness to research here in Colombia. Sometimes it is possible for companies to support us with materials, but it is not easy because they often have their own priorities.
PK has developed skills in public relations, a feminised activity in which women outnumber men threefold (Ramírez Alvarado et al. 2015). She invests her time in approaching companies and searching for material resources to continue research, a task that in any case does not guarantee that the inputs will be supplied. She stressed that for a year at the time of the interview (2019) she had been passing around proposals and seeking contacts that would provide the materials for a PhD student to develop his research, showing that she cares about him, but so far, they had not been able to get steady support from any company:
requesting support does not necessarily mean that it is given to us. Sometimes the companies have all the intention, but maybe they don't have the time, they don't have the availability, or they are distracted by other things, or, or they get a lot of requests, so we don't get it. Well, yes, sometimes it comes out, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes maybe I should keep looking, pushing and everything, but I don't do it either … we still don't have someone who says, ‘ready, we'll give you the material’, or something like that; there are intentions, but, but there we go. In other words, the rebusque is the rebusque.
PK's assertion that it might be appropriate to persist in the search for resources is interesting, as neoliberal rationality dictates that success is an individual responsibility, and if you do not do enough, you cannot achieve your goals. She assumes the responsibility for not making more of an effort to obtain the necessary materials, even though her rebusque already includes both applying to calls for proposals and developing marketing strategies that allow her to directly search for the support of companies that can provide her with materials, despite the fact that these activities do not always yield positive results. This may indicate that PK identifies not obtaining capital as due to a lack of individual effort, to not doing enough, which could be due both to neoliberal governmentality and to the social tendency to undervalue women's work.
Cultivating relationships with colleagues
Cultivation of relationships with colleagues from other countries is another practice of rebusque. This care practice is important since it allows for sending students for research stays in other countries where the students can use equipment, learn new methodologies and advance their research. This means that the professors are providing economic capital and cultural capital to their students. In this case, the cultural capital is in the form of the students’ educational qualifications. The institutionalised state, according to Bourdieu (1986: 20), includes ‘the objectification of cultural capital in the form of academic qualifications’. This kind of rebusque was referred to by two professors, both of whom have studied abroad and frequently participate in international academic events. Through years of cultivating relationships, the professors have managed to build networks of collaboration with colleagues who have supported them by hosting students in their laboratories. Professor A (PA) points out that the mobility process has to be done following certain administrative formalities, while Professor O (PO) states that she makes requests to people with whom she has a close relationship since she is in constant communication by electronic means.
PA says that she has networks of colleagues at universities in Europe and Latin America, who have hosted her students, enabling them to carry out parts of their PhD or MSc research. PA details this practice of rebusque:
First of all, you need to have a research partner in the other country who agrees to receive your students. Let's say that it was relatively easy for us because we studied abroad, and we had contacts, and we had friends. So thanks to that, let's say it wasn't very complex. Another thing is that when you go to conferences it is very useful not only to learn things, but also to make these kinds of relationships, these kinds of contacts. So, I talk to the professor and I say, ‘look, I would love it if my students could go to your lab, they could work with you for a part of their research’.
Cultivating relations with foreign colleagues is a practice of rebusque that responsibilises individual students and academics for overcoming institutional shortcomings in the context of scarcity. PA points out that when she started teaching at the CPU there was not all the equipment that is available now, so research trips ‘were very useful for the students to use those pieces of equipment that were rare, to be able to have them here’. Today, these exchanges enable students to continue research, as the advances made in foreign laboratories allow them to develop their work, achieve collective publication and ‘open up the group to the outside world’. Thanks to this cultivation of relationships, there is an openness to the mobility of the professors’ students, which allows them to continue their academic training.
For PO, cultivating relationships, even casually, has been fundamental in gaining support for her students to benefit from foreign institutions:
There was no cash, but there was support in stuff. They received my students there, with all their research stuff. So, I didn't have to worry about that: they went to the lab there and could use all the materials, all the things. My students even received a stipend to live there.
These research trips were made possible, PO explains, thanks to her own eight-month research stay, which allowed her to meet and live with colleagues who are currently working as professors in several institutions. After this stay, she continued to travel to the region, which allowed her to deepen her bonds. Other exchanges have also taken place with people she met at conferences, similarly to PA. PO emphasises that the care she takes of these bonds, which generates her closeness with her colleagues, is the reason for the relative ease of managing this mobility of students:
I cultivate relationships a lot. I call, I ask, ‘hello, how are you?’ At the conferences, you get to know each other, you get to work … ‘So let's go for a beer, let's have lunch’, and so on. So, ‘oh, I'd like to send a student’, ‘sure, of course, send her’ … I just sent an email, ‘hey, receive my student, please, say yes’. And then, of course, ‘we would like to do this, and this.’ But formats and those kinds of requirements, no.
Not having to fill out forms to apply for research trips shows that PO is familiar with the people to whom she makes these requests. This relationship with colleagues abroad is in a constant flow of stays and academic exchanges.
In summary, constant communication, fluid exchanges and professional recognition are the most important elements of cultivating relationships. PO emphasises that in addition to granting her students access to laboratories, her colleagues have provided them with all necessary materials and reagents, and have funded a monthly stipend and their accommodation: ‘Another student I had, he didn't pay a peso for his master's degree, and now he's doing his doctorate with them, and now he's living in that house … yes, they have always helped me.’ This support is possible because foreign colleagues have been familiar with this professor's academic work for fifteen years, and she is cultivating those bonds. These result in networks of support. This is beneficial for the involved students because they are getting known and people become aware of their knowledge, which opens doors for them to continue their postgraduate studies, as in the case referred to by PO. But it is also good for the professor and her research group in Colombia:
I send one of my students to one of those laboratories, any one of them. She learns ways to do things, and when she comes back, she teaches us. We get to publish with them, I learn and I make space for other students, so that's an advantage. In terms of knowledge, it moves you fast, and you're with people of great academic prestige, and you're there, inside, and you're well inside.
‘Being well inside’ means that working to maintain good relationships with people at these top academic institutions supports the viability of further research with the professors’ students, despite any shortfalls in research funding. According to PO, ‘being well inside’ means being an active part of an international academic community: being a valid interlocutor, since they collaborate with each other in scientific projects with highly recognised and prestigious groups. In this way, PO and her students are part of the scientific debate and can make contributions to it. ‘Being well inside’ does not occur out of charity or pity; it is because the members of her research group make relevant contributions. This is significant for students to gain social capital, understood as ‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’, which ‘provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively-owned capital’ (Bourdieu 1986: 21) and allows for the reproduction of ‘useful relationships that can secure material or symbolic profits’ (Bourdieu 1986: 22). When social capital is conceptualised in this way, the network of relationships can be considered ‘the product of investment strategies’ (Bourdieu 1986: 22), as can be seen in PO's remarks:
When you don't leave the country, you see their names in the publications, but you don't have the opportunity to have a coffee with these people who are flesh and bone like us. [The research stays] make [the students] rise, make them lose some of the fears that one has here, as if one feels lesser. They come, and most of them are women students, mothers who are heads of households, and they come [back] transformed, they come with a capacity and a strength that makes them eat up the world. So that is nice, to see them grow not only on a scientific level, but also on a personal level: courageous women, who go forward.
Cultivating relationships involves taking care of these bonds, a way of doing research in which professors work to strengthen interpersonal contacts. Doing research under this practice of rebusque is based on the students’ trips, whereby they make use of equipment that the CPU does not have, use materials free of charge and learn other research methods, thus contributing to the development of research. The fact that their students can go to these foreign laboratories, often without having to finance their stay, shows how the professors look for ways for their students to continue advancing, even if the economic conditions in Colombia are not the most adequate. The cultivation of relationships, which allows one to request external support, is a way of making ends meet in the face of the shortcomings of the university and the scarcity of research resources.
Final reflections
In this article, I have demonstrated that some women professors in a Colombian public university have developed a strategy that benefits their students: rebusque. This practice arises due to the scarcity of resources. The main form of rebusque is through alliances, and it mostly emerges as three specific practices: being available to perform services required by public and private entities; developing marketing strategies to obtain materials; and cultivating relationships with colleagues to gain access to other laboratories through academic exchanges of students. This leads to a search for different types of capital, such as money to buy materials (including furniture); useful materials for ongoing research; and research stays to enable learning and the use of equipment. It is very important to emphasise that these practices of rebusque are directly related to benefiting students, which denotes care.
The rebusque indicates the existence of a feminine habitus because in all of these forms there is care for the bonds – that is, a series of personal dispositions generally associated with concern for the well-being of others, which have historically been assigned as a field of action specific to women and the feminine. All this financial management work, which involves caring for alliances, is on top of the teaching activities that the professors undertake. For women, however, these burdens are made more arduous by the ways that they look for resources and engage in care work outside and inside the university, while dealing with discrimination and subtle violence (Castelao-Huerta 2022). As a result, many of the women professors claim to work all the time, which means that there is an extension of their working hours and an intrusion of work into personal life. This occurs because the neoliberalisation of higher education institutions comes with a set of values that make individuals responsible instead of governments and organisations. Thus, some professors have to assume the responsibility of nurturing a new generation of researchers because this is not done by the institutions. Caring and careful practices within universities and their importance for the wider society should be recognised and institutionally supported in order to avoid burdening the few individuals who undertake this work.
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