Literature

In recent years, the casualisation of academic labour has heightened exponentially (Gupta et al. 2016). This follows a widespread adoption of neoliberal tactics of maintaining insecure, disposable workforces to facilitate the continual restructuring that this business model requires, creating and exacerbating widespread precarities and inequalities (Sennett 1998). In the UK, the University and College Union (UCU 2021) has identified that one-third of all academics in higher education are now on fixed-term contracts, with women and minoritised staff over-represented in these temporary posts. Despite this under-resourcing, students are positioned as consumers and UK universities give priority to the National Student Survey, Teaching Excellence and awards, which bolster cultures of immediate gratification for students (Nixon et al. 2016). This has particular implications for the everyday lived experiences of those who are temporarily employed, meaning that those who are fearful that their contracts may not be renewed may refrain from taking risks in teaching (Leathwood and Read 2022). Research suggests that as a result of increasing casualisation, a two-tier system is emerging with those on the margins taking on disproportionate shares of ‘academic housework’ – administration, teaching and pastoral care (Bozzon et al. 2018). This system is characterised by feminisation, racialisation (Bhopal 2015) and exploitation of casualised staff so that those cast as ‘research stars’ (Smyth 2017) can advance their careers, regardless of the impacts on careers and opportunities accorded to temporary staff (Zbyszewska 2017).

A body of literature around gender and precarity in the early-career stage is drawing out gendered, racialised and classed effects of such insecurity, including a lack of dependable income and benefits; a lack of mentoring, support and capacity-building; an inability to plan for the future; and the detrimental effects on self-esteem and professional identity of ongoing exclusion and marginalisation in everyday academic life (Acker and Haque 2017; Bataille et al. 2017; Read and Leathwood 2020; Murgia and Poggio 2018; Ivancheva et al. 2019; O'Keefe and Courtois 2019; Ylijoki 2013). Women may experience precarity in particular ways, staying in precarious situations longer and becoming ‘stuck’ on temporary contracts in the long term, with careers often taking a downward trajectory (O'Keefe and Courtois 2019). Women do the most exploitative, least secure work and tend to be channelled into part-time roles. Findings suggest that precarious academics are frequently less hopeful about prospects of developing careers (O'Keefe and Courtois 2019). Instead there may be a lack of institutional support, they can be stigmatised due to their low status and consequently their work is devalued; such staff can then be, as Courtois and O'Keefe (2015) describe it, caught in a ‘hamster wheel of precarity’ that can last for decades. Women in particular can become trapped in roles that comprise ‘dead-end jobs’ (Zbyszewska 2017), are debarred from promotional opportunities and have fewer opportunities and resources than male counterparts (Courtois and O'Keefe 2015). However, such workers can experience ambivalence in relation to their desire for a ‘dream job’ (Bozzon et al. 2018): they often have a passionate attachment to their work (Hey and Leathwood 2009) and feelings of being ‘lucky’ to have a job in academia at all (Loveday 2018). This should also be seen in the context of continuing gendered and classed inequities in the academy, underpinned by patriarchal, elitist and racist value structures despite a surface rhetoric of equality and diversity (Ahmed 2012; Reay 2004). Women, single parents, mature, disabled and working-class academics, sexual minorities, and racialised and migrant academics are particularly subject to academic marginalisation (Amsler and Motta 2017; Ivancheva et al. 2019).

Exclusions along gendered, classed and interrelated indices of inequality interlink with experiences of non-belonging, which often stem from being ‘otherised’ in such environments (Read et al. 2010). Elitist aspects of UK academia are reflected in physical environments and may particularly affect working-class academics who, like working-class students, may struggle to feel they ‘fit in’ (Reay et al. 2010). Experiences of non-belonging for both postgraduates and early-career academics have been linked to occupying liminal spaces ‘in-between’ student and fully fledged ‘real’ academic (Morris 2021; Morris et al. 2022).

Robyn Dowling and Lilia Mantai (2017) have observed that identifications as researchers are bound up with space, while Sarunwit Promsaka Na Sakronnakon and James Burford (2020) have described the ‘unworkable spaces’ that many postgraduates endure, for example being cramped or without natural light. This is also likely to affect early-career, temporarily employed academics who may lack the basic spaces and resources to do their jobs effectively, including being able to offer confidential and supportive meeting spaces for their students (Read and Leathwood 2020; UCU 2021). As with PhD researchers, they may be relegated to ‘hot desk’ areas where they cannot leave their belongings or undertake quiet scholarly work (Promaska Na Sakonnakon and Burford 2020). Beyond these practicalities, space is highly symbolic, consolidating power, privileges and hierarchies, dividing and marking out disciplinary, occupational and status differences and determining which bodies do and do not belong in the academy (Puwar 2004). For those at the bottom of the academic hierarchy this may contribute to felt senses of ‘in-between’ status, preventing identifications as researchers who are part of their community (Dowling and Mantai 2017). Helen Jarvis (2009) further suggests that academic spaces, whether classrooms, staff rooms, field trips or conferences, reproduce unequal gendered performances and power relations along elitist and ethnocentric lines.

One predominant concern in the literature that relates to the focus on space here is the current requirement and often necessity for (international) mobility in order to maintain and develop academic careers (Sautier 2021). This is likely to have a particular impact on those who face barriers to academic mobility, especially carers and those who are from marginalised, minority or tightly knit families, communities and kinship networks who may need to remain in a particular place and are therefore reliant on whatever work their local university offers. Deteriorating working conditions and challenges around developing cohesive occupational identities, combined with the imperative for transnational mobility, have rendered it difficult for academic workers to care for others and themselves (Ivancheva et al. 2019). Instead they can become caught up in multiple and contradictory expectations of demonstrating the marketability of teaching and research. This can force them to exploit any opportunities that arise, while simultaneously demonstrating active (often unpaid) academic citizenship. According to Ivancheva et al. (2019), such conditions have been normalised, despite some resistance to casualisation through industrial disputes.

Beyond such challenges for individual academics, there are implications for knowledge creation and teaching. As Carole Leathwood and Barbara Read (2022) observe, the framing of educator–student relationships as ‘customer service’, which is to be measured by student satisfaction scores, has the potential to undermine critical and emancipatory approaches to teaching. Precarious teaching staff in higher education are dependent on student satisfaction scores in order to maintain their positions and apply for further jobs and so may well avoid following approaches that may challenge or discomfort students. Rather, the ‘student-consumer model’ encourages output-focused utilitarian pedagogies. Furthermore, feminised and racialised staff are more vulnerable to receiving negative feedback from students (Heffernan 2021) with potentially disastrous consequences for their confidence and careers. Such constraints may further impact on the autonomy, professionalism, opportunities, academic freedom and everyday experiences of those working in the neoliberal academy. This article now turns to outline our methodology before sharing key findings in relation to space-place.

Methodology

Our feminist approach to academic knowledge production foregrounds the situatedness of knowledge (Haraway 1988), including the interplay between texts, bodies, subjectivities and spaces (both as subject matter and within the teaching context). We move between terminology of space, place and space-place (Fairchild 2021), recognising ways in which space (the physical surrounding in which we live and work) and place (in terms of specific geographical location) intertwine in our narratives and everyday experiences and meaning-making. When thinking about how we could best explore and capture lived gendered experiences of precarity and non-belonging in everyday space-places of academia, it was of vital importance to create an environment whereby both our individual and shared experience(s) of taking up space, both physically and metaphorically, could be explored. Data was collected through a walking tour of the space-place of the campus where our paths collided. This was followed by two co-interviews, specifically using the mobile method of ‘bimbling’ (Moles 2008). Bimbling refers to the act of wondering aimlessly through ‘a co-ingredient environment’ (Moles 2008: paragraph 4.3), combining place, space, culture, stories, bodies and emotions. These joint walking interviews and autobiographical reflections illuminated ways in which our sense of non-belonging was spatialised and reinforced in particular academic space-places.

The co-interview took place on the university campus where we had met and which held particular meanings for us as part of our life narratives. The building was where we had both been interviewed for an academic position, where one of us had studied and where we had both previously been employed in various temporary academic roles following our PhD completions. In thinking of where to physically conduct the co-interview, we suggested the idea of meeting in the building that was home to the department where we had both at different points undertaken academic work. Located on the periphery of the campus, the building sits on top of a hill and is less frequented by students. This allowed us to talk more freely, away from the ears of students, whom we did not feel comfortable overhearing our corridor talk about the ‘backstage’ of university life. Moreover, as a physical location, the space provided room to sit and talk. While this decision was rooted initially in practical considerations, this physical location also had metaphorical resonances for our experiences of navigating academia. Our gazing out onto the day-to-day running of the university from this vantage point prompted further reflection and discussion. Teaching rarely occurs in this building and, with the exception of small seminar spaces, it is more of an academic home to staff members (e.g. offices, meeting rooms). Students tend to only pay a visit when they attend academic staff's office hours, so this building operates somewhat on the margins of university life. This physical peripheral location was reminiscent of how we had felt at times, working within academia on fixed-term, teaching-focused contracts. We had felt that we were a small fleeting part of academia as opposed to being a core fixture of university life, central to its functioning. We nevertheless each had our own attachments to this space-place as it played a part in our lives, career biographies and memories, and was where we had made meaningful connections and enjoyed valuable personal-professional experiences.

In exploring lived gendered experiences of precarity and non-belonging in everyday spaces and places of academia, we required a method that would enable us to explore and capture ways in which space, place and people combine to shape our experiences of the ‘lived environment’ (Lefebvre 1991). We felt, like Law and Urry (2004), that we needed to adopt a method that would allow for the ‘emotional’, ‘sensory’ and ‘fleeting’ minutiae of everyday working life in the academy. Thus, mobile methods were employed. We wished to pay attention to the issues of place and space in a way that accounted for and encompassed their mobility. We wished to foreground the importance of recognising affinities between personal narratives and movement through place, and thus employed the concept of bimbling (Moles 2008). Wandering without a particular destination facilitated dialogue between the individual and the place (Anderson 2004: 258). The process of bimbling ‘invokes memories of a place, personal and cultural, and it works off the signs and symbols in the space, moving between social understandings of different events and personal webs of understanding’ (Moles 2008: paragraph 4.5). This enabled us to reveal ways in which space, place, the personal and the cultural interlinked and combined to shape our subjective gendered experiences of precarity and non-belonging in everyday spaces and places of academia. Culturally, different ways of knowing the university derive from personal experiences of the space interlinked with histories of inclusions and exclusions in education.

As we embarked on our co-interview we reflected on our trajectories into and through academia, and on the memorable moments, spaces and places that we felt had shaped our experiences and attachments to it. This is in no part a reflection on particular institutions or departments, colleagues or students, but rather on the broader landscape of UK higher education, academia as a global factory and ourselves as the reserve army of labour, and so we situate our discussion within critiques of neoliberal academia. Lastly, in the way in which we have told our stories, we wish to recognise the social construction of gender, and its intersections with class, race, disability and other indices of power and inequality. We acknowledge that much has been left out, namely the privileges that have enabled us to ‘pass’ more easily than others within academia, such as our whiteness (Samatar et al. 2021). The stories that we tell in what follows are partial, fleeting and exist as snapshots; they are not the entire picture, nor do they encompass every facet of our lived experiences. Likewise, we do not claim objective truth about ‘the academic experience’ but acknowledge the situatedness of this article in a specific moment and context and in relation to our gendered, classed, raced and ableised positionalities. Our aim here is to contribute to understandings of gendered experiences of precarity and non-belonging in everyday academia. What follows is a discussion of key themes that emerged from this process in relation to space and place: ‘On the periphery’, ‘in-between spaces’, ‘ambivalent spaces’ and ‘spaces of resistance’.

On the periphery and in-between

As we moved around various spaces we stopped and reflected on what they signified for us and how we felt in these spaces. Many conversations centred on a felt sense of lack of permanent belonging to the department or institution and were reflected in the spaces and the ways in which they were organised. However, there was ambivalence around this; certain areas of this seemingly neutral corporate environment sometimes felt like home due to the importance of our work and our relationships with colleagues and students, and this prompted our desire to gain full-time permanent work here. While exclusions may not have been ‘deliberate’, spaces nevertheless underlined hierarchies that place precariously employed staff – especially those who may occupy underprivileged positionalities – both physically and metaphorically on the periphery. Kimber (2003) has written of the ‘tenured core’ and ‘tenuous periphery’ in describing the emergence of a two-tiered system in neoliberal academia, and this is often materialised physically. What or who is valued is reflected in the ways in which academic spaces are organised. In this research-intensive institution, those involved in feminised, classed and racialised activities of teaching and pastoral care are positioned at the lower end of the hierarchy (see also Morris et al. 2022). This can be reflected in the allocation of spaces (shared rather than single offices or no office at all), the positioning of those offices (in a prominent or background location) and their quality. The lack of suitable working spaces for academics on temporary contracts has been identified as a barrier by Read and Leathwood (2020). Temporary staff who are often used as teaching cover (as alluded to in the extract below) for research-active staff members may not have a visible presence or full membership as faculty; rather, they perform invisible ‘academic housework’ (Reay 2004), which is undervalued yet essential. This felt sense of being semi-outsiders, not fully part of things, not fully legitimate, accepted citizens of the academy (Sümer 2020), was encapsulated within our conversation (below). The allusion here to a ‘girl’ conveys a sense of infantilisation, belying the age and experience of the speaker:

I always felt a bit peripheral coming in and doing bits and bobs, I'd never had a full-time job, and I'd never had an office and I wasn't like part of the faculty, I was just like a ‘cover girl’.

The next extract from our co-interview (below) is indicative of how arrangements of spaces within academic departments can reflect, contribute to and consolidate hierarchies. Spaces can underline and reinforce material, social and epistemic dimensions of precarity and non-belonging through withholding resources and marking out who is perceived as a legitimate ‘knower’. Spaces may also become affective containers including shame – a felt sense of occupying a lower status. In this extract, allusions to the speaker feeling as though they were ‘in an enclosure’ metaphorically depicted a felt sense of dehumanisation – of being positioned as ‘less than’ – that Mason and Megoran (2021) have identified as a feature of precarious academic labour. A physical demarcation is set up between the ‘real academics’ (Morris et al. 2022) and their ‘others’:

This space we're sitting in has associations for me … I remember during my time as a part-time tutor/teaching fellow sitting here and just to describe it, it's an area where visiting staff/tutors/hourly paid lecturers sit and there's computers and chairs and these like built-up walls around it – it seems like such a metaphor! And then there's a corridor running around it and all the real academics have their offices in the corridor so they're all tucked away in their offices and what felt so strange about it was that when colleagues wanted to speak to me they would literally be speaking down to me and I kind of felt like I was in an enclosure! I feel that even though I know and love people here, often people are in their offices anyway and I just felt so isolated; I really felt not having my own space to work in, I really felt at the bottom of the hierarchy, um, there was this kind of office [temporary staff] can book like for one or two hours a week that we all have to share in order to see our students.

Leathwood and Read (2022) have drawn attention to the lack of time-space for precarious academics to develop positive pedagogical relationships with students, finding that these staff often did not have access to appropriate spaces for student meetings. Not only does this potentially impact negatively on the quality of student experiences and learning, but it marks precarious academics out as marginal. Sara Motta and Anna Bennett (2018) similarly note that caring pedagogies, which centre the needs of students, require appropriate pedagogical spaces for meaningful encounters to take place and to foster safety and belonging, which are especially important for marginalised students. However, it is too often the case that non-permanent staff lack access to such spaces. One of us remembered having to provide a supervision in a small photocopying room (essentially a cupboard) in one department; the implications of this lack of resource are serious for student experiences as well as working conditions. The inconvenience, discomfort and lack of care in the design and organisation of academic spaces was highlighted in our conversations and written reflections (as shared below). This emphasised ableist assumptions implicit in expectations around navigating a campus and the physicality of an intensive teaching role, alongside the reinforcement of impermanence through the lack of adequate space:

We also passed the bland, impersonal office space which was booked by the hour so that temporary staff could offer an office hour to students. It reminded me of the discomfort of carrying everything with me from building to building and never having anywhere to leave things – library books, teaching materials, writing equipment, lunch, water, coat, extra jumper, etc. I would often arrive at the office hour, which was a first-come, first-served slot, feeling hurried and stressed, usually after a teaching session in another location and after an uphill walk (which was sometimes painful as I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). (Author 1)

Such struggles are invisibilised but can be intensely felt, and as we walked through the building some of these deeply held emotional, affective responses resurfaced. However, the act of revisiting, sharing and gaining distance and perspective meant that some of these feelings started to lose their momentum. The following quotation conveys a felt sense of occupying a spectral presence who exists as a resource to provide teaching cover but is otherwise unseen:

I also felt a bit invisible … you're just floating along without leaving a trace as though I don't really exist and no one would notice if I was here or not … as long as the teaching gets done – you're not really a person but a lump of resource.

‘In-between’ and liminal spaces around the university provided moments in which feelings of precarity and un-belonging were compounded and intensified (Morris 2021; Morris et al. 2022). Mundane spaces such as the car park and department reception area were sites of intense memories and affective associations. The reception space, in the building where we started our tour, held significance for our shared story as it was the waiting area where we had seen each other on the interview day and were hit with the realisation that as friends, neoliberal academia had put us in competition with one another. While neutral on the face of it, the reception space proved to be filled with memories that were in turn intense, pleasant and painful. This space at the centre of the building felt more equal than the corridors filled with academic offices and clear markers of power and prestige. The staffed reception area was often a site of pleasant exchanges between colleagues and it formed an ideal meeting place or opportunity to greet each other, at least in passing; certain spaces facilitated collegial exchange more than others. Sometimes meetings with students would take place in adjacent small cubicles (a less than ideal alternative to a private office). Usually, this area would be quiet – an area to pass through rather than to pause in for long periods of time. During term time it would sometimes be bustling with students moving between spaces.

The car park was a space of waiting where one world would meet another. One of us reminisced about being met by a relative after the job interview and how intensely she felt about the need for this job. The job, beyond being ‘just a job’, signified the ability to be in a place that was meaningful and familiar. Most importantly, it would mean being nearer to family and community, a key concern for some working-class academics and those with close kinship ties and caring responsibilities. The neoliberal ideal of the mobile academic was not achievable for someone with emotional, intimate, caring ties and obligations in a specific region and locale: space and place were closely intertwined (Fairchild 2021).

Ambivalent spaces: At the sharp edge of teaching

We both expressed ambivalence about the spaces we taught in. Teaching spaces had positive associations in many respects and we shared moments of joy and passion about our work. However, in the current climate where students are positioned as consumers, combined with our relative lack of power as women on temporary contracts, we sometimes felt exposed, discomforted and disempowered. There is a history of women not being seen as competent ‘knowers’ in the academy (Code 1991; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. 2012) and this was further exacerbated by class, disability and our precarious positionalities. In this way precarity was not simply material or social but was also epistemic – our legitimacy as academics was continually called into question. One further area of discomfort came from working in a research-intensive environment in which teaching activity was less valued than research (Morris et al. 2022). However, the value we placed on teaching was reflected in our career biographies. One of us moved away from a research position in a Russell Group university to take up this temporary teaching-only post (albeit coupled with the desire to be closer to home). The other moved to a more teaching-focused institution for a permanent opportunity. We discussed the way that following a less high-status career path at a less prestigious university was an act of resistance.

I actually do value teaching, do value teaching and I'm very happy doing that and actually one of my friends was like ‘Oh my God, that's so radical, that is like such an act of resistance, the fact that you're saying “Do you know what? I don't value, you know, what I've been told from the industry to value”’. I didn't really see it like that until she said that, so I think coming back to [this institution] was part of me (a) identifying what type of career path I wanted in life, and (b) resisting, you know, the notion that we should always aspire to be on research-intensive contracts, and just turn out tons of publication[s], and teaching to be seen as like a secondary or an additional thing.

Having crossed the car park we entered a building that had actually been the site of early teaching experiences and held affective memories of exhilaration, excitement and pride, but also anxiety, fear and doubt. Taking some time to pause in one of the classrooms prompted reflection on experiences of teaching and of the tensions and ambivalences situated within the current neoliberal moment, which had changed even in the six years since one of us had begun teaching here. This entailed a transactional customer-service model and what we referred to as a ‘bums on seats’ approach whereby universities compete for student customers, resulting in rising class sizes. It was noted that a climate of competitiveness affected peer-to-peer interactions, with some students disengaging and other students sometimes not wanting to share their work with others for fear of their ideas being used.

Author 2: I definitely get a sense from my seminars that they just want … I try to chuck questions at them and they will think about it a bit but only at the level of ‘what do I think’ rather than what does the reading say, let's think deeply about this level, they sort of wait for me to give them the answers. It's tricky because I love teaching but I don't love that side of it to be honest.

Author 1: I really love teaching but I've really noticed huge shifts in terms of the expectations, the demands, the dynamics of the classroom and that's something we're dealing with. Coming back to careers, the onus is now really on us in terms of learning and teaching – we have to raise our game and kind of find ways to stimulate and engage and really get students motivated …

Teaching spaces therefore held for us mixed emotions and ambivalences – they were a location where we experienced a certain amount of autonomy and were able to exercise some creativity and undertake meaningful activities. Simultaneously, they were a site of high pressure and increasing demands. At times we had felt the need to be performative and embody a ‘clown’ or entertainer in order to motivate and engage. This reflects the exposure that precarious educators in particular face in neoliberal academia. The Teaching Excellence Framework and the emphasis placed on National Student Surveys mean that student evaluations hold weight and potentially impact on academic careers if negative feedback is received, despite reflecting biases (Heffernan 2021). We were conscious of the spectre of negative evaluations and the accompanying fear of introducing challenging content (Read and Leathwood 2020). There was certainly a sense that the responsibility for learning was being shifted further away from students and placed onto us as individual lecturers through such neoliberal measures and metrics. The affective dimensions of our conversation shifted from shared joy and excitement to frustration and a sense of being isolated and carrying this burden of responsibility alone.

Author 2: I hate that though, the idea that it's up to us to excite them and motivate them – to me this is post-compulsory education. It's not up to me to dress up as a clown in order to teach [the subject] but I get that it needs to be interesting and stimulating.

This performative aspect of our work reflected the contemporary neoliberal regimes and consumer-orientated framework we were working within and was also highly gendered, reflecting intensive emotional labour (Hochschild 1983) involved in teaching, which often falls onto women. There is a gendered construction of teachers at play whereby women tend to be presented as being caring and therefore responsible for good pedagogical relationships and student support (Morley 1998) whereas men are identified with theatrical lectures (Morris et al. 2022). This reification of a masculinised ‘rock star’ model of academia in the neoliberal context (Smyth 2017) was far from our style of teaching and our values as lecturers, as both of us are committed to feminist pedagogies involving inclusive spaces, which resist hierarchies and power relationships. This further reflects ways in which certain bodies, values, dispositions and ways of knowing and being are more or less valued in academia (Puwar 2004). Despite the complex challenges of navigating consumer imperatives that sometimes conflicted with our values as critical feminist educators, there was a shared sense of being isolated and left to deal with these problems alone. Indeed, those on precarious contracts may have limited access to training, resources and support, and for one of us who was juggling multiple contracts, there was little time or space to reflect and confer with colleagues or attend meetings and share concerns. When one of us described precariously employed academics as ‘self-assembly academics’, this highlighted the neoliberal responsibilisation of early-career academics for their own training, resources and self-management.

Spaces of resistance

Walking back towards where we had started, we paused by a café where one of us recalled meaningful conversations. It felt separate from the academic space and, as such, was an environment in which emotions could be felt, acknowledged and expressed and heard, resisting notions of academia as an ‘emotion-free zone’ (Hey and Leathwood 2009). Some of these conversations were recounted, alongside politically orientated and resistant discussions, as the café had been a meeting point during industrial action. Memories of intense pedagogical discussions in planning and reflecting on teaching sessions or meeting with like-minded colleagues with an interest in feminist pedagogies arose. The café may have acted as a site for rich conversations because it was separate from the main campus, where there may have been some fear of surveillance, of saying the wrong thing, being overheard or giving a less-than-professional impression. The informality of a café setting facilitated more open, expressive ways of being and a chance to vent frustrations, anger and disappointment. Times spent there tended to be in-between times that were not ‘timetabled’ as part of our formal working day, and this enabled invaluable formative moments:

I'm just pausing here because this little café means a lot to me because it's not in one of the big buildings and it's been a place where I've had lots of interesting discussions like on feminist pedagogies and it seems to be a little space that's in-between, it's not one thing or the other.

It had also been a space to share experiences of precarity and where one of us had felt safe to meet with their union representative. Narrating this episode, the author described the crying that had taken place, indicating the depth of distress at the working conditions and insecurity they were experiencing at that point:

I remember sitting in the middle of that room once though with tears pouring down my face and it was about precarity and I was talking to X about how difficult I was finding it being in this ongoing casualised thing and I can't even remember what sparked it off but X was really supportive. Just kind of listening – I'd been pulled in to teach something for the xth year in a row and it was a course I taught for x years and I absolutely loved it and it was going really well, the students loved it and then suddenly it was pulled and I was pulled for no reason … I think I was also upset because my contract ended as soon as the teaching finished and also, you know, I was not quite sure what would happen next, if I would have employment. I felt I was being used – picked up and dropped.

The act of crying in academia has been elsewhere theorised as a counterpoint to idealised expectations of masculinised standards of rationality and self-control that tend to dominate (Hacker 2018). This site of what might be considered ‘improper’ tears (Hacker 2018) was at once a repository of affective memories and a space where strong emotions were shared alongside conversations about the working conditions and structural inequalities that produced such responses. Ultimately it became linked with actions and expressions of solidarity, and this was the focus of our final reflective conversation, in which we reflected on how important these space-places and moments of solidarity are and how we had created such an opportunity through our conversations. While both the spaces of the academy and conditions of precarity seem to separate and atomise us, we found ways to overcome and reclaim resistance through solidarity.

Conclusions

In this article we have shared experiences and insights into non-belonging in academia of two early-career academics on temporary contracts. Through its focus on space and place, the article contributes insights into ways in which precarity is experienced multidimensionally with interlinked material, social, epistemic and affective domains. Our research was conducted in the context of a university campus and we recognise that ‘the university’ as a physical entity is often visualised through notions of ‘the campus’, which has historically been a site of exclusion for certain gendered, classed, disabled, aged and racialised bodies (Puwar 2004). Our methodology, involving a walking tour and bimbling, co-interviews and reflections, enabled us to focus on space-places and their affective, personal, biographical, epistemic, relational and political associations and dimensions. Space-places served as physical and symbolic containers for our hopes, dreams, memories and emotions, in turn enabling or constraining belonging. They illuminated power dynamics and hierarchies that have long been entrenched in academia in tandem with the imposition of neoliberal management regimes and the performativities they demand. In-between spaces create metaphors for the liminality of our positioning as ‘almost-academic’ at turning points in our career trajectories. They reminded us of our sense of not being sure of ‘our place’ and our experiences of uncertainty and waiting, with livelihoods and futures hanging in the balance. Our mixed emotions within learning spaces, as educators experiencing ambivalence in a challenging context and as bodies and subjectivities that do not quite belong, evoked visceral responses to insecure working conditions. Our conversations highlighted how complex and challenging it was to make choices that were both meaningful for us and played to our strengths and values while taking account of the material, social and epistemic constraints that shape what is possible.

In terms of ‘belonging’ we experienced ambivalence, occupying positionalities of both privilege and disadvantage in these spaces. Rather than simply ‘belonging or not belonging’, we have shown that such feelings are not static but shift across different times and spaces. Some spaces were felt to be ‘our space’, thus fostering belonging and positive experiences of collegiality, collaboration and collectivity, while we occupied other spaces in ways that were fleeting, or in which we experienced power disparities with colleagues and students and were not always taken seriously as legitimate knowers. This fostered a feeling that ‘we don't belong’. Our experiences were not wholly unique but reflected broader inequitable structures, highlighting detrimental consequences of the adoption of a model of continual restructuring that requires a disposable workforce (Sennett 1998). Those most marginalised are placed as teachers at the ‘front line’ of customer service with their livelihoods dependent on the success or otherwise of their ‘performance’. Yet they are often not accorded the resources, support, recognition or status that would enable their flourishing as academics. Temporary staff, who are often feminised, classed and racialised, are therefore made responsible for successful institutional metrics yet cast as expendable. This mitigates against the conditions required for meaningful knowledge creation, pedagogies and collegiality. This state of affairs, we argue, is unsustainable and undermines institutional and sectoral stated commitments to equality, diversity and inclusion.