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Academia is not the first area that comes to mind when speaking of precarity. It is often considered a space of knowledge production, status, social prestige, and sometimes – but not always – “progressiveness”. Despite this privileged access to status, academics are not immune to precarity, as systematic powerlessness is distributed along all social strata, including the . Precarity has been presented as a state of being for many and a condition of our times – where we are experiencing the weakening of welfare states, the growth of neoliberal social order and economies, climate change and the recent pandemic-induced state of precarity. 

The academy’s current state is precarious for many reasons, including , , insular community, , unhealthy working conditions, and within a neoliberal context that promotes , individualises responsibility, masks inequalities, and pathologises . In addition, Eurocentrism in academia leads to the (re)reproduction of inequalities in the . This makes academic conditions for migrant academics, especially for those with ambiguous (legal) status, as the loss of previously built social networks and various forms of discrimination and disadvantage impact their lives as academics and as migrants. 

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Coupled with the rampant neoliberal and competition-based work culture in academic spheres in the Global North, inequality materialises in diverse forms in academia. Discrimination based on , , ability and age – among – has been shown to affect everyday life, the physical and mental health of academics, and “survival” within an academic system that is often characterised by individualism and . Academia inherits the flaws of the larger social system in which it is embedded. As Cecilia Ridgeway puts it, the Western labour market is only . The discrimination mentioned above has intersectional effects on the everyday lives, career paths, mental health and life course trajectories of migrant academics.

Precarity has already been used to analyse how the current state of affairs in the academy contributes to and moulds academic careers into and to answer the question of whether precarity can serve as a critical concept for challenging social exclusions or . We draw on how (feminist) scholarship has taken up precarity as a concept to illustrate different forms of and powerlessness. We extend this structural and lived experience of powerlessness to the realm of academia by centring on autoethnographic and autobiographic insights, and thereby also proliferating accounts of precarity, creating more dialogue around it. Precarity is not a set of fixed conditions but a complex and multidimensional state that is context-dependent, relational, relative, material and embodied. 

Resilience refers to strategies of endurance that people adopt to facilitate their day-to-day living but which that make their lives difficult. It can be related to how individuals and societies adapt to externally imposed change. Some argue that, even if we cannot change the world, we can . Resilience is a currently debated concept, especially because it has expanded to include neoliberal subjectivities through its use within . Neoliberalism is understood here as a rationality of government performed through regimes of subjectification that extend the logic of the market – and, specifically, the principles of competition and inequality – to .  

In this view, resilience becomes a normative concept, fit for neoliberal logic. However, there is a post-neoliberal discourse on resilience as well, which opens up the possibility for resilience to be conceptualised in a way where individuals are not mere targets of top-down or bottom-up frameworks of government, but contextually empowered selves in a . In the latter view that we adopt, resilience may have the potential to enable survival and help subjects learn and prepare for uncertainty and challenges in the future. 

Resilience is, however, not experienced in the same way by all people, because our individual vulnerabilities constitute our “un-freedoms” or the restrictions – material or ideological – that prevent us . Not everyone is afforded the same level of resilience, and scholarly literature has already revealed the and of resilience. Adapting to change, resisting structural challenges and preparing for future uncertainties is difficult in the presence of inequality, precarity and the shortage or lack of support systems. Different narratives highlight exactly this: that the capacity to become resilient is not distributed equally.

Olga Burlyuk is assistant professor in the department of political science and Ladan Rahbari is assistant professor in the department of sociology, both at the University of Amsterdam.

Extracted with permission from (Open Book Publishers).

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