Learning and Teaching (LATISS)

This Special Issue brings together contributions from contrasting contexts to explore ways in which higher education learning and teaching is affected by precarious working conditions and ways in which this is gendered. The articles here address precarity in three different geographical contexts: Western and Northern Europe, represented by the United Kingdom and Sweden; Central-Eastern Europe, illustrated by Hungary; and South America, exemplified by Colombia.

This article explores how women full professors engage in practices of rebusque to try to offer conditions that can allow their students to conduct academic research. Thanks to the efforts of the professors, these students can finish their degrees despite the prevalent precarity and scarcity of government funds in Colombia. Mainly based on twenty-four semi-structured and in-depth interviews with women professors, this article argues that the main form of rebusque is through alliances, and it emerges as three practices: (1) being available to perform services required by public and/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.

Drawing on a case study of media technology, this article addresses theory–practice conflict in an educational work setting. This conflict is expressed in employment contracts and career opportunities and in how professional identity is made. We demonstrate how ideas about practical and theoretical knowledge are negotiated in the academic career system, as well as made on different organisational levels and at intersections with multiple factors such as gender and precarious work conditions. The study is based on a collective memory-work and content analysis of policy documents and communication material. Our results highlight a dissonance between symbolic discourse about practice-based education, as highlighted in external communications, and the academic career system in which theoretical knowledge is more highly valued, as demonstrated in teachers’ positions and assignments.

This article investigates precarious working conditions and their effects on female academics working in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in Hungary. We aim to show how precarity in different formats, such as contractual and economic precarity combined with gender-based discrimination, is present through career stages based on twenty-six individual and group interviews conducted with female PhD holders, including both researchers at the early and mature stages of their careers. The results confirm a precarity paradox whereby those with the highest level of education experienced fixed-term contracts, low incomes and gender-based discrimination over time at different career stages, and junior and senior female teachers and researchers suffered significant impacts at the personal, job, career and organisational levels, undermining their research excellence, well-being and career progress.

This research article investigates the impact of childbearing and horizontal segregation on income disparities among young academics in Hungary. Using a comprehensive, large-scale survey data set on the demographics and working conditions of academics in Hungary, this research highlights the precarious conditions in the Hungarian academic sector. The findings reveal that researchers and lecturers often rely on multiple sources of income and work extra hours to secure their livelihoods, creating a disadvantageous situation for women with young children, especially during the highly competitive early stages of their careers. The results suggest that the income differences between men and women are to a large extent explained by the so-called fatherhood wage premium and that horizontal gender segregation of the scientific fields has a significant effect on income disparities as well.

This article explores gendered day-to-day lived experiences of (relatively) marginalised teaching-only academic staff on insecure contracts through the lens of space and place. It stems from a collaborative auto-ethnography focusing on the experience of two UK early-career academics on temporary contracts (at the time of this research) who occupy contrasting positionalities. Exploring gendered lived experiences of precariously employed teaching-only staff through joint walking interviews and auto-biographical reflections illuminated ways in which our sense of non-belonging was spatialised and reinforced in particular academic spaces. We share insights into multidimensional aspects of precarity, encompassing material, social, epistemic and affective experiential domains, with a particular emphasis on the pains and pleasures of learning and teaching. We consider some of the wider implications of precarity for learning, teaching and knowledge creation, and also signal possibilities and potentialities for creating moments and space-places for resistance and solidarity.

Ash Vatansever and Aysuda Kölemen (eds) (2022), Academic Freedom and Precarity in the Global North: Free as a Bird Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 184 pp., ISBN: 9781032189192