Between and Betwixt: Experiences of Academic Precarity and Resistance During COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper reflects on our joint gendered experience of precarity in UK Higher Education; a conversation that started during the pandemic as a means of negotiating a joint sense of liminality and disorientation during this period. Academic precariousness impacts women specifically (Zhang, 2018),
and through an auto-ethnographic exploration, we argue that we find ourselves constantly betwixt and between in terms of working conditions, career development and research, and this has been exacerbated during the pandemic. Our experiences of liminality are inextricably linked to time, the nature of which shifted during the health crisis. For precarious academics, time is always in short supply. The increased pressure to publish and to develop means that even though research takes time, the desire to take this time is often in direct competition with the 'publish or perish' conditions of neoliberal universities (Mountz et al., 2015). Furthermore, precarious academics often experience time running away from them, with a constant feeling that they are running out of
time. This is especially so as precarity is often long lasting rather than short term, and a source of anxiety for most early career academics. The pandemic has further intensified this experience of liminality and anxiety for us. Moreover, there has been the imperative that the pandemic, and especially the lockdown, should be seen as a fertile time for research, or for catching up whilst for many academics on fixed term contracts it has also been a time of great uncertainty. Our analysis, therefore, focuses on our experiences of being between and betwixt as women academics, our positionality in the academic field, our strategies, our moments of failure and resistance as well as the strategies have developed against precariousness during the pandemic. It is our view that in order to build effective strategies to support precarious academics we need to understand the impact that the timeframes imposed by academia have. We, therefore, view precarity as a liminal space in which exploitation and resistance coexist. In the context of COVID-19 we will discuss how increasing acceptance of remote working has led to increased networks of support and accessibility. Finally, we place our discussion of precarity in academia within the wider phenomena of precariousness within capitalist societies and the rise of the 'attention economy' (Odell, 2020), where, as in academia, time is linked to
productive activity.