You are warmly invited to a hybrid research seminar entitled

"Precarity and Resistance in the Marketised University"

featuring Dr Lena Wånggren and Dr Krista Bonello

(with Carys Hill as discussant)

It will take place as follows:

• Friday, November 15^th
• 13.00 to 15.00 (UK time; to convert this to your time-zone, click here)
• Hybrid event:

• face to face at the University of Warwick, Social Sciences Building: S2.77
• online via Teams

Abstract:

The precarisation of work has become a key feature of contemporary academia: in the UK, around half of all academic staff are precariously employed on insecure hourly-paid, fixed-term, or ad-hoc contracts. In this talk, Krista and Lena will share seven years of collaborative feminist work, providing a snapshot of the experiences of a generation of teachers and researchers for whom precarity and ill health is the norm. With examples from their book Working Conditions in a Marketised University SystemLink opens in a new window, they demonstrate how contractual precarity invades all areas of life, threatening feminist knowledges and careers. Crucially, contractual precarity has specific intersectional gendered and racialised impacts, with women and/or people of colour more likely to be employed on insecure contracts and more acutely impacted. The talk will share experiences of insecure work but also strategies of resistance, including community-building and trade union organising.

Speaker Bios:

• Dr Lena Wånggren is a researcher and teacher at the University of Edinburgh. She works on gender, intersectionality and social justice in nineteenth-century literature and culture, alongside interdisciplinary work on equalities in the contemporary workplace. Her current UKRI/BA-funded project (with Cecile Menard) In Their Own Time examines marginalised casualised academics’ unpaid and invisibilised labour. Lena is also a trade union representative, most recently serving as President of University and College Union Scotland.
• Dr Krista Bonello is a research support officer with the Centre for Labour Studies and a visiting senior lecturer with the Department of English at the University of Malta, as well as being a research fellow with the University of Kent. Her research interests range across several disciplines, including labour studies, literature, law, higher education, and video games, among others. Her recent research has focused on academic labour, and she is also part of the COST action VOICES: Making Young Researchers’ Voices Heard for Gender Equality. She is an elected council member of the academic trade union UMASA at the University of Malta.

This seminar is free and open to all, but advance registration is required.

To register for a place, CLICK HERE.

If you have any questions about the event, please email cswg-events@warwick.ac.uk

If you have accessibility requirements or there are any adjustments we can make to support your full participation, you can let us know through the booking page above.

This event is organised by the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, in collaboration with Warwick UCU.

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