The Politics of Motherhood in the Marketised University

Mother-academics face multiple systematic barriers to remaining in higher education and reaching the benchmarks which are paradigmatic of academic success. This presentation explores these barriers and reflects on practices... [ view full abstract ]

Mother-academics face multiple systematic barriers to remaining in higher education and reaching the benchmarks which are paradigmatic of academic success. This presentation explores these barriers and reflects on practices emerging in the work of the Centre for Excellence in Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE), University of Newcastle which seek to challenge and transgress such exclusionary conditions of academic labour.

In Australia women constitute just fewer than twenty percent of academic professors (most of whom are white). Across the globe women are less likely to be considered excellent academics or research academics. Women often lag behind in terms of publications and attracting grants due to their invisibilised caring roles and responsibilities. Academic lifestyle also affects women’s wider relationships. Women academics are more likely not to marry, have fewer children and many choose to remain childless. Mother academics are more likely to be in part time work/study and be lower down in the ranks and/or on fixed term and temporary contracts. To these tensions are added the psychological and social splitting described by women who suffer from multiple and intersecting oppressions of class, race, gender, sexuality and bodily ability.

This presentation will map using a feminist auto-ethnographic methodology the concrete ways in which this context impacts upon the conditions of labour and life of mother-academics with a particular focus on the temporalities, spatialities and subjectivities fostered by the intensification of marketisation. It will demonstrate how the ideal neoliberal subject is grounded in individualisation, flexibility, survivalist competition and personal profitable exchanges which can result in the exclusion of women.

It will then explore, reflecting on practices emerging within the work of CEEHE ways in which we might nurture ‘other’ ways of becoming academic and producing the university which ensure the inclusion and participation of mother-academics.