Susan Berridge

A few weeks ago, I attended the annual MeCCSA conference, held at the
University of Leeds. A dominant strand of the event centred around
contemporary working cultures in the creative industries, with
presentations on precarity, issues of diversity and equality within the
sector and the psychological implications of 'failure' to name but a
few. My own paper explored gendered discourses of care in the screen
sector, looking at how care is discussed in official reports on issues
of equality in the film and TV industries and thinking about inherent
incompatibilities between cultural labour and care responsibilities. My
interest in this topic emerged from facilitating student analysis of a
survey run by [Raising Films](https://www.raisingfilms.com/), an
organisation set up to explore the (gendered) impact of parental and
wider care responsibilities on the career trajectories of people working
in the film and television industries.

Many of the discussions that followed the MeCCSA papers highlighted
parallels between working cultures in the creative sector and academia,
something I was also struck by when working with Raising Films. In this
blog, I want to reflect further on care and academic labour, focusing
specifically on Early Career Academics (ECAs), and considering the
significance of career stage to the way in which the challenges of
balancing care with precarious academic labour are experienced. This
blog is indebted to previous cst blogs on working cultures in UK higher
education, such as Catherine Johnson's excellent '[Working Ourselves to
Death](https://cstonline.net/working-ourselves-to-death)' from January
2015, Karen Boyle's thought-provoking response a month later on
'[Working Others to Death](https://cstonline.net/working-others-death)',
and Richard Hewett's '[Goodbye to all
that](https://cstonline.net/goodbye-to-all-that-by-richard-hewett/)', a
blog that resonated with me, reflecting upon his experiences of
temporary teaching contracts.

Both the creative industries and academia are marked by an increasing
casualisation of labour, potentially long hours, feast/famine patterns
of working, job insecurity and resulting financial instability and
heightened stress and anxiety. Within academia, this precarity is keenly
felt by ECAs, many of whom are on hourly (low) paid contracts,
characterised by irregular working patterns that are subject to constant
change (Gill and Donaghue, 2016: 92). Many ECAs piece together work from
several different institutions and, as Hewett notes in his blog, it is
common not to be paid over the summer, thus creating a necessity to pick
up further work in other sectors.

This situation is tough for *all* ECAs, but for those with care
responsibilities -- and typically, it is women who remain
disproportionately affected by duties of care -- these challenges are
exacerbated (Bosanquet, 2017). The highly competitive nature of the
academic sector means that ECAs are encouraged to maintain their profile
at all times: publishing, applying for funding, presenting at
conferences, taking on teaching. I took on hourly paid teaching work
when my son was 12 weeks old because I had an intense fear of taking
time out and not being able to get back in. The lack of maternity pay
when on precarious contracts was another consideration. (I realise that
out-with the UK system, 12 weeks is a relatively long time to be off.)
While I enjoyed that period of teaching, at the same time, as Catherine
Johnson notes in her blog, the common 'doing what you love' argument can
become a justification for not having boundaries between work/life. That
blurring of boundaries at an early time in my son's life resulted in me
feeling that I wasn't really 'present' either at work or at home, which
in turn impacted significantly on my mental health.

Inconsistent working patterns means that it is difficult to schedule
consistent and affordable childcare while on precarious contracts and
financial insecurity becomes even more pressing. I was only able to
teach at that time because I have a supportive partner who works
flexible hours and could look after our son. If I hadn't had this
set-up, I would have been effectively paying to teach because the hourly
rates would rarely have covered childcare costs. This is without
considering the further unpaid labour involved in career development at
this stage. There are further practical challenges. For example, care
responsibilities make it difficult to attend conferences and research
seminars that are scheduled out-with core working hours. As these are
both activities that are deemed crucial to building up your CV,
establishing important networks and thus, helping attain the elusive
open-ended post, it puts those with care responsibilities (again more
likely to be women) at a significant disadvantage. More recently, I have
noticed that some conferences are adding creches and building in
childcare costs, which are welcome steps to address these inequalities,
but still often few and far between.

Rosalind Gill and Ngaire Donaghue (2016) have explored the way in which
recent large scale structural and institutional changes in the
university sector have produced 'a psychosocial and somatic catastrophe
amongst academics that manifests in experiences of chronic stress,
anxiety, exhaustion, insomnia and spiralling rates of physical and
mental illness' (2016: 91). Further, they note the way in which the
'hidden injuries of academia' felt by academics (and other university
workers) are silenced in official university spaces or, increasingly,
reframed in a way that places the onus for change on the individual
worker, thereby leaving structural power relations intact (2016: 92).
Gill and Donaghue are attentive to intersectionality when considering
how these 'hidden injuries' are experienced, noting that they are
'marked by wider patterns of inequality and injustice that relate to
gender, age, class and other social divisions' (2016: 91).

Thinking particularly about my experiences as an ECA on precarious
contracts, I had an intense fear of rocking the boat and not being
offered future work which made it difficult to speak out about the
challenges of care. For example, I remember spending a lot of time
expressing breastmilk in the toilets in between seminars because I
didn't have an office and I didn't want to be a 'hassle' by asking for
access to one. (And I am all too aware that I am only writing this blog
now because I have an open-ended post, something Richard Hewett also
comments on in his blog.) It is important to note that in all the
institutions I have worked in, I have been treated well. I am confident
that I would have received more support had I asked for it. But I
internalised the challenges and thought if I couldn't cope, it must be
that I wasn't good enough, I wasn't working hard enough, I wasn't smart
enough. Self-blame is a dominant and pervasive aspect of the neoliberal
university, as Johnson explores in her blog. In turn, this self-blame
perpetuates a silencing of the challenges of academic labour and
reinforces feelings of isolation and alienation. It wasn't until I
started speaking with Raising Films that I began to realise that my
experiences were not just personal problems, but much wider, structural
issues.

Notably, academic labour can offer a flexibility which can be helpful
when factoring in care responsibilities. Nowadays, I often juggle my
workload so that I can take my sons for a couple of hours here and there
through the week or finish a bit earlier to pick them up from nursery.
But as an ECA on precarious contracts, this flexibility felt like a bit
of a myth. I didn't feel I could say no to any job opportunities and I
was scared not to check my email for even a day in case I missed
something important. I hiked up a hill just to get phone signal on our
first family holiday when my son was 3 months old because I was worried
that if I didn't keep up with student emails, I'd get a bad reputation
(this was during reading week when I wasn't being paid).

This is why it is vital to be attentive to experience and career stage
when exploring academic labour and care. There are small steps that we
can take to address these issues. Karen Boyle recommends mentoring, for
example, which I have found helpful, although we need to ensure this
mentoring extends to those on precarious contracts. Boyle also
recommends support for returning to work after extended periods of
leave. My experience was that I didn't take much leave at all when
having kids, but even support when returning to work after short periods
of leave or when starting a new job or contract would be welcome. For
me, it was also hugely important to feel included in the institution in
which I was working. Tiny things like being invited on staff nights out
or being asked by colleagues about my research were so important to me
in helping me to feel valued and challenging feelings of isolation and
exploitation. There also needs to be radical changes to working cultures
and to expectations that we should work all the time as both Boyle and
Johnson illuminate. And, of course, there needs to be much wider
structural change too in terms of how care labour is conceptualised. My
partner is the primary caregiver for our children, but I'm all too aware
of how unusual this is. He is regularly the only dad at playgroups, and
I still get raised eyebrows when I mention that I work full time with
young kids (yawn -- I am aware of many other female friends in academia
with small children who have had similar experiences). My partner often
bemusedly finds himself celebrated by others for the tiniest act of
childcare too, whereas it's simply seen as the norm for women in the
same role.

Johnson powerfully argues for the need to talk about our own personal
narratives of academic labour, not in terms of over-indulgence or
privileging the personal over the political, but in terms of starting to
build 'a collective language and action that can be powerful and
empowering'. So this is my personal narrative on experiences of care as
an ECA. I've agonised over this blog for too long because I'm aware that
I'm privileged in many ways, especially in having a supportive partner
which meant that I was able to withstand the years of precarious labour
before finding some job security. Without that set-up, I wouldn't have
been able to stay in academia. I highlight this not to personalise the
problem, but to point to the significant challenges for many other ECAs
trying to carve out an academic career while also caring for others.

**Susan Berridge** is Lecturer in Film and Media and a member of the
Centre for Gender and Feminist Studies at the University of Stirling.
She is also co-editor of the Commentary and Criticism section of
*Feminist Media Studies.* Her research is focused on screen
representations of gender, sexuality, sexual violence and age. But
that's work. The rest of the time, she hangs out with her awesome
partner, her two endlessly entertaining boys and her dog, Indiana Bones.
And she watches a lot of *Neighbours --* still can't get over Dee and
Toadie.

 

 


A few weeks ago, I attended the annual MeCCSA conference, held at the University of Leeds. A dominant strand of the event centred around contemporary working cultures in the creative industries, with presentations on precarity, issues of diversity and equality within the sector and the psychological implications of ‘failure’ to name but a few.

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Care, Precarity and Early Career Academics in the UK