Mapping Precarious Academic Life in the Media & Communications Field project
The IAMCR Committee for the Improvement of Academic Life (CIAL) is undertaking an exploratory project on precarious academic life. Widely discussed and debated, and the subject of significant study and theorization, precarity is a major challenge to the conditions, sustainability, quality, and future prospects for academic life, including in our field of media and communications.
Precarity combines to deepen the oppression, injustice, and challenges arising from other longstanding and traditional forms of threats to academic life and freedom.
Such precarity especially affects emerging scholars, such as doctoral researchers, and those in the early stages of their careers. Precarity is also likely to be adversely amplified by other factors and situation of marginality, discrimination, and exclusion that be faced in relation to gender, sexuality, race, disability, rural location, religion, resources and income of the society, status, funding, and capacity of particular universities and programs.
- Undertaken by the CIAL, the objectives of the project are to:
- Inquire widely into the nature and conditions of precarity across the various countries, regions, and settings of media and communication research, scholarship, and teaching;
- Explore and identify the specific forms and implications of precarity for media and communications researchers;
- Document and identify responses to precarity around the world, developed by: scholarly and professional associations; groups of scholars, intellectuals, and activists; trade unions; learned academics; peak bodies of humanities and social sciences faculties; international bodies;
- Prepare and distribute a concise and accessible report documenting the findings;
- Develop options, recommendations, and guidelines for discussion at IAMCR regarding responses and initiatives towards strengthening the conditions of academic life in the face of precarity;
- Prepare a special issue of a journal based on the project.
The project is supported by a grant from IAMCR Committee & Task Force Fund.
CIAL welcomes any resources, suggestions, links, references, case studies, and perspectives on issues of precarity in relation to academic life, especially in relation to media and communication and associated disciplines and institutions.
As part of the project, CIAL will convene a special session on ‘Precarious Academic Life’ at IAMCR 2018 Eugene conference. We still have 2 places available on the panel, so please be in touch with us with an expression of interest, if this is something you would like to participate in.
Please send any material, comments, or queries to Cherry Baylosis (the researcher assisting with the project) at: cherry.baylosis (at) sydney.edu.au
And also feel free to contact the members from CIAL coordinating the project:
- Gerard Goggin - gerard.goggin (at) sydney.edu.au
- Chika Anyanwu - canyanwu (at) csu.edu.au
- Sergio Ricardo Quiroga - sergioricardoquiroga (at) gmail.com
- Eno Akpabio - eakpabio (at) unam.na
- Burce Celik - burcecelik8 (at) gmail.com
- Tanja Bosch - tanja.bosch (at) uct.ac.za