This article examines the rise in precarious academic employment in Ireland as an outcome of the higher education restructuring following OECD (Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development), government initiatives and post‐crisis austerity. Presenting the narratives of academic women at different career stages, we claim that a focus on care sheds new light on the debate on precarity. A more complete understanding of precarity should take account not only of the contractual security but also affective relational security in the lives of employees. The intersectionality of paid work and care work lives was a dominant theme in our interviews among academic women. In a globalized academic market, premised on the care‐free masculinized ideals of competitive performance, 24/7 work and geographical mobility, women who opt out of these norms, suffer labour‐led contractual precarity and are over‐represented in part‐time and fixed‐term positions. Women who comply with these organizational commands need to peripheralize their relational lives and experience care‐led affective precarity.

Some higher educational institutions have higher status than universities, notably the Grandes écoles in France, and some have lower status, such as Community Colleges in the USA. Contribution to the Theme Section 'Academic freedom and tenure'

This paper examines the idea of 'core business' in contemporary South African public universities. South Africa's public higher education system has global ambitions, but is also highly internally stratified. Drawing on new data from interviews with higher education leaders and government policymakers across a number of South African institutions, we show that while the rhetoric of 'core business' of the university has been adopted by higher education leaders, the question of what constitutes the purpose of the university, in South Africa and arguably beyond, is subject to ongoing debate and negotiation. The multiplicity of conflicting but coexisting narratives about what universities should do in South African society-producing excellent research, preparing a labour force, or addressing societal inequalities-exposes a persisting tension surrounding the purpose of a public university. And while this tension has historical origins, we show that responses to addressing these various roles of the institution are not developed organically and in a neutral context. They emerge under conflicts over limited state funding and attendant and opportune market pressure put on public universities in times of crisis, that shape profoundly their framing and outcomes, and the future of the universities.

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Universities are facing growing internal and external pressures to generate income, educate a widening continuum of learners, and make effective use of digital technologies. One response has been growth of online education, catalysed by Massive Open Online Courses, availability of digital devices and technologies, and notions of borderless global education. In growing online education, learning and teaching provision has become increasingly disaggregated, and universities are partnering with a range of private companies to reach new learners, and commercialise educational provision. In this paper, we explore the competing drivers which impact decision making within English universities and their strategies to grow online education provision, through interviews with senior managers, and interrogation of their views through the lens of a range of internal, external and organisational drivers. We show that pressures facing universities may be alleviated by growth of online education provision, but that negotiating an appropriate route to realise this ambition involves attempts to resolve these underlying tensions deriving from competing drivers. We use a modified form of the PEST model to demonstrate the complexities, inter-dependencies and processes associated with these drivers when negotiating delivery of unbundled online education through use of private company services, or in partnership with private companies.

This paper discusses the changing housing regime during Bulgaria's transition from socialism to post-socialism. Focusing on the Roma minority in Sofia I trace the present-day legacy of socialist housing policies. After 1989 the displacement of Roma people drastically increased. As their self-built houses and annexes were informally legitimisied but not formally legalised under socialism, they were evicted by neoliberal urban authorities to clear the way for new private developments. Many small Roma neighbourhoods were pronounced 'illegal' and destroyed and their inhabitants were pushed out to zones without economic and education opportunities. Triangulating archival and secondary sources with ethnographic observation and qualitative interviews, I ask what past and present legal regulations, policies, and practices made Roma settlements in Sofia vulnerable to demolition and their inhabitants to displacement. I claim that, as in other periods of the development of the Bulgarian capital, quick-fix solutions were characteristic of the socialist period. In the case of Roma, in order to provide a temporary solution to the overall housing shortage the state turned a blind eye to the increasing amount of semi-legal housing. Furthermore, as Roma mostly remained low-skilled workers, they did not benefit from the redistribution that championed certain occupations privileged by the one-party state.

The focus of this paper is on the contestations and dilemmas emergent in the higher education curriculum in a context of increasing processes of unbundling, digitisation and marketisation. The paper explores the notion of contestation through the theoretical lens of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. It points to illustrative examples of this contestation from empirical data drawn from stakeholder research in South African higher education. The paper grapples with understandings of the concept of curriculum and argues how these have been shaped byand are shapingemergent meanings of the curriculum in an unbundling context. The argument is that these emergent meanings are a function of different explicit and tacit understandings of curriculum and what higher education offers to students. These understandings are deepened or modified by processes of unbundling. Empirical data from the research study show these understandings to be forming against the backdrop of powerful cultural and agentic forces and players.

Mostly not-employed mothers set the cultural standards for 'good' parenthood and 'good' education, while childless subjects set the standards in the world of work; [those] … want to do both, will be measured by the standards set by those … that are only into one of the spheres (Bomert and Leinfellner, 2017:118, citing König, 2012: 193) Lynch, Ivancheva, O'Flynn, Keating and O'Connor 2020 Care Ceiling in Higher Education -Irish Educational Studies (pre-publication version) 2relations more generally, especially in terms of their interface with love and/or care relations with family, colleagues and students.The paper also contributes to on-going debates about the gendered and care-disinterested character of organisations, (