Fixed-Term and Temporary: Teaching Fellows, Tactics, and the Negotiation of Contingent Labour in the UK Higher Education System

Abstract

Abstract. This paper autobiographically considers the role of teaching-only staff as a contingent labour force in the contemporary Higher Education system in the UK. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, whilst much attention has been paid to the role of the research fellow, there has been less consideration, in the UK context, of the Teaching Fellow as an alternate form of postdoctoral experience. Accordingly, this paper gives voice to the Teaching Fellow -a member of academic staff who is not allocated writing and research time as part of their contract -whose views are often marginalised in on-going debates concerning the plays of power in the neo-liberalised academy. Second, the paper raises these voices to bring into consciousness the impacts of Teaching Fellow experience for the Fellow themselves and the faculties they work in. It is argued that Teaching Fellows face challenging circumstances in view of their onwards career trajectories in the academy. Accordingly, this paper considers the ways in which Fellows, through tactics of place making, presence and visibility, and collaboration, negotiate the challenging structural and institutional conditions that underscore their contracts. It is contended that exploring the teaching-only workforce is vital for critically assessing the workings of the contemporary academy and questioning the unequal power relations that underscore work places in a culture where contingent labour is expanding; becoming less of a fixed-term and temporary feature of the university system, but rather a stable and enduring one.

Tangential attachments: Towards a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of cultural urban regeneration on local identities

“…The notion of attachments as tangential can be situated within a lineage of concepts in the social sciences which privilege contingent, in-between, positions and experiences. Precarity, for example, has gained currency within urban studies where it is used to describe the insecure and ever-changing nature of migrant mobilities (Lewis et al, 2015;Waite, 2009), as well as precarious urban forms and tenures (Chatterton 2010), and the experience of increasing casualization of the labour market, not least in academia (Peters & Turner, 2014). Within the field of political geography, the concept of the improvised state (Jeffrey, 2012) draws on a wider adoption of improvisation in the social sciences in order to highlight the 'doing' of social practice as it is worked out through everyday life.…”

Placing researcher identifications: labs, offices and homes in the PhD

“…; Dowling ). At a sectoral level these changes include increasing marketisation of higher education, the shift toward temporary academic employment (Peters and Turner ) and the implementation of performance measures of academic work (Birch et al . ).…”

Shifting landscapes: from coalface to quick sand? Teaching Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences in Higher Education

“…Autoethnography, with its requirement for the researcher to write ‘herself into the account of the phenomenon’ (Hellsten et al . , 271), is emerging as a powerful methodology for investigating the neoliberal reconfiguration of the university (Purcell ; Rossi ; Peters and Turner ). Authorship of the narratives and the paper overlap, but are not identical.…”

“…Shelton et al . () suggest that the use of fixed‐term and short‐term contracts in higher education pointed to casualisation of the labour force in favour of universities holding greater flexibility in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), while Peters and Turner (, 2327) highlight the highly precarious experience of temporary teaching‐only staff who are used strategically to allow departmental research activities to ‘excel and accelerate’ (particularly through teaching buy‐outs built into large research grants; see also Ní Laoire and Shelton , 99). Teaching‐focused contracts need to feature squarely on our disciplines’ agendas.…”

“…The cultural stories about these posts, and the working conditions they justify, have not changed at the pace that labour markets have. A small but growing body of reflexive personal accounts (autoethnographic writing; Ellis ) demonstrate how cultural stories and practices reify a standard career path and ‘other’ those not willing or able to access such a path (Purcell ; Rossi ; Peters and Turner ). Teaching‐focused academics are constructed as servicing the ‘real’ work of a department.…”