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What does it mean to succeed or to fail in today’s academia? How do these expectations contribute to our day-to-day working culture? Is there a feminist way of being a professional, a student, a teacher? How do we create more caring and ethical spaces for teaching, researching, and writing? The questions of academic labor at the changing and increasingly neo-liberal university were a recurring theme among more than one hundred students, researchers and scholars that participated in the first German-speaking feminist geography summer school. We got together for five days in September this year in the middle of the Swiss idyllic countryside with the aim to foreground, consolidate and challenge feminist geographical scholarship and activism in German-speaking countries. The summer school galvanized interest of large numbers of young scholars. It was especially exciting since feminist geography, until recently, has been on the fringes of the discipline within the universities of Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Many geographic departments are often missing in-depth courses where young scholars have the opportunity to deal with feminist research topics.
The “Gender and Space” summer school was organized by members of Arbeitskreis Geographie und Geschlecht (“Geography and gender” working group), a landmark academic association of feminist geographers in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. The event was also a way of celebrating a 30-year anniversary of the grounding of the association that continues to gain prominence, especially in the last couple of years. The summer school offered an opportunity to dive deeper into key feminist theories and concepts, engage with feminist research methodologies, discuss trans-disciplinary political and activist positions and interventions. Academic labor and its discontents was one theme that we grappled with as students, teachers, supervisors and activists. To address these challenges, the summer school opened up a space of reflection and care in innovative and inspiring ways. Here, we would like to give you a glimpse into some of these conversations that were part of the creative method of Berufswege or “vocational journeys”. Heidi Kaspar and Muriel Côte developed the method as a walk through the Herzberg forest interspersed with questions about failures, successes, inequalities and pressures of academic work. Below is an excerpt of the walking contemplation undertaken by Katha, Joshua, Alev, Eva, Sunčana, Stephanie and Renata, seven people who mostly did not know one another. We encountered the following five questions in our walk through the idyllic forest.
Berufswege Question 1.
A question about work/life balance… “Women can have it all!” (i.e. “career” and family) What does this mean? Do you find this important/desirable?
Figure 1: Berufswege start (Photo taken by Alev Coban)
“No I do not want to have it all, if that means engaging in toxic power play and competition, and defending supposed academic kingdoms/queendoms :)…”
“Work/Life balance is super important for me. I try to see my academic work as labor which has boundaries, e.g. timewise. Reading books for my PhD is working time and I am reluctant to work at the weekend.”
“Academia is also just a job! Not a ‘mission’ and not more important than what other people do!”
“Do questions of ‘work/life balance’ only to refer to women with children?”
Berufswege Question 2.
A question about our dreams and successes… What is the ideal job for you?
Figure 2: Forest question (Photo taken by Alev Coban)
“Ideal job: less hierarchical, less institutional and bureaucratic impositions, working less hours…”
“Solidarity network, inside and outside academic life, which gives like a base of people and relations where you connect with different people for different projects. Also sharing perspectives within academia and outside academia.”
“Working in a diverse surrounding where different forms of knowledge and capacities are valued (not just being able to understand or write complicated texts based on white masculinist thinking).”
“I agree. The idea of pure individual work feels harsh for me.”
Berufswege Question 3.
A question about our failures… What do you consider a failure in your work?
Figure 3: Failing in academia (Photo taken by Alev Coban)
“It feels like a failure that I have not completed my PhD during the three years of my scholarship. Due to the support of my supervisor, I don’t have to finish writing my thesis while handling the bureaucracies of being formally unemployed. I got a 50% contract for one year at the university where I’m doing the doctorate. Nevertheless, the time limits of scholarships and usual contracts at the university, do make me feel too slow for academia.”
“I feel responsible for what is happening in ‘my’ classroom. I have various experiences in teaching when it was important to support students in their situation, in their position, in their knowledge. I am not always able to do that in the ‘right way’ or to react in the moment. This also includes my way of rejecting positions when intervening into student discussion that involve racist, sexist, ableist, classist… comments. Sometimes I really feel helpless and angry with me not being able to handle these situations…”
“I feel like I cannot express clearly my analytical ideas and I have trouble in producing something within academic patterns. I wish there were other patterns we could follow that could count as scientific knowledge.”
Berufswege Question 4.
A question about activism… Is there a feminist way of being a professional, a student, a teacher?
Figure 4: Berfuswege flowers (Photo taken by Alev Coban)
“I do understand feminism more as a praxis than as a theory. So for me it is more about how to establish structures within everyday professional routines that open up space for doing things differently, for sharing emotions, for caring about each other, for supporting other people in saying NO (or YES). This also includes developing strategies for sharing privileges, supporting marginalized positions and sometimes being a killjoy… (yeah Sara!)”
“A feminist methodology means thinking about why and how I am doing things and how far this is inside a patriarchal and white male structure and pattern. Through this method I can always try and find new ways to develop my projects with a caring collective perspective and therefore consolidating the idea of feminism for me.”
Berufswege Question 5.
A question about work culture… What is for you a masculinist work culture? What do we do about it?
Figure 5: Cobra in Herzberg (Photo taken by Alev Coban)
“Masculinist work culture: taking space without the feeling/need to legitimize/justify that you take this space.”
“A masculinist work culture is a competition space where I have, by means of my status, to impose what I consider as true. “
“A masculinist work culture consists of people who take space without feeling the urge to justify it, e.g. having a specific knowledge, etc.”
“For me this question leads to everyday experiences at my department, e.g. when two of my white male doctoral colleagues insisted that at our department there was no sexism and started explaining to me why. And then later confronting one of them with their own sexist behaviour.”
“One possible method is to amplify female voices in meetings and conferences by referring to and repeating other women’s ideas and contributions, and ensuring that their name is heard.”
“I never heard of the ‘amplifying female voices’ strategy and think it’s worth trying it out in conferences and smaller meetings at our institute. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to not only raise women’s awareness about unequal vocal contributions, but also men’s awareness and support in amplifying female voices.”
“Typical masculinist behaviours are being loud and assuming the ‘Cobra’ body position.”
“It is our task to find out how to deal with different ways of communication, especially with oppressive communication. I would scrutinize that the adaptation of masculinist forms of communication, e.g. taking the Cobra body position, is a desirable solution.”
Finally, we hope these forest conversations and other summer school events and encounters encourage further ways to challenge dominant academic work cultures. We also find these issues extend across different spaces. What are your experiences with obstacles and opportunities of academic workplaces? Share your thoughts, ideas and suggestions in the comments below.
We would like to thank all the participants and organizers, as well as to Gender, Place and Cutlure for co-sponsoring the summer school. For more information about the Gender and Space summer school visit http://humangeographische-sommerschulen.de.
Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 