“Comply, strategise, or resist?”: Exploring early-career women’s academic identities in Australian higher education using Foucauldian discourse analysis

Abstract

The becoming of, and being, an early-career academic is a dynamic journey, marked by movement through learning, adapting, and adopting new skills and capacities, being ‘thrown in the deep end’ of academic responsibilities, and beginning to develop an academic identity. We explored how early-career women academics within Australian universities conceptualise their academic identities, and the subject positions (i.e., identities/ways of being) made available through their discourse. Seventeen participants were interviewed, aged between 27 and 62 years, with transcripts of interviews analyzed using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. Three subject positions were identified—The Compliant Woman (who follows the rules and meets the expectations of the institution); The Strategic Woman (who balances complying and safely challenging the traditional academic ways of being); and The Rebellious Woman (who outrightly challenges the conditions of academia). Discourse surrounding compliance, tolerance, obedience, the patriarchy, and survival, created subjectivities suggesting that the early-career women academics felt unsafe and insecure in academia, as well as having to work harder to prove themselves in a setting that works to exclude them. The key message was that no matter their approach, the early-career women academics felt damned in their navigation of academia.