Abstract
In recent years, it has become common for individuals to juggle employment and unpaid care work. This is just as true for the England-based academic workforce, our focus in this article. We discuss how, in the context of English Higher Education, support for carers is enacted and negotiated through policies and practices of care. Our focus on academics with a diverse range of caring responsibilities is unusual insofar as the literature on care in academia is overwhelmingly concerned with parents, usually mothers. This article is informed primarily by critical and post-structuralist feminist perspectives. We draw on a corpus of 47 interviews conducted with academics representing a broad range of caring responsibilities, subjects, and positions. A thematic analysis reveals how carers’ relationship with the provision and policies of care support at an institutional level is characterised by ambivalence. On the one hand, participants approve of societal and institutional policy support for carers. On the other hand, they are often reluctant to position themselves as the beneficiary of such policies, expressing instead a general preference for support from outside the workplace or for workplace-based inter-individual and informal care arrangements. This resistance is particularly noticeable in the case of participants with caring responsibilities other than the parenting of healthy, able-bodied children and of those whose gender, class, racial, or sexual identity do not conform with the figure of the ‘ideal academic’, contributing to their othering in the academic realm. These findings have significant implications for policies supporting carers, pointing to the need for greater visibility and recognition of caring responsibilities in academia, especially in terms of their diverse identities.
Highlights
Recent research highlights how, in the UK as in many other countries, juggling employment with caring responsibilities has become an increasingly widespread occurrence (Carers UK 2014).In English Higher Education, the focus of this article, little evidence has been systematically collected across the sector regarding the caring status of employees, academics or otherwise
The analytical lens underpinning this body of work tends to omit the intersectionality of identities and how the hyphenated identity1 of the academic carer is compounded by social class and ethnic background, sexual orientation, disability, and gender
The demands on academic carers are likely to be exacerbated by two discourses which we have described at length elsewhere: a discourse of intensive parenting and a discourse of the neoliberal university (Moreau 2016)
Summary
In English Higher Education, the focus of this article, little evidence has been systematically collected across the sector regarding the caring status of employees, academics or otherwise. While a variety of studies describe how, as in other sectors, combining employment and care work is commonplace (Moreau and Robertson 2017), extant research rarely focuses on academics who are caregivers. When it does, it usually concentrates on parenting, often mothering, with little consideration of other caring responsibilities. The analytical lens underpinning this body of work tends to omit the intersectionality of identities and how the hyphenated identity of the academic carer is compounded by social class and ethnic background, sexual orientation, disability, and gender. The literature ‘Hyphenated’ is used in this context to refer to the dual, often conflicting, identities of participants as academics who are carers
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