25/04/2024
How to rebuild a city with Karam Alkatlabe
Once the preserve of the White, middle-class, male and ‘unencumbered’ scholar, ‘Western’ academia has considerably diversified over the past fifty years, with many students and academic staff now having some form of caring responsibilities (Carers UK, 2014). Yet academic excellence continues to be associated with the ‘bachelor boy’ (Hinton-Smith, 2012) as Cartesian dualisms, which produce academic identities through a denial of emotional domestic, physical and domestic matters, still permeate academic cultures (Ahmed, 1998; Braidotti, 1991; Leathwood & Hey, 2009). While an ethics of care and care work are not the preserve of those ‘with caring responsibilities’, this group offers a unique lens to explore the way carers are positioned in academic cultures as they cannot easily renounce these responsibilities.
Drawing on a critical and post-structuralist feminist understanding of higher education and care and on a corpus of interviews conducted in England since 2010 with HE students and academics with caring responsibilities, I explore how this group negotiates the conflicting demands of two ‘greedy institutions’ (Coser, 1974): family and higher education. More specifically, I consider how the intersections of care and academic work play out in their experiences and how these are shaped by gender, in intersection with other identity markers such as ethnicity, sexual orientation and social class. Three themes emerge from this large corpus of data: the in/visibilities of carer/s their mis/recognition and the hierarchies of care, pointing to the need for ‘regimes of care’ which consider both inequalities between carers and non-carers, and inequalities among carers.
Speaker Bio
Marie-Pierre Moreau is Professor in Education and Education Research Lead in the School of Education and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University, UK. A sociologist by training, her research is located at the nexus of education, work and inequalities. Her current research concentrates in two key areas: teachers' identities and careers, with specific reference to gender and the 'feminisation thesis’, and the relationship between care and academic work, with specific reference to the way students and academic staff with caring responsibilities are positioned in academic discourses. She is the author or co-author of over 100 publications, including two monographs and an edited volume. She is the editor of the peer-reviewed journal International Studies in Widening Participation (with Dr Anna Bennett, Newcastle, Australia and Dr Nadine Zacharias, Deakin, Australia) and the editor of the Bloomsbury Gender and Education book series (with Prof. Penny Jane Burke, Newcastle, Australia and Prof. Nancy Niemi, Yale, USA).
