Title: Generation precarity: the marketisation of UK higher education
Date: Wednesday 2 December 2020
Time: 18:00
Venue: Via Zoom
Registration: Register via email.
Speakers: Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone & Lena WÃ¥nggren
Convenors: Peter Mayo, Michael Briguglio, Francois Zammit
Abstract
Higher Education in the United Kingdom has witnessed a rise in the number of casualised staff, that is to say workers who are employed on insecure hourly-paid or fixed-term contracts: more than half (54 percent) of all academic staff in the UK are employed on these types of contract (UCU 2016). While a generation ago, these contracts may have been part of a ‘rite of passage’ before permanency, the precarisation of work has become the defining feature of a majority of academic workers’ lives. This talk, built on our forthcoming book, provides a snapshot of the experiences of a generation of teachers and researchers for whom insecurity and ill health is the norm.
Biographies
is currently a Casual and Visiting Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta. After her BA in Law and English at the University of Malta, and an MA in Shakespeare Studies from the University of Birmingham, she completed her PhD in Drama and an MA in Higher Education at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In addition to co-authoring this upcoming monograph, she is also co-editing the volumes The Double Binds of Neoliberalism: Theory and Culture After 1968 (Rowman and Littlefield International, forthcoming) and Video Games and Comedy (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
is a researcher and teacher at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also a trade union representative. She works on nineteenth-century literature, feminist writing and activism, pedagogy, and the medical humanities.
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