Conference Program

Once the preserve of the White middle-class male and ‘unencumbered’ scholar, ‘Western’ academia has considerably diversified over the past fifty years. In particular, many students and academic staff now hold some form of caring responsibilities. Yet academic excellence continues to be associated with the ‘bachelor boy’ as Cartesian dualisms, which produce academic identities through a denial of emotional domestic, physical and domestic matters, still permeate academic cultures. The physical and normative dissociation of academia and care, already ingrained in the Cartesian ideals, is also reactualised through the (gendered) discourses of the managerial university and of intensive parenting (read ‘mothering’) – two ‘greedy institutions’ which surveillent and command undivided loyalty and full availability from the scholar and the parent. Such a climate has led to claims that Western, contemporary, academic cultures are masculinist, ‘careless’ or even ‘toxic’. 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 care/rs are positioned by/in academic cultures as they cannot easily renounce these.

The paper draws on several inter-related projects conducted in UK universities since 2010. These projects have involved conducting questionnaire surveys and interviews with a range of staff and students. Altogether, these projects have generated an important body of data regarding the experiences of student and staff carers in Higher Education and how these experiences are shaped by university policies and cultures and their ‘care regimes’. The paper uses the notion of the ‘space invader’ and of (gendered, classed, racialised) ‘care order’, ‘care regime’ and ‘care practice’, echoing in this Matthew’s and Connell’s similar distinction about gender, to conceptualise the relationship between care/rs and academia, and to provide an insight into the lives of carers, most of which are women. It focuses on three related aspects emerging from the data: the invisibilisation of care/rs, their mis/recognition and the intersectionality of their experiences, always mediated, inter alia, by gender, class and race. Ultimately, this paper is an attempt to further the development of a sociology linking areas of society and of people’s lives (in this case, care and academia) which have historically been constructed as mutually exclusive, pointing to the changes needed so that academia becomes more care-centric or ‘care-full’’.