Gender equity in academic knowledge production: the influence of politics, power and precarity

Abstract

This paper explores the issue of gender, intersecting with other aspects of identity, in relation to academic staff and academic knowledge production in higher education institutions across Europe. The paper argues for the need to go beyond the ‘topline’ figures regarding gender equity (and intersecting aspects of identity) when considering diversity of academic staff, to a focus on the degree to which academics can meaningfully contribute to knowledge production. Looking across Europe, the paper focuses on a number of factors that are frequently brought up, but not often together, when discussing equity in the academy: gendered discourses of the most valued and legitimate forms of knowledge and the knower; the increasing levels of precarity in the academic workforce; and the growing influence of far right political discourse in Europe and beyond. Drawing on poststructuralist theories of gender, knowledge and precarity, I will be discussing how such dynamics combine to exacerbate already existing inequalities regarding who and what are regarded as legitimate knowledge and legitimate ‘knowers’ in European academia.