Our empirical work is structured across four sections: (1) a reflection on academic friendships (2) on navigating conferences (3) on subverting conferences and (4) on troubling friendships.
The literature review situates the paper across sociology and critical university studies and includes a discussion of our own friendship.
There is then a critical literature review in which we introduce our conceptualisations of conference spaces “academic circle jerks” and friendship. First, we introduce our two methods: interviews and reflective auto-methods. These explorations sparked the ideas in this article which explores the sometimes affirmative, sometimes nefarious ways that friendship shapes academic conferences, and thus academia. We concluded that, potentially, the strike became a radical space of care, kindness and solidarity (Burton and Turbine 2018) in its direct challenge to the neoliberal university.īundled up in our strike layers, a few hundred yards from the university we’d met at years earlier, we speculated that perhaps this space was built on friendship: to one another, to strangers, and to colleagues across the country and world.
Afterwards, we wondered if, and how, it would be possible to emulate this in the normal activities of the university. The supportive atmosphere was in stark contrast to the competitive streak often found in academic conference spaces. In the teach-out, we talked about academic conference spaces as microcosms of wider male, pale, and stale spaces of academia (Oliver and Morris, 2020). Opening a paper on conferences with a synopsis of industrial action in the UK might seem strange, but it was during the 2020 strikes, after a frosty morning on the pickets, that we led a ‘teach-out’ for striking staff and students on academic conferences. As we write, thousands of university workers have once again committed to industrial action over the same issues. For early career academics (ECAs), this was compounded on top of a loneliness that has already been described as an ‘epidemic’ in academia (Sibai et al.
In 2020, strike action was followed by an intense period of social, physical and professional isolation (Bannerjee and Rai 2020). 2020): marketisation, and its effects on the growing academic precariat, are here to stay. However, during the pandemic, the UK higher education sector has demonstrated its commitment to ‘business-as-usual’ (Lybeck et al. The end of this strike action coincided with the beginning of the pandemic, which transformed our ways of working, socialising, and organising, with national lockdown measures introduced just days after academics left the pickets. In 20, University staff undertook strike action in disputes over pensions, pay, and working conditions (Sharma 2019).
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