Introduction
What is academic citizenship and how is it gendered? An everyday understanding of the term associates academic citizenship with affiliation to a specific university, research institution or scientific community. In a broader perspective, the term is often used to describe the service duties and responsibilities that academics have, both to their scientific communities and the society at large, beyond the core tasks of teaching and research. More analytical approaches, emphasising the formal and informal aspects of academic citizenship and stressing their gendered dimensions, are rare. They constitute the focus of this book. We adopt a wide-ranging definition of academic citizenship, involving not only formal membership of academic institutions, but also the relational and emotional aspects of participation, recognition and belonging, within Higher Education and Research Institutions (HERIs) and broader academic communities.
Somewhat paradoxically, the notion of academic citizenship is currently gaining attention, precisely in a context where some HERIs appear to be undermining academics’ sense of membership and recognition. Academic citizenship is thus threatened by a shift from the shared belief in knowledge production as a worthy end in itself, to a concern with the rationality and profitability of the academic endeavour and its contribution to the consolidation of so-called ‘knowledge economies’ on a global scale. Despite some international variation (Le Feuvre et al. 2019), academic institutions are increasingly being run according to the principles of private enterprise, emphasising corporatisation, marketisation and profitability, while also fostering a highly competitive academic labour market. The term ‘academic capitalism’ is often used to describe these processes of commercialisation, internationalisation and competition (Slaughter and Leslie 2001; Collyer 2015). Under such circumstances, the very notion of ‘academic citizenship’ may appear to hark back to a time when contributing to the smooth functioning of academic institutions and scientific communities was an unproblematic academic activity. In this book, our emphasis is on gendered power relations that influence academic practices in this context of competitive individualism. We propose to analyse the conditions under which different members of the scientific community contribute to such structural shifts and experience them in their daily lives.
Our concept of gendered academic citizenship involves three key components: membership, recognition and belonging. Emphasising the manifold ways in which gendered power relations influence academic practices, we identify four ideal-types of academic citizenship: full citizenship, limited citizenship, transitional (or probationary) citizenship and non-citizenship. Later in this chapter, we discuss their key characteristics in the context of increasing managerialism, competition and individualism in HERIs across Europe. In establishing this typology, we are particularly concerned with reaching a better understanding of gendered experiences, discriminatory processes and persisting hierarchies in the academic world.
While our focus is on gendered practices, we acknowledge the complex interrelationships of gender with multiple inequality structures, including class, race/ethnicity, age, sexuality and disability. Several chapters of this book directly address these cross-cutting mechanisms of subordination and discrimination. Building on both international comparisons and national case studies, the chapters contribute to a fine-grained analysis of the overall dynamics of the gendering of the academic world in the contemporary context. Situated in the legacy of feminist contributions to citizenship studies, the concept of gendered academic citizenship enables us to capture the multi-dimensional and complex power dynamics and everyday practices in academia. Before presenting our own conceptualisation of academic citizenship, we start with a brief review of the earlier contributions to the gendering of the citizenship concept.
Gendering the Citizenship Concept
Citizenship is a contested yet robust concept that has been the object of numerous projects of ‘remaking’ and ‘gendering’ (e.g. Hobson and Lister 2002; Lister 1997, 2000, 2007; Lister et al. 2007; Benhabib 2004; Abraham et al. 2010; Siim 2000; Yuval-Davis 2008; Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999; Halsaa et al. 2012; Hobson 2000; Siim and Squires 2008; Roseneil 2013). Historically developed by political scientists in relation to membership of the Nation-state, the concept of citizenship has gradually become more interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional, capturing the dynamics of rights, obligations and belonging in a wide range of life domains.
As a concept, citizenship has roots that go far back in history, to ancient Greece, where it was established as a political ideal: political participation was considered a civic duty through which the citizens’ ‘full potential as a political being is realized’ (Hobson and Lister 2002: 24). In the classical liberal tradition that developed during the seventeenth century, civil and political rights are considered to be the essence of citizenship, with the citizen seen essentially as a ‘bearer of rights’ (ibid.: 25).
Much of contemporary scholarship on citizenship has been inspired by the work of the British sociologist T. H. Marshall (1950), who expanded the liberal concept of citizenship beyond civil and political rights to include social rights. Marshall’s notion of social citizenship included social and health services, education as well as social benefits and social insurance with the aim of reducing social (class) inequalities. He defined citizenship as ‘a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community’ (2000: 36). This understanding of citizenship involves not only legal rules ‘governing the relationships between individuals and the state, but also a set of social relationships between […] individual citizens’ (Lister 1997: 15, our emphasis).
The multi-dimensional potential in Marshall’s thinking and its overall focus on membership and participation has inspired generations of feminist theorists who have advocated a broad definition of citizenship, recognising the multiple dimensions of membership (e.g. Yuval-Davis 1999; Halsaa et al. 2012). They often begin by noting that gender is absent from most of the traditional conceptualisations of citizenship (Walby 1994). It is a particular group of men (adult, white, heterosexual and able-bodied) in whose image the ‘citizenship template has been forged’ (Hobson and Lister 2002: 26). The male worker thus ‘serves as the ideal typical citizen’, while the gendered character of social rights and related claims on the State is often ignored (Orloff 1993: 308). Feminist scholarship has thus illuminated the ways in which citizenship developed as a quintessentially male practice, founded on the rigid separation of public an...