Seminar: The Future of Academia: gender practices and early career scholars
Program:
14.00-14.05: Opening by Yvonne Benschop & Marieke van den Brink
14.05-15.05: Short lectures by:
– Rosemary Deem explores the extent to which doctoral education still provides a good preparation for working in universities, given recent changes to academic work, the predominance of neoliberalism in higher education, the shortage and precarity of academic jobs, the continuing gendering of doctoral study and the challenges to wellbeing that doctoral study in the contemporary university poses. More emphasis on equality and public good are suggested as one way forward.
– Jeroen Huisman will argue that defensive institutional work is underlying resistance to gender equality in the academic profession. Powerful organizational actors resist these initiatives by (un)intentionally deploying a combination of discursive strategies that legitimate what we coin as non-time-bound gender equality initiatives, as the expected outcomes are undetermined in time. At the same time these strategies de-legitimate concrete, time-bound measures that define specific outcomes against well-defined deadlines.
– Claartje Vinkenburg will speak about specifications for systemic diversity interventions in upward mobility career systems, aimed at optimizing decision making through mitigating bias by engaging gatekeepers. These interventions address the paradox of meritocracy that underlies the surprising lack of diversity at the top of the career pyramid in these systems. She will discus why it is difficult to a) sell these ‘bias interventions’ and b) prove them to be effective.
– Liudvika Leisyte will present a recent study on diversity enhancement in the university curriculum in a German university. The findings show that facilitating curriculum change towards inclusive teacher training through project-to-organization learning, universities may need to enact a combination of new practices, some designed to codify and transfer lessons learned, and others created to generate new interpretations and build common knowledge across organizational boundaries.
15.05- 15.15 short coffee break
15.15-15.45 panel discussion with Rosemary Deem, Jeroen Huisman, Claartje Vinkenburg, Liudvika Leisyte, Beate van der Heijden and Inge Bleijenbergh.