Academic Labor

We Asked Where America’s Future Scientists Would Want to Live
Infrastructure
May 19, 2025

We Asked Where America’s Future Scientists Would Want to Live

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Why the Latest Strike Wave at UK Universities is Likely to Achieve Little
Opinion
November 23, 2022

Why the Latest Strike Wave at UK Universities is Likely to Achieve Little

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Is COVID-19 Enabling Academic Disaster Capitalism?
Industry
July 21, 2021

Is COVID-19 Enabling Academic Disaster Capitalism?

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Watch the Webinar: Deconstructing Neoliberalism in Higher Education
Announcements
April 22, 2021

Watch the Webinar: Deconstructing Neoliberalism in Higher Education

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2021: From Scholars to Disposable Labor in the Brave New World of Academic Capitalism

2021: From Scholars to Disposable Labor in the Brave New World of Academic Capitalism

In terms of the organization of academic labor, higher education is ever more sharply divided between, on the one hand, an advantaged minority in full-time, long-term employment and, on the other hand, academia’s reserve army of labor.

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Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Let’s Talk About ‘De-coupling’ and the ‘China Bubble’

Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Let’s Talk About ‘De-coupling’ and the ‘China Bubble’

To what extent do the realities of social research in China live up to the favorable image created by job ads on academic recruitment sites?

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Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Better Plan Carefully

Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Better Plan Carefully

At their heart, Chinese public universities are deeply parochial bureaucratic structures geared towards the party-state’s priorities for socio-economic development. In response to national and international pressures, some universities have recently begun to internationalize, with notably different degrees of enthusiasm. Others have not. You would do well to determine, the author writes, into what category a prospective employer falls.

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Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Better Think Twice

Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Better Think Twice

China has become an increasingly attractive destination for Western social scientists, both for those doing research in and on China and for those looking to continue their careers with meaningful, long-term perspectives.

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Not What It Used to Be: Academic Capitalism and Sociological Futures in the UK

Not What It Used to Be: Academic Capitalism and Sociological Futures in the UK

Sociology today, argues our Daniek Nehring, is defined by a fundamental contradiction between its everyday labor practices and its imaginary ethos.

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The Deskilled Academic: Bureaucracy Defeats Scholarship

The Deskilled Academic: Bureaucracy Defeats Scholarship

Intellectual labor comes to be largely external to the objectives of the bureaucratic regimes that dominate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, and academics whose careers were built on intellectual labor turn out to be deskilled workers in organizational settings indifferent to their concerns.

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What’s Wrong With Academic Freedom in the UK?

What’s Wrong With Academic Freedom in the UK?

Given the ferocity of the current assault on academic freedom, argues Daniel Nehring, it seems to me that we may be close to a point of no return, past which ‘tone of voice policies’ and similar control mechanisms may become a norm into which coming generations of academics will be socialized as a matter of course.

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Young Scholars Fear for the University of Their Future

Young Scholars Fear for the University of Their Future

Universities are at a crossroads. Pushed by governments who want institutions to dominate in the competitive, globalized world of higher education, they are also struggling with questions about academic freedom in the face of the pressures of marketization. Here a group of young PhD students argue for more debate about the kind of places universities are becoming.

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