Natasha Webster

Exploring the importance of inter-departmental women’s friendship in geography as resistance in the neoliberal academy

ABSTRACT Friendship has potential as a key coping and self-care strategy among early career researchers (ECR’s) and has been shown to be crucial to overall well-being and sense of belonging, but its importance as a response to career pressures is not well studied. For ECR’s, friendships within the university are situated in a specific structural and institutional context, and formigrant women, this includes an additional aspect of gendered complexity. At the same time friendships may prove difficult as heightened neoliberal metrics emphasize competition forfunding, positions and teaching requirements. Using autoethnographic intra-reflections on the authors’ own friendship, bridging human geography and physical geography, this paper examines friendship of two ECR women from a homosocial perspective where institutional hierarchies and structures may be somewhat equalized. Drawing on the exploration of the authors’ friendship during their PhD years and into their post-doc positions, we reflect on the importance of friendship as an act of support, self-care and resistance. We argue for heightening importance for examining the way friendship creates safe social spaces and offer new insights into the importance of friendships in career paths. Friendship in the neoliberal academy has transformative potential for creating a culture of well-being in geography.

Lo que me hizo continuar fue la cabezonería: Perspectivas de las mujeres suecas al inicio de su carrera académica en Geografía

The rise of neoliberalism is creating inequalities for women as they balance their private lives and career trajectories. Geography as a middle sized discipline bridging the social and physical sciences offers insights into the ways neoliberal policies are felt by early career women (ECW). Using a life course model, this study presents the results of a workshop which sought to explore the ways in which women geographers, in Sweden, perceive and experience obstacles in their career advancement and which coping strategies they put in place to overcome those. The results show the blurring of the ECW ´s work and private lives. We find the experiences of ECW in Swedish geography departments are consistent with those of women in other countries. We conclude that ECW carry extra burdens in their career trajectories as academics due to unsupportive working environments, lack of mentorship, and an increasing pressure to produce measurable outputs and precarious employment. We argue that initiatives and programs aimed at retaining women in academia need to take on a broader perspective acknowledging the entanglement of women´s private and public spheres.