Description
This paper uses critical reflexivity as a method to document and analyse the ethical dilemmas that emerge when researching academic precarity across the permanent/precarious divide. With our project on long-term academic precarity as a case study, and as people who experienced long-term academic precarity, we take as the starting point other researchers' silences about their positionality and about who does the work in the production of research on academic precarity. What is striking is that, although our small, unfunded project was driven by feminist ethics and transformative feminist praxis, there were some ethical issues we did not foresee, nor could we resolve. By engaging in critical reflection on our own research project, the main risk that we identify is the exploitation of precarious academics, as participants and as workers, which we have mostly avoided. Four main issues arise in relation to authenticity and subjectivity, disclosure of employment history and status, methods/techniques used, and how research benefits from the labour of precarious academics, or what we call the ‘precarity dividend’. The paper seeks to push the boundaries around how researchers hold themselves to account in the process of knowledge production. We suggest that precarity and especially the precarity dividend must become an inherent ethical consideration in all social scientific research design. It is a call for social researchers to make explicit – in writing, in ethics reviews and in presentations of their work – the labour process and labour conditions of all those involved.| Period | 2024 |
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| Event title | British Sociological Association Annual Conference |
| Event type | Conference |