D AV I D L O H E R , S A B I N E S T R A S S E R A N D G E O R G E TA

STOICA

Politics of precarity: neoliberal academia

under austerity measures and
authoritarian threat

In recent years, precarity has become the norm rather than an exception in contemporary European academia.
This special issue on politics of precarity examines the economic, social and political crisis‐effects of the
neoliberal turn in academia. It analyses how austerity measures and authoritarian politics have led to a prolif-
eration of precarity among, mostly young, scholars.

Key words   precarity, academia, neoliberalism, authoritarianism, audit culture

Introduction

‘I can’t accept this three‐year contract. After my defence, I have to spend at least one
year abroad before submitting a post‐doc proposal that allows me to continue my aca-
demic career.’ Our post‐doctoral colleague had serious doubts as to whether this three‐
year employment at the department would bind her to one university for too long and
create disadvantages for her next academic step. The Swiss national funding body has
strict time limits and explicit prescriptions for mobility in its regulations with regard
to career development grants. These regulations aim to reduce young scholars’ depen-
dency on professors and departments, increase personal responsibility and encour-
age the international experience necessary for securing a tenure‐track position. Yet
whether these efforts will pay off some day and lead to a tenured position after years
of insecurity remains uncertain. Universities and funding bodies engender streamlined
and comparable career paths and require constant competition, unconditional com-
mitment to an academic career and continuous mobility. Non‐academic issues such as
care work, family life or political engagement have to be secondary. Our colleague’s
concerns show how increasing neoliberalisation of academia is creating insecurity even
under quite favourable conditions with relatively decent wages, convenient working
conditions and a rather long planning horizon of three years.
Debates on the neoliberal turn in academia and its manifold effects on public uni-
versities are high on the agenda in social anthropology. Many have written about
‘Audit Culture’ since Marilyn Strathern’s edited volume in the EASA book series
(2000) and since Cris Shore and Susan Wright (1999, 2015a, 2015b, 2016) described
how the neoliberal toolkit of organisational management has been proliferating in aca-
demia. They examined, for example, how quality management tools to measure
research quality through the arithmetic of output data or of teaching performance have
changed the perception of what good research and teaching might be. Time and again,

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doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12697
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anthropological journals have published special issues or curated threads on the neo-
liberalisation of universities and the resulting precarisation of academics.1 The concept
of precarity, referring to a life of struggle against insecurity, was applied to the experi-
ences of protracted uncertainties in academic careers. Of course, these threatening
experiences have expanded and accelerated further since the 2008 global financial crisis,
which hit all academics, though differently according to academic positions, respective
university reforms and national contexts. Average incomes, social security systems,
national unemployment figures and national political as well as economic constella-
tions and stability shape un/certainties in academia and diversify the faces of precarity.
Nonetheless, shared experiences of flexibilisation, competition and mobility across
Europe laid the groundwork for collective responses and initiatives.
This special issue on the ‘politics of precarity’ brings together the analysis of economic,
social and political ‘crisis‐effects’ (Strasser 2016) in order to understand how austerity pol-
itics, right‐wing populist anti‐intellectualism and authoritarian governments have affected
European academic life in recent years. By crisis‐effect we mean the redistribution of polit-
ical power in times of emergency that enables transformations that were unthinkable in
times of normality (Roitman 2014). This extended perspective on political transformations
accompanying university reforms and the temporal focus help us to understand the com-
plexity of local situations as well as connections between different countries, politics and
experiences. We are living through times when economic, social and political crises‐effects
have paved the way for increased uncertainty and the simultaneous renewed closure of
borders and resurgence of nationalisms, in place of the EU’s liberal democratic values and
moral optimism, authoritarian regimes (Hungary, Russia and Turkey), right‐wing pop-
ulism (Austria, Italy and the Netherlands) and a new wave of strict austerity measures
(Spain, Portugal and Greece) are going hand in hand with university reforms enforcing
new work conditions, hierarchies and forms of both inclusion and exclusion. This focus on
political constellations allows us to expand the concept of academic precarity and reveals
that the neoliberal impact on universities not only affects job conditions and has disciplin-
ing effects on academics but is also itself entangled with austerity measures and author-
itarianism, thus jeopardising academic freedom and scientific fields. We aim to open up
the concept to questions of the economic, social and political effects of situations framed
as crises since 2008 in order to prepare new ground for awareness of the entanglements
between neo‐nationalism, austerity measures and neoliberal academia.
The uncertainty, including among highly educated people, has been exacerbated
by severe austerity policy measures in several southern European countries, including
Greece, Spain and Portugal (Narotzky forthcoming). Contracts with the EU Troika
designed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the
International Monetary Fund ensured long‐term major cuts in university and research
budgets. Simultaneously, authoritarian and neo‐nationalist governments targeted crit-
ical research and affected academics in times of political instability. Turkey closed 15
universities and dismissed almost 6,000 academics accused of membership of a terrorist
organisation by means of emergency decrees after a coup attempt in 2016.2 In the

1 See the debates in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (Forum 2016; Special issue 2010),
Cultural Anthropology (2018) and Allegra Lab (#universitycrises 2016 and #precarity 2017).  See
also Pérez and Montoya (2018), who urge for an anthropology of precarity in academia.
2 For more detailed numbers see: https​://www.hrw.org/news/2018/05/14/turkey-gover​nment-targe​
ting-acade​mics and Zerrin Özlem Biner in this issue.

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meantime, many of the affected scholars have left Turkey and try to survive in the
intensely competitive academic job market in Europe and the USA. Viktor Orbán
issued a law against the Central European University in Budapest in order to target
George Soros, his favourite enemy, whom he repeatedly accused of encouraging migra-
tion to Europe. In addition, in 2018 the Hungarian government stopped financing gen-
der studies at public universities, signalling a major cultural transformation away from
the left liberalism towards conservative values. These examples show that not only job
insecurity, mobility pressure and overwork are at stake but also academic freedom and
access to field sites, as well as a concerted attack on alternative and critical thinking,
once the main aim of universities.
Yet, when academics become subjected to new forms of vulnerability, exclusion
and exploitation resulting in precarious lives, they are also offered exciting translo-
cal employment opportunities and establish new professional networks as well as
transnational networks expressing solidarity and critique. One result of increased
transnational collaboration against deteriorating work conditions is the PrecAnthro
Collective, launched at the Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social
Anthropologists (EASA) in Milan, 2016. In a public letter, the collective drew atten-
tion to work conditions in academia and urged their European association, EASA,
to take up this issue and collaborate in combatting increasing insecurity in the disci-
pline and in academia at large. The EASA executive committee responded and installed
PrecAnthro Liaison Officers and dedicated the next meeting, the EASA AGM Seminar
2017 in Bern, Switzerland, to ‘Politics and Precarity in Academia’. Instead of focusing
on similarities as a basis for developing political strategies, the seminar started with an
analysis of differences to prepare the ground for mutual understanding and identifying
priorities for interventions in different economic, political and national contexts. While
differences between the temporalities and effects of audit cultures, between hierar-
chically positioned scholars and between personal experiences of subjectivation along
dividing and overlapping ascriptions and identifications of class, gender, sexualities,
citizenship and racialisation were debated intensively, the seminar retained its focus
on an awareness of the entanglement of neoliberal academia with austerity measures
and increasing authoritarianism. Despite the many identified differences and complex-
ities, a shared experience of vulnerability and anger as much as a growing desire for
solidarity emerged. Similarities in experiences and affects found in these discussions
might prompt intensified collaboration and spark a sense of optimism and action. The
seminar paved the way for this special issue, in which we focus on the proliferation of
precarity under neoliberal regulations and try to use precarity as an analytical lens that
helps reveal the entanglement of these disciplining measures of insecurity and fear with
authoritarian regimes and austerity measures. Beyond this analytical focus, this special
issue has the aim of making a political intervention. It provides a common space for
reflection on how academia could be imagined differently and how we can collectively
strive towards this.

Precarity: An academic lens

The term ‘precarity’ entered academic English as a neologism only recently com-
pared to the academic debates in France (with the term précarité, e.g. Bourdieu 1998;
Castel 1995) and Germany (with the term Prekarität, e.g. Brinkman 2006; Hauer 2007;

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Marchart 2013), where it has a longer history (see also Schultheis and Herold 2010).
Many debates define precarity against the backdrop of an unquestioned Fordist and
Keynesian ideal of economy and employment, partially materialised in the welfare
states of the Global North (see Neilson and Rossiter 2008). These debates tend to
focus primarily on industrial labour and examine the effects of increasing job insecu-
rity in combination with an eroding welfare system under hegemonic neoliberal rule,
which has led to ever more people facing economic uncertainty and being threatened
by social decline (see Nachtwey 2016). Yet not only anthropologists have criticised
Guy Standing’s (2011) suggestion of ‘precariat’ as a designation for a newly emerging
social class that has replaced the working class. There is no new working class in the
making but instead only a shared feeling of insecurity and vulnerability from many
different angles and positions (Gill 2014; Kasmir 2018).
The narrowing of precarity to job insecurity and its devastating effects on every
other aspect of life remains nonetheless caught in the framework of an idealised
Keynesian economic model of industrial labour and serves as a point of reference
against which actual deviation is measured and identified as precarious. It ignores the
fact that the imagined economic world order which is implicitly set as being normal
is in fact an exception of no longer than roughly the three decades after the Second
World War, and restricted to some parts of the Global North. Put simply, casualised
and insecure labour arrangements have been the norm in the Global South, as Hart
(1973), for example, showed in his early study on urban employment in Ghana. Even
within the temporal and geographical exception, the norm of a stable job combined
with a solid welfare state was arguably more an ideal than a social reality for the major-
ity of the workforce, as critiques noted (see Neilson and Rossiter 2008). Although the
‘growing insecurity brought on by the flexible management of the global work force
within post‐Fordist capitalism’ (Brophy 2006: 622) is indeed an accurate description of
the devastating effects of neoliberal politics worldwide, the proliferation of this inse-
curity is tangible in particular for those who have previously lived under conditions
of stability.
Yet the expectation of normality is an important aspect of precarity. Though it
can serve as an ideological obfuscation of existing disruptions in society, it might also
serve as leverage in political struggles. In this second case, the narrative of normality
that consists of a stable job for life combined with solid social security provided by the
welfare state serves as an important starting point for political claims, either those that
defend what remains of the welfare state, or those aiming for improvement.
Another important strand of literature differentiates between ‘precarity’ and ‘pre-
cariousness’ and emphasises the existential dimension of precarious lives. Defined as
an existential state of unpredictability, ‘a life without the promise of stability’ (Tsing
2015: 2), or as mutual dependency as a shared human quality (Butler 2012; see also
Lorey 2015), this notion is anchored in the idea of precariousness as a deeply human
condition. Yet stripped of its socio‐economic context, this notion remains elusive and
occludes class and race (see Thorkelson 2016a; Kasmir 2018). Nevertheless, this exis-
tential approach is a reminder of the subjective and experiential aspect of precarity.
Together with the hegemonic expectations of normality, it is the individual experi-
ence of insecurity and instability that transforms a situation of economic scarcity into
precarity.
A series of studies moves beyond the gaze fixed on wage relations that still dom-
inates the debates on precarity in anthropology. For example, Allison (2013) studies

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how the different aspects are intertwined in her ethnography on contemporary Japan,
analysing how people perceive and respond to the socio‐economic transformation of
society. Studying the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on the everyday, Narotzky and
Besnier (2014) suggest a similar approach, focusing on the question of how people
organise their economic lives in their physical, social and affective dimensions. Molé
(2010) examines the implementation of neoliberal reforms in Northern Italy and shows
how precarity marginalises subjects in society. Matos (2019) locates precarisation as
an ongoing process limiting the options and conditions of ‘wage earning’, and exam-
ines how kinship, class and generational difference structure the feeling through which
ordinary people imagine and aspire to being ‘livelihood earners’. What all of these
studies have in common is that they understand the experience of precarity in relation
to the historical conjuncture of neoliberalism.
The special issue connects to this anthropological research through its insistence
on the importance of studying the interdependence of precarity’s different dimensions.
We suggest distinguishing four dimensions that constitute economic, social and polit-
ical precarity in academia. First, precarity is structured by the socio‐economic con-
ditions under neoliberal rule and describes the casualisation of labour arrangements
and the proliferation of economic insecurity and unpredictability. Second, it is further
shaped by the destabilising effects on everyday life that originate in politics. The third
dimension comprises the historically constituted hegemonic expectations of normal-
ity as the backdrop against which the actual deviation of everyday life is measured
and explained. And finally, the fourth dimension consists of individual experience of
insecurity and unpredictability. Anthropology is in a privileged position to study the
interdependence of these four dimensions due to the discipline’s attention to the ques-
tion of how changes in broader socio‐economic conditions affect the ordinary. This
enables us to get a better understanding of how the everyday life of academics is shaped
and affected by these conditions, and it allows us to examine individual and collective
responses to these changes.

Precarity in times of crisis‐effects

Universities and research centres situated within a vibrant and accelerating global
knowledge economy have been exposed to pressure from the dynamic competition of
market‐oriented institutions on the one hand and restrictive politics on the other. Since
the financial crisis in 2008, when rising numbers of unemployed have made a living by
working in several part‐time jobs without insurance, the gig economy has spilled over
into different sectors, particularly during structural adjustment in southern European
countries. Uncertainty entered colleges and universities when costs were cut by hiring
more adjunct and part‐time academics based on third‐party project funding all over
Europe. These university reforms have changed the relation between fixed‐term and
permanent positions. Short‐term employments have become prevalent, with weekly‐
contracts in austerity‐hit Spain (see Schwaller in this issue) or zero‐hour contracts in
the UK. Even former welfare states transformed their universities into greedy enter-
prises with part‐time, underpaid, overworked staff members and an increasing number
of third‐party‐funded research positions (see Rogler in this issue). According to an
analysis by the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK 2017), Germany’s rate of fixed‐
term contracts has risen to more than 85%, which reignited protest at universities.

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Replacing institutional block grant financing with output‐oriented, project‐based,

competitive and temporary funding (in particular related to the Excellence Initiative)
created new opportunities for collaboration but limited or at least postponed job secu-
rity for post‐docs.
Andrea Muehlebach’s (2013) suggestion we should change our perspective and
stop seeing the non‐academic path as second best, while strengthening non‐academic
job opportunities for anthropologists, was adopted by many commentators. However,
this of course only helps those who have such alternatives in the job market. Jobs
beyond academia are not easily available under conditions of austerity (Schwaller in
this issue) or alternatives are simply blocked for those expelled from Turkish universi-
ties (see Biner in this issue).
After a long period of liberalisation, destabilisation and privatisation, the financial,
economic and political troubles from 2008 onwards heralded a new era of interventions
and innovations at universities. Austerity measures and neo‐nationalism, intended
to manage various crises and emergency situations, in fact facilitated instability and
increased precarity, including at universities and among highly educated academics.
This can be exemplified by the pressure to be mobile and globally connected. Once
something that successful academics aspired to, in the course of recent transformations
and restrictions, mobility has become a precondition of success and thus a burden, if
not a threat, for early career scholars in insecure positions (Schaer et al. 2017; Rogler
in this issue). Yet, under authoritarian conditions, mobility is granted to followers of
hegemonic ideas and governing parties and suspended for unwanted and resistant aca-
demics. In the present constellations of neoliberal and authoritarian interventions in
Turkey, immobilisation intensified to the extent that passports were revoked, access
to research areas and sites was restricted and academics were not only dismissed from
universities but also either prevented from travelling or forced to leave the country (see
Biner and Vouvouli in this issue).
Big projects funded by national bodies and the supra‐national European Research
Council (ERC) are further examples of recent entangled developments at universities.
Innovation and excellence in these well‐funded and prestigious research projects show
how reforms are on the one hand providing first‐rate stepping stones for future pro-
fessors and early career scholars. Yet, on the other hand, with their aura of excellence,
these projects contribute simultaneously to an immense pressure of competition for
gig jobs and an unequal distribution of merits. Furthermore, strengthening the role of
‘principal investigators’ (PI) reconstitutes formerly dissolved structures of hierarchy,
patronage and dependence. Managing big projects appropriately should not be left
to the goodwill of PIs but should instead be built upon and supervised by a collab-
oratively elaborated code of conduct as suggested in a workshop by the PrecAnthro
collective at the EASA conference in Stockholm 2018 (see Tilche and Loperfido in the
Forum of this issue).
Similar regulations are also needed for all collaborative projects across borders
that are insufficiently protected by institutional codes of ethics, ombudspeople and/
or legal regulations. This holds true for big transnationally recruited research projects
as much as for shared publication projects and collective efforts for open access jour-
nals (as the recent HAU debate has shown clearly). All projects that cannot be super-
vised and accounted for at the level of institutions need agreements and collectively
defined mechanisms of fair collaboration. Instead of being granted equal opportunity
in these projects, non‐EU academics struggling with securitisation, the reinforcement

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of border controls and everyday bordering practices face discrimination and depreci-
ation in European universities, irrespective of their academic qualifications. In many
Schengen countries, non‐EU nationals are threatened with expulsion due to the lack of
a permanent visa or at least a long‐term residence permit. When post‐docs try to meet
the expectations of mobility and flexibility of big and prestigious projects, thus fulfill-
ing their duty as successful, mobile scholars, they often lose the residence rights they
have accumulated in one country during their time as an employed PhD.

Studying precarity ‘at home’

Due to increasing uncertainty in their departments as well as in academia more gen-

erally, anthropologists have begun to study precarity ‘at home’ within their own
discipline and among their own colleagues, and mainly from the vantage point of pre-
carious positions and calling for alternative practices within academia (see Peacock
2016). Thorkelson (2016b) even suggests considering the academic crisis as a turning
point that engenders hope for the transformation of university structures. Alternative
pathways for academics and research questions in this field aim to find a way out of the
deadlock of lamenting (Lems 2017). This special issue comprises engaged ethnographic
contributions that adopt a perspective on precarity in different regional academic con-
texts that is entangled with various political and economic transformations.
Zerrin Özlem Biner, who gave the keynote at the Bern seminar in 2017, chose an
auto‐ethnographic approach with the aim of producing alternative knowledge both
within Turkey and in the UK. Starting with the case of ‘Academics for Peace’, she
exemplifies how precarity and solidarity are constituted in the context of authoritar-
ianism in Turkey where critical academics are perceived as a threat to the integrity of
the Turkish nation‐state and the well‐being of the people. She searches for alternative
ways of producing meaningful knowledge that can contribute to the creation of sites
for solidarity.
Corinne Schwaller shows how young academics in Barcelona make ends meet and
how precarity is normalised under austerity conditions. Following academic biogra-
phies within and outside the university, she links different regimes of value and shows
how short‐term contracts have different impacts on young academics navigating along
gendered, educational, migratory and existential pathways. She clearly shows that the
solution of training academics for the job market beyond academia is not an option in
times of economic crisis.
Christian Rogler shows how neoliberal university reforms in the early 2000s have
turned universities into ‘greedy’ institutions. Over time this has exacerbated the vul-
nerability of scholars, in particular PhDs and post‐docs. Studying anthropological
departments in two large universities situated in small EU welfare states, he traces the
rise of third‐party funding and how competition, performance and control became
the dominant features of higher education. These neoliberal measures were introduced
along with an illiberal managerial system. The university’s greediness is twofold, he
concludes: it is hungry for output and stingy towards employees.
Aimilia Vouvouli takes as a starting point her own experiences of job insecurity
in times of austerity in Greece and during the authoritarian transformation in Turkey.
She reveals her own experiences to the reader and follows three colleagues with sim-
ilar trajectories. She invites anthropologists to contribute emotionally, morally and

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intellectually to her narration as co‐participants in order to develop new perspectives

on precarity across borders and alternative knowledge. She suggests in her analysis
that neoliberal and authoritarian precarity affect people similarly, since both reproduce
forms of governmentality through disciplining.
In the Debate section, Georgeta Stoica, Julia Eckert, Katharina Bordirsky and Dan
Hirslund discuss gnawing problems of academic insecurity and the options for critique
and intervention. How do academics themselves contribute to their exploitability, how
can they share responsibility and how does the decision ‘to bring the state back in’
enrich the analysis and broaden opportunities of solidarity and resistance beyond aca-
demia? The invited discussants contribute from their particular perspectives and shape
options for solidarity.
Finally, with the Forum we aim to represent the diversity of perspectives, positions
and experiences. Here PhD students, post‐doc researchers, tenure‐track assistant pro-
fessors and associate as well as full professors provide different experiences from many
countries, positions and ideologies.
To conclude, this special issue is engaging with a globally converging knowl-
edge economy, disrupted by restrictive border regimes, in which universities pro-
vide competitive and streamlined career tracks and produce an increasing number of
post‐docs on fixed‐term contracts who experience both flexibility and exploitability.
Precarity has become an indeterminacy that is now more the norm than the exception
in our times in European academia. What marks the last decade is the ‘crisis‐effect’
creeping into neoliberal working conditions in Europe, that is, the intertwining
of neoliberal policies and audit culture with austerity measures. The descent into
authoritarian rule, as in Turkey, Hungary and Russia, and the rise of right‐wing and
nationalist movements throughout Europe, have shown the appalling consequences
of anti‐intellectualism and have exacerbated political and professional insecurity for
thousands of academics and damaged intellectual development. Although academics
in Turkey were dismissed and imprisoned, they have shown us how to build a trans-
national network and combat authoritarianism from within and outside the country
(see Biner in this issue). This did not change the dire situation at Turkish universities
and many intellectuals have left the country in the meantime. But we can learn from
each other something about how to respond to greedy institutions and threatening
governments, individualisation and subjectivation – and we can also learn from each
other about the power of poisonous knowledge and solidarity.

Acknowledgements

This special issue originates from the 2016 EASA Annual General Meeting Seminar
at the University of Bern. We express our thanks to all participants of the seminar, as
well as to our colleagues from the EASA executive board who generously supported
the meeting. We particularly thank our authors of the articles and our colleagues
who accepted the invitation to contribute in the Forum and the Debate to the discus-
sion of academic precarity. Sarah Green, the leaving editor of Social Anthropology/
Anthropologie Sociale, recognised the intellectual and political importance of this
endeavour. She encouraged us and supported this publication. With her critical and
helpful comments on earlier drafts, Gerhild Perl helped us to sharpen the argument
with critical remarks. Merciless, she flagged inconsistencies and flaws and forced us to

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 P O L I T I C S O F P R E C A R I T Y      9

more coherence and clarity. Yaren Kirmitzitas was an invaluable help for the organ-
isation of the seminar, and she also helped us to keep track of communications with
all the contributors involved in the Forum and the Debate. Julene Knox gave us very
helpful advice on language. The Institute of Social Anthropology of the University of
Bern gave us financial support to realise this publication.

David Loher and Sabine Strasser

Institute of Social Anthropology
University of Bern
Bern
Switzerland
david.loher@anthro.unibe.ch
sabine.strasser@anthro.unibe.ch

Georgeta Stoica
Centre Universitaire de Formation et de Recherche de Mayotte
France
georgeta.stoica@univ-mayotte.fr

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Politiques de précarité : le milieu universitaire

néolibéral face aux mesures d'austérité et à la
menace autoritaire
Au cours des dernières années, la précarité est devenue la norme plutôt que l’exception dans
les universités européennes. Ce numéro spécial sur les politiques de précarité examine les effets
économiques, sociales et politiques du tournant néolibéral sur le monde universitaire. Les

© 2019 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 P O L I T I C S O F P R E C A R I T Y      1 1

analyses démontrent de quelles façons les mesures d’austérité et les politiques autoritaires résult-
ent en une précarité élevée parmi les chercheurs – surtout les plus jeunes.

Mots-clés   precarite, monde universitaire, néolibéralisme, autoritarisme, culture de l'audit

© 2019 European Association of Social Anthropologists.