Precarity Across Borders: Affective and Epistemic Challenges in Gender Studies Under Anti-Gender and Neoliberal Regimes

Pehlivanlı E., Eslen-Ziya H.

SU Gender Conference, İstanbul, Türkiye, 6 - 07 Aralık 2025, ss.1, (Özet Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: İstanbul
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1
  • Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

This paper investigates the sociological dimensions of academic precarity experienced by gender studies scholars in Turkey and Scandinavia. Against the backdrop of rising anti-gender mobilizations and the deepening neoliberalization of higher education, we examine how institutional configurations and shifting gender political landscapes shape both the material and affective conditions of academic labor.

Drawing on preliminary data set from qualitative interviews with scholars across the two regions, we identify converging structural patterns – contractual insecurity, performance-driven evaluation regimes, and constrained academic autonomy – alongside profound emotional effects, including burnout, anxiety, and disaffection. These dynamics manifest differently across contexts: in Turkey, through explicit state-led suppression of gender research; in Scandinavia, through subtle marginalization within managerial frameworks that privilege technocratic neutrality over critical scholarship.

Building on our previous work, we apply and extend the concept of affective precarity to analyze how structural constraints are internalized and felt in scholars’ everyday academic lives. We show how these pressures not only undermine academic well-being but also distort the production and circulation of feminist and queer knowledge. Yet we also trace emergent modes of resistance: everyday acts of refusal, relational forms of care, and transnational solidarities that signal alternative ways of sustaining intellectual and emotional life in the academy. By centering scholars’ lived experiences, we call for a sociological rethinking of academic sustainability: one that foregrounds not individual resilience, but collective strategies for fostering epistemic justice, institutional inclusivity, and feminist solidarity across borders.