Excellence Regimes in Precarious Times: Exhaustion, Exclusion, and Structural Discrimination in Early-career Academic Lives

Sažetak

This article reflects on how structural precarisation, institutional hierarchies, administrative discriminations and a pervasive culture of self-exploitation shape both the production of knowledge and the material conditions of young academic lives. As precarious early-career researchers within a European project labelled as an “excellence program”, we analyze the tensions involved in sustaining research experiences that face legal challenges, resort to affective ties and informal strategies of survival, and are rooted in political commitments while embedded in scholarly environments that prioritise competitiveness, profitability and bibliometric productivity. The different experiences collected in this paper present challenges that affect how we live, eat, conduct fieldwork, how and where we write, what we can publish, and what we are compelled to withhold. We navigate these contradictions from situated bodies – some of which are gendered, racialised, and/or illegalised – sustained by informal and invisible networks of care, and by reconciliation efforts that rarely find recognition within the official frameworks of authorised knowledge production. Dissent does not always take explicit forms; it often appears in fractures, alliances and everyday gestures of defiance. In the era of the “marketisation of education” (Fisher 2009), “audit cultures” (Strathern 2000), and “unrealistic expectations” (Polese 2018), we ask how we can sustain a collective ethics of academic labour that does not dissociate the human and relational dimensions of research from the political, economic and precarious conditions under which it is produced.

Ključne riječi: excellence regimes, academic precarity, informal survival strategies, networks of care, audit cultures