The university as heterotopia? Space, time and precarity in the academy
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Abstract
This Special Issue focuses on the theme of social precarity in higher education, as seen through a spatial and/or temporal lens. Social precarity as a concept is being increasingly used to explore issues relating to equity in higher education, primarily in relation to the increasing proportion of academic staff on casualised, short-term or part-time contracts in most countries where the sector is under neoliberal influence (see, for example: Ylijoki 2010; Chattarji 2016; Read & Leathwood 2020). In this introduction to the Special Issue I will be briefly discussing some of the key reasons for focusing firstly on social precarity, and secondly on the spatial-temporal. I also make use of Foucault’s (1984) concept of ‘heterotopia’ when discussing some of the key ways that the papers in the Special Issue conceptualise precarity from a spatial-temporal lens. For Foucault, heterotopias are distinct spaces (bound also in time) that have a complex relationship to the wider social world, seeming to stand in contrast to wider social ‘reality’ but in many ways also encapsulating and enhancing aspects of this reality. As we will see, the papers in this Special Issue all point out the complexities of academia as a spatial-temporal phenomenon that in some ways promotes itself as a special ‘space’, but can also represent and even reinforce dynamics of inequality prevalent in the wider social world. Of particular focus is conditions of social precarity as experienced by both staff and students in the university.
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