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Paper short abstract

In this experimental, auto-ethnographic narrative, I reflect on navigating the highly precarious context of academic anthropology and social sciences as an early-career researcher with a PhD.

Paper long abstract

In this experimental, auto-ethnographic and meta-textual presentation, I reflect on my experiences and emotions of navigating the highly precarious terrain of academic anthropology and social sciences following the completion of my doctoral studies at a large public university in Sweden. In doing so, I draw on my anthropological research on care labour, which looked at diverse forms of embodied and infrastructural care in urban settings, to provide a critical commentary on the disciplinary effects of fragmentation. First, I remark on how academic precarity and racialised border regimes shape and constrain transnational scholarship. Second, specific to the experiences of navigating Swedish higher education, I discuss how the welfare state and trade unions, though vital in supporting unemployed degree holders, effectively render scholars as ideal disciplinary subjects. Third, drawing on themes of care, social reproduction, and solidarity, I reflect on the unique challenges of algorithmic encroachment in academia and other professional domains, which both illustrates ongoing and new forms of precarity and depoliticization. In doing so, this presentation foregrounds how diverse and, more often than not, invisible, gendered and racialised forms of care work and caring remain central to not just the sustenance of academic scholarship, but also to forms of critique and solidarity that shape further epistemic, ethical, and political projects.