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Paper short abstract

What is it like being left-behinds? What are our own untold stories of waste and wasting (time, desire, opportunities), and how could these act as a disruptor and reassemble imaginaries of academic innovation in future societies?

Paper long abstract

Funded under Research Ireland’s Science Policy Research stand, this project explores the research talent pipeline and research culture(s) in Ireland, Denmark and Singapore as examples of small, advanced economies. Our project uses qualitative interviews to map the lived experiences of postdoctoral staff (n=60) within the talent pipeline to understand the opportunities and barriers innovation workers face, including the ‘left-behinds’ residues. We seek, in an anarchist form, to mis-use value stream mapping, a core lean management tool (used in industries such as manufacturing to document all steps within a production process), to trace often invisible elements which form the production process of postdocs within the higher education ecosystem. Stepping beyond discussions of precariousness and gender equality, our aim is to visualise material resources, information flow, value and waste. In this paper, we direct our attention to being left-over and left-behind, practices of waste and wasting (time, desire, opportunities) and how these might act as a disruptor and reassemble imaginaries of academic innovation in future societies.