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Paper short abstract

Academic careers are increasingly precarious. Drawing on 36 interviews with unemployed researchers, this paper shows how research practices sustain careers and the academic system, enacting resilience under structural instability while shifting responsibility for precarity onto individuals.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary academic careers are increasingly precarious and uncertain. While resilience is frequently discussed in relation to socio-technical systems, it is rarely applied to researchers themselves. Yet researchers must navigate uncertainty, temporary employment, and institutional instability, and little attention has been paid to how resilience is enacted in practice and under which conditions it becomes possible.

Drawing on 36 qualitative interviews with researchers who have experienced periods of unemployment, this paper examines how scientific work continues beyond formal institutional affiliation. Interviewees describe practices through which they attempt to remain legible as researchers, including writing publications, analysing data, maintaining collaborations, preparing grant proposals, and participating in academic networks. These practices allow researchers to sustain engagement with ongoing research trajectories despite the absence of employment or institutional resources, though their ability to continue depends on personal backgrounds, epistemic characteristics of research fields, and broader organisational structures.

The interviews also reveal how these practices are shaped by normative expectations within academia to remain productive, visible, and competitive even during unemployment. Continued research is often framed as a necessary personal responsibility to remain employable in systems that reward continuous output.

By performing research under precarious conditions, researchers not only sustain their own careers but also maintain the functioning of the academic system, reproducing employment precarity while stabilising knowledge production. In this way, resilience practices operate simultaneously as individual coping strategies and as systemic maintenance, highlighting how structural pressures are individualised under the façade of continuous productivity.