Monthly Archives: January 2021

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Susana Narotzky: A History of Precariousness in Spain

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The EASA report on The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) is an important initiative that offers quantitative evidence about a situation which all of those who work in academia are aware of, many experience daily, and which has repeatedly been denounced since the onslaught of the neoliberal policies starting in the 1980s. I will comment on this document from my situated viewpoint as a Spanish anthropologist, a full time tenured anthropologist, and a PI of large collaborative projects.

As a report produced by anthropologists for anthropologists, my first surprise was to find it not very anthropological. Although the report acknowledges that situations are very different among countries, we do not get a picture of what those differences are. The ‘methodology’ cannot deliver that picture. First, the assumption that EASA membership represents anthropologists working in Europe, and in particular the most precarious anthropologists, is probably inaccurate. In Spain, many of the part-time non-tenured teaching positions have extremely low salaries and their holders juggle a plurality of jobs that make research difficult. As a result, membership in EASA –which is fundamentally tied to participation in the biennial conference—is rarely sought. Therefore, a large contingent of (probably) the most precarious voices, many of which are not proficient in English, is not represented in the survey. This may also explain why a large majority of respondents work in Northern institutions which have more resources than those in other countries.

Second, what does the fact of choosing to produce a ‘survey’ rather than an ‘ethnography’ of “The anthropological career in Europe” say about the discipline of social anthropology, about its trust in the ‘evidence’ produced by our main methodological tool? Why does EASA as an association of social anthropologists thinks that it needs quantitative evidence in order to make its point about precarious anthropologists’ situation in the academy? We have countless ethnographies about labor precarity in Europe, but we have scant detailed ethnographies about precarious anthropologists teaching and doing research in concrete university environments. This has not been an obstacle to insightful and important articles being written from two perspectives: on the one hand, contributions based on personal experience; on the other hand, contributions based on statistical secondary sources enabling theorizations about the neoliberal transformations of the university in general or in a particular country (often in the Global North). As Pérez and Montoya (2018: A5) propose, personal experience should “reveal research paths for future ethnographies of academic precarity”, but it cannot substitute for them. I suggest that producing ethnographies is an urgent task if we want (1) to understand concrete ongoing processes of exploitation, domination and dispossession, and (2) to organize in a collective manner to overturn them.

Third, context and history. The survey does not provide any tools for historical and political context. Rather, it generalizes the neoliberal process as if it developed in the same way everywhere. We know from anthropological investigations into other domains of life, however, that the rolling back and rolling out of the neoliberal state is modulated by concrete historical circumstances.

In the mid-1970s, as a result of an increase in the number of university students, Spanish universities resorted to hiring a large number of non-permanent faculty. The figures vary slightly according to each university but, on average, 80 per cent of the faculty in Spanish universities were non-permanent in the mid-1970s (Profesor No Numerario) (Moreno 2019, Castillo 1982). According to statistical records of the Ministry of Universities, the figure of non-permanent faculty has stabilized at around 45 per cent in the past four years. Precarity, then, was part of an undemocratic university system where hierarchies of patronage dominated the scarce avenues towards stable tenure. Precarity, now, is part of an austerity regime that has reduced public education resources, forcing universities to seek funding from other sources (e.g., research grant overheads) or public-private partnerships. This has important implications for our understanding of the neoliberalisation of Spanish academia; as much as it sheds light on the long history of academic precarity and the struggle against this.

In the 1970s, as part of the general struggles for democratization of the university, a nationwide movement of the No Numerario’s developed. Based on assembly meetings in faculties and universities, it was not attached to parties or unions and was coordinated at the national scale by a committee of representatives. They demanded the same treatment as the permanent faculty, together with access to decision making committees in the university and other democratic requests. They organized long strikes and threatened the continuity of teaching and exams. Yet, their demand of stability and equal treatment sought to obtain a well-paid labor contract and to abolish the life-long tenure of the Profesor Numerario, subjecting all professors to periodic evaluation of their teaching and research and, implicitly, to the possibility of ending their contract. In the end, this radical position –the generalization of “non-tenured” academic labor contracts– was disabled by a law of university reform issued by the first socialist government in 1983, which promoted a process of rapid stabilization of most PhD-holding No Numerario’s through access to lifelong tenure  (Carreras 2004).

Today, the privatization of the public university system is based on the elimination of that life-tenure system and its substitution by tenured labor contracts in a context where the existing labor regulations have deregulated most rights and protections. Precarious faculty today in Spain are represented only partially and by various unions demanding stability, but there is no equivalent movement, organization and coordination to that of the No Numerario’s in the seventies. Why is that?

Local patronage networks are still very much in place, and one of the major assets to access a permanent job is to remain close to one’s Alma Mater, rather than to publish or get an international post-doc position abroad. In public universities 87% of teaching faculty (tenured and non-tenured) have a PhD from the same Autonomous Community, and 73% from the same university where they defended their PhD. Simultaneously, an increasing contingent of young academics who have been competitively selected to post-doc positions in research projects, have generally been able to publish in ‘impact’ journals and have expanded their international networks.

As a result, two very different kinds of precarious academic exist nowadays. They are often pitted against each other in competitions for tenured positions. When committees have to decide the value of teaching or research experience, the value of the local or foreign (i.e. from outside the university) candidate, they often tend to favor the local candidate with teaching experience. Rather than moralizing this as being ‘bad’ or ‘good’ for the university, my point here is to underline the diverse positionalities of precarious academics in Spain and the difficulties that this fragmentation entails in terms of collective organization and mobilization. In a context with more precarity and minimal research opportunities, within an ongoing struggle for democracy, the No Numerario’s movement collectively organized and achieved stability. Why not now? What needs to be done?

As anthropologists we need ethnographies of academic precarities, we need to historically situate the various forms of precarity and to compare them. To act effectively, we need to understand the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization. We know the numbers, now we need to know the souls.

Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Bibliography

Carreras, J. 2004. Evaluación de la calidad docente y promoción del profesorado (IV). Legislación universitaria española (b): de la Ley de Reforma Universitaria (1983) a la Ley Orgánica de universidades (2002). (1ª parte.) Educación Médica 7(1): 9-23

Castillo, J.J. 1982. Universidad: O todos o ninguno, El País, 12 de abril 1982

Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Moreno, I. 2019. Interview with Prof. Isidoro Moreno, Anthropologist, Universidad de Sevilla. 20 March, 2019. http://tv.us.es/el-movimiento-de-los-pnn-y-la-democratizacion-de-la-universidad-y-el-pais/

Pérez, M. & Montoya, A. 2018. The Unsustainability of the Neoliberal Public University: Towards an Ethnography of Precarity in Academia. Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, LXXIII(1): A1-A16

Cite as: Narotzky, Susana. 2021. “A History of Precariousness in Spain.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/susana-narotzky:-a-history-of-precariousness-in-spain/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Giacomo Loperfido: On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Covid19 is producing a crisis – both sanitary and economic – of global structural proportions, threatening the very existence of society as we know it. All precarious segments of society have become more precarious. But even before now, a growing precariat, eating into larger and larger segments of the middle classes, was emerging. Isolation, alienation, precaritization are not a novelty. Looking at the PrecAnthro/Easa survey (Fotta, Ivancheva, Pernes, 2020), one can see that the transformations of the academic system are an integral part of the process of middle class precaritization that started long before the current crisis.

I am an unemployed anthropologist (and have been so for more than two years). I am also a member of the PrecAnthro collective/union. At the EASA conference of 2018 I had the pleasure to be part of Alice Tilche’s initiative to bring together junior and senior anthropologists (precarious and otherwise) to reflect critically on the implications of the current trend of funding academic research through “big projects” (see Tilche and Loperfido, 2019). Before then, I had been a “privileged” (Matos, 2019) precarious researcher, employed as a postdoc in one of those big projects. For four years, I enjoyed the chance to participate in a solidly funded team under the expert coordination of a senior researcher who was also able to embed our collective research among her high level contacts in global anthropology. Despite fundamentally benefitting from having been part of a “big project”, I would like to use my space here to express a critical stance on what seems to have become one of the hegemonic mechanisms of research funding in the European and global arena.

The “big project” trend relates directly to the occupational transformations within social anthropology highlighted by the survey: precaritization, constant competition over funding, growing separation between research and teaching, vertical polarisation of academic hierarchies, de-professionalization of academic labor through multiple contracts, the imperatives of – often restless – international mobility, to cite but a few.

In the 1990s, the extension of New Public Management policies to the university system enforced the managerialization of administrations, introduced performance requirements, and set up unbridled competition. What emerged was a new trans-nationalized educational arena, in which “excellence” and “competition” became not only fundamental key words and real-world access keys to tenured careers. As an effect, an increasing number of tenured positions were proletarianized as a collective body, “and the number of short term or part time contracts at major institutions increased (with the concomitant participation of a handful of highly paid stars)”, as a worried Bill Readings had already stated 25 years ago (Readings 1996: 1). He noted how the university was beginning to be spoken of in the idiom of “excellence” rather than of “culture”. His explanation was that “the university no longer has to safeguard and propagate national culture, because the nation-state is no longer the major site at which capital reproduces itself” (Readings 1996:13).

About ten years later, the establishment of the European Research Council was saluted as “a European Champions League” (Winnacker 2008: 126), and the new way of funding research through big grants was established as part of the EU’s 7th framework program. Here again, “individual excellence” and “competition as the prerequisite for the formation of excellence” were becoming key principles in overcoming the “startling parochialism fostered in Europe by the reality of Nation States” (Winnacker: 124-25).

In much less enthusiastic terms, PrecAnthro’s action has focused on those very processes of increased internationalisation, escalating competition, and the new global imperative of “excellence”. With the above-mentioned event at the EASA conference 2018, we wanted to problematize the ways in which the international academic arena has been transformed into a market, where “scholars who are able to secure large grants have become football stars openly traded in the academic league” (Tilche, Loperfido, 2019:111).  A “Champions League”, indeed. Yet, on the dark side of that seemingly glamorous moon, a less visible academic precariat silently took shap; and became exposed to all the profound challenges and hardships in academic careers and personal life that the EASA/PrecAnthro report brings to light for the EASA membership community.

From all the above, I can only infer a general decline in the perception of the value of public institutions as something being endowed with more than just ‘competition’, such as social equality and cultural reproduction. Certainly, we all love excellent scholarship. Yet, there is a difference between a public action that promotes academic excellence so that it helps everybody to improve their scholarship, and an excellence that comes as a single-minded competition mechanism where only those that already have the label of excellence will benefit. 

Personally, I did benefit from the opportunities offered by participation in a big international grant. But we should refuse to assess collective problems on the grounds of our personal interests only. If we are to do something about “the current tragedy of anthropology as a discipline” (Kapferer, 2018) – and these are, once again, words from a time before the current pandemic – it is important ask, from a political and economic angle, where the public money that I benefitted from did not go. How many more non-tenured positions, how many more fixed-term research contracts and how many part-time teaching contracts does each €2,5 million grant produce? Who shoulders the costs of those grants? The PrecAnthro survey offers important answers to these questions. Now, what happens if we put together the scary picture portrayed by that survey prior to the current pandemic with the projections we have on the impact of Covid19 on the global economy and precarity in the academy in particular? There is enough evidence now for an honest and serious discussion on social justice; and to question where the current organisation of “big grant” transnational research funding fits into the escalating inequality in academia.

Giacomo Loperfido is an independent researcher, member of PrecAnthro. He is currently working on his first monograph, A Birth of Neo-fascism: Cultural Identities, the State, and the Politics of Marginality in Italy, thanks to the generous help of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, CH.

Bibliography

Fotta, Martin, Ivancheva, Mariya, Pernes, Raluca. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Kapferer, Bruce. 2018. “The Hau complicity: An event in the crisis of anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 9 July. www.focaalblog.com/2018/07/09/bruce-kapferer-the-hau-complicity-an-event-in-the-crisis-of-anthropology.

Matos, Patricia, 2019. “Precarious Privilege. Confronting Material and Moral Dispossession”, in Forum: Politics and Precarity in Academia, Social Anthropology 27: 97-117.

Readings, Bill, 1996, The University in Ruins. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.

Tilche, Alice, Loperfido, Giacomo, 2019. “The Return of Armchair Anthropology? Debating the Ethics and Politics of Big Projects”, in Forum: Politics and Precarity in Academia, Social Anthropology 27: 97-117

Winnacker, Ernst-Ludwig, 2008. “On Excellence Through Competition”, European Educational Research Journal, 7:2, 124-30.

Cite as: Loperfido, Giacomo. 2021. “On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/giacomo-loperfido-on-excellence-precarity-and-the-uses-of-public-money/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Natalia Buier: What sample, whose voice, which Europe?

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The EASA membership survey and the associated ‘precarity’ report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) are an important and timely contribution. Surely these are findings we must build on and the critical scrutiny of which is indispensable for formulating minimally shared lines of action. The report is likely to stir discussion both through its inclusions as well as through some of its inevitable silences. It is some of the latter that I want to briefly touch upon here.

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Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Don Kalb: Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The PrecAnthro Collective within EASA has shown staying power and bite. That is what the EASA precarity survey demonstrates (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020). Mariya Ivancheva has turned her elected stint in the Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists to good use. She, her co-authors, and her multiple collaborators and supporters in and outside of EASA should be applauded. This is Europe-wide anthropological collective action at work, and it goes far beyond business as usual.

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Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Stefan Voicu: Introduction: EASA’s ‘Precarity Report’: Reflections, Critiques, Extensions

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Every day across Europe hundreds of social anthropologists wake up knowing that their precarious employment conditions may one day force them to leave the discipline. Still, they keep the discipline going across the continent by teaching, providing vital research data for high-profile research projects and a substantial share of the annual publication output. They also apply for grants and jobs while balancing the tightrope of overtime work and personal life. All for the glimmer of hope of a permanent position.

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Blog

Lesley Gill: Can the Left Revive the ‘Pink Tide’ amid a Global Pandemic?

As Covid-19 has washed over Latin America like a tsunami and the pillars of shaky economies have shuddered under lockdowns, the priority of profits over public welfare stands out in starker relief, restating the need for effective public policies and demanding government intervention more than ever. Such an unprecedented moment poses strong challenges for the left and Latin America’s social movements. Remobilizing in the wake of Covid and building lasting, independent social movement power are key tasks ahead.

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Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog, Fieldworks

Sanderien Verstappen: Hidden behind toilet rolls: visual landscapes of COVID-19

During the lockdowns of spring 2020, short videos became a popular means of reflecting on new experiences of quarantine and social distancing. Passed around on social media platforms, downloaded in microseconds, and stored on smartphones where they became nested amidst other videos and photos, Corona videos brought about smiles amidst anxious circumstances and reflected meaningful forms of expert and folk knowledges about the pandemic. In this blogpost, the genre of the Corona video is approached from the perspective of anthropological filmmaking. Can anthropologists create their own cinematographic interventions into the pandemic, by joining these visual conversations while commenting on them at the same time?

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