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This chapter looks at the discursive dimension of the working environment in research and higher education organizations; more specifically at neoliberal managerial discourse and at how it participates in shaping the way researchers, teachers and support staff perceive themselves and their experiences. It is based on a multiple case study and combines an intersectional and a socio-clinical approach. The empirical data is constituted by in-depth interviews with women conducted in Ireland and Chile, and includes some observations made in France. A thematic analysis of individual narratives of self-ascribed experiences of being bullied enables to look behind the veil drawn by managerial discourse, thus providing insights into power vectors and power domains contributing to workplace violence. It also shows that workplace bullying may reinforce identification to undervalued social categories. This contribution argues that neoliberal managerial discourse, by encouraging social representations of “neutral” individuals at work, or else celebrating their “diversity,” conceals power relations rooting on different social categories. This process influences one’s perception of one’s experience and its verbalization. At the same time, feeling assigned to one or more of undervalued social category can raise the perception of being bullied or discriminated against. While research has shown that only a minority of incidents of bullying and discrimination are reported within organizations, this contribution suggests that acknowledging the multiplicity and superposition of categories and their influence in shaping power relations could help secure a more collective and caring approach, and thus foster a safer work culture and atmosphere in research organizations.

The chapter addresses the questions surrounding the politics of the academe as a reflective process. The three authors’ experiences are very different – spanning from tenured professor to sessional instructor to professor in an African university. The narratives from the authors inform the readers of their goals to join the academy as faculty; their job search; being members of the staff and then; their experiences as members of the teaching force at various universities. The chapter is based on their experiences of navigating the politics of the academe. This chapter provides their narratives of what it means to be a professor, mentor, colleague, and researcher. Each story is told from their particular standpoint: two females and one male teaching in North American universities and Africa, respectively, two Black and one racialized female who can pass, but cannot because of her name. The analysis will address numerous complications involved in addressing expectations, establishing common grounds as educators from an international perspective, and providing narratives of how we have managed to maintain our goals and aspirations as members of the academe. The tensions involved will be problematized and explored from within the context of the academy and the associated constraints therein (Tatum, 1999). The objective of this chapter is to theorize the significance of navigating the politics of the academe to deflate arising tensions that may delay your passion for teaching. The chapter is informed by an anticolonial theoretical framework in light of converges and divergences of varying colonial contexts embedded in colonial Canadian society. The anticolonial framework draws on the specific settler-colonial Canadian context (Tuck & Yang, 2012). The chapter is divided into six parts: (1) introduction that provides a general overview of what it means to be faculty at a university, (2) situating ourselves, (3) theoretical framework, (4) Universities in general and more specifically, Canadian system and Kenyan, (5) discussion that provides an analysis or synthesis of our experiences, and (6) conclusion.

Activist criminology advocates for social change by acting beyond the role of the academic, mainly through first-hand involvement in the field (Goyes, 2016). In this chapter, the author offers a longitudinal reflection on the researcher’s positionality, epistemology and methodology from the personal experience since their first research project, in 2019. During this project, the author started having cooperation with the Liberi Nantes migrants’ sports centre, now a community centre in Rome’s working-class suburb. This sparked her first reflections on activist criminology and how to embed it in her research approach and practice. The initial cooperation evolved in the ongoing and evolving collective ‘conversational integration’ project, which aims at overcoming the notion of integration as one-sided assimilation, working on addressing the diverse needs of the local community through a bottom-up governance initiative. This chapter is to be intended as a checkpoint in their growth within activist criminology and it hopefully serves to spark questions, suggestions and a push to form a solid network of activist academics that can help in fostering social change outside of the neoliberal agendas of academia.

Purpose – This chapter explores the strategies and tactics employed by researchers when dealing with emotionally challenging situations, both in the field and in academia in general.

Methodology/Approach – It draws on a qualitative longitudinal project investigating how recent Polish migrants from cities that are rather homogenous in terms of ethnicity and religion make sense of, and come to terms with, the much greater diversity they encounter in German and British cities. The project adopts a mixed-methods approach that includes social network analysis, focus groups, creative methods and in-depth interviews.

Findings – Moving beyond the inside–outsider binary in qualitative research, the authors reflect on their management of conflicting feelings about what happens in research situations. The authors discuss interview situations they found particularly emotionally challenging and the different ways they supported each other during and after fieldwork, for instance, when faced with situations in which research participants say things that are racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, xenophobic, classist or misogynist. They reflect on their use of electronic media, especially email and messenger applications, as tools which not only allow them to unpack the emotions that emerge in fieldwork, but also enable them to collaboratively reflect on their own positionalities in the field.

Originality/Value – The chapter argues that face-to-face and virtual interactions with colleagues can create spaces of care, self-care and solidarity. These relational spaces can form integral support systems for researchers and help them to deal with both the emotionality of social-science research and the wider emotional labour of academic work.

In this chapter the authors analyse different forms of gender and class discrimination in Spanish academic institutions. Androcentrism in terms of the structures of academic institutions, the meritocratic system, the rhythms and contents of work present barriers for women advancing into positions of leadership. The intersectionality of gender and class provides different kinds of hurdles and possibilities for women and men from middle-class and working-class backgrounds. Relationships between (mostly male) supervisors and men and women researchers tend to strengthen men's capabilities of developing their own scientific aspirations and claims to leadership, while women tend to become subordinated supporters of their supervisors' objectives. Power structures dominated by men's values have the effect that some women do not perceive leadership positions as desirable.