At what point is the university not worth defending?

Rosie Joy Barron is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education, where she is involved with the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). For this issue of demos journal, I decided to ask Rosie if she’d chat with me about her research work on precarity and worker organising.

AK: Hi Rosie, please tell us about yourself and what your current research is about?

RJB: I’m Rosie, I’m 27 and my pronouns are she/her. I’m a settler living on Wurundjeri Country, land of the Kulin Nations, and I grew up on the Central Coast, Darkinjung Country. I’m currently doing a PhD in Education at the University of Melbourne.

My research is about worker activism in relation to the idea of ‘precarity’. The term ‘precarious work’ has become widely used in recent years, and it has taken on a few different meanings. In popular discourse, it usually refers to non-standard work – that is, casualised, contract-based, criminalised, or legally ambiguous work, for example. Attention to precarious work on part of scholars, unions, and policymakers has grown as it has become more common due to changes to labor laws, increasing casualisation, and cuts to welfare, among other factors.

There are big debates in labor studies in terms of what ‘precarity’ means in labor organising and for activism more generally, with which my research engages. My work explores worker activism and education in Australia in recent decades, with a focus on two groups of workers who are deemed ‘precarious’ for very different reasons: untenured academics and sex workers. This will involve examining the different organisational forms these workers use to build movements, and how they engage in education within and beyond the workplace, both between peers and that which is directed to broader publics.

AK: How is ‘precarity’ currently talked about in popular discourse?

RJB: In popular usage, for example, what you might find in newspapers or union documents, it is often used to denote casualised or contract-based work, as opposed to full-time, ongoing work. It also seems to be used as a synonym for informal work, which makes sense given that the popularity of this term has grown alongside the increasing visibility of phenomena such as the ‘gig economy’ or piece-work.

I see value in this usage, particularly in terms of the potential for building solidarity by connecting workers’ movements with other social struggles. I think Guy Standing’s (2011) notion of ‘the precariat’, which has significantly influenced how the term has been taken up both within and beyond academia, tries to pursue this potential. However, as others have suggested (see Paret, 2016), using the term in such a broad way as Standing does can fail to grapple with profound differences between precarious workers, especially where precarity is also the product of intersecting forms of structural violence such as criminalisation and border policing. This is a constant tension in my own work, and I think a worthy one to struggle with.

The term ‘precarity’ has a really interesting genealogy, which I am still learning about.  Casas-Cortés (2014) traces this since its growing usage in Europe in the 1980s, since which time it has been mobilised in social movements that grapple with questions of production, reproduction, and citizenship in different ways. A more recent example of this tradition can be seen in the work of the feminist collective Precarias a la Deriva (in English, Precarious Women Adrift), which was established after the general strike in Spain in 2002 (see Precarias a la Deriva, 2006).

AK: I feel like as a word it kind of ‘nods’ to particular literature or understandings, but in terms of what people mean, it’s actually bit amorphous …

RJB: Totally. As I said, I do think there can be political potential in that kind of generalised conception, and I like how it leaves space for interpretation and experimentation. But I find it problematic in that it can dehistoricise the term and depoliticise the way it has been built up within particular anti-capitalist struggles in particular times and places.

AK: What made you interested in this particular area or topic – worker organising for these two groups?

RJB: I’ve long been interested in worker organising, especially in terms of the relationships between workers’ movements and other social movements. I have been personally involved in worker activism within the union movement and outside of it, and this has definitely informed my interest in debates around ‘precarious work’ – in particular, the role and remit of unions in changing conditions, and changing ideas of what ‘work’ and ‘activism’ mean. It’s my hope that considering activism and education in university worker organising and the sex worker rights movement, both independently and relationally, can enable speaking to these and other questions in a useful way. As a worker, I also feel strongly about preserving the memory of our activism, and there is a historical aspect to this research for that reason.

AK: How did you first get into studying education and how did you get into educational research?

RJB: I didn’t really plan on doing educational research and during my undergrad I was more interested in doing further research in literature, if I did it at all. But toward the end of my degree I met some people who were doing further studies in education, or planning to. I had also started engaging more closely with areas of education research I hadn’t had much exposure to, but which I ended up loving, such as sociology of education and philosophy of education. After I graduated I started doing research assistant work in a school of education, and eventually enrolled in a research masters at Melbourne.

AK: How did being first generation in your family affect your experiences at university?

RJB: When I did research assistant work, a lot of projects were related to reforms intended to ‘widen participation’ to higher education for ‘non-traditional’ and ‘first in family’ students. The policy discourse at the time was very much focused on low-SES [socio-economic status] students. Funded programs and initiatives were targeted to low-SES students, as well as other ‘equity groups’, but in terms of the policy discourse and the stuff I encountered in my work, there was strong emphasis on low SES students.

I feel like when we were in high school [Pan and Rosie attended a government high school in a ‘low-SES’ area], going to university was mythologised as out of reach, or only accessible in particular ways, for particular students. But, at the same time, this ‘widening participation’ discourse was gaining momentum when we graduated, and we were the direct beneficiaries of related policy measures such as the uncapping of Commonwealth Supported Places (CPSs) and bonus point schemes. For me, this did make university seem like more of a real possibility than it might have if we’d graduated a few years earlier. It was strange to later find myself working in a university, focusing on a reform agenda without which I might not have gone to university in the first place.

To be clear though, unlike many beneficiaries of this policy agenda, I was not the first in my family to go to university. I was first generation, but my older brother and sister had completed teaching degrees by the time I started one. I am the first in my family to do higher research and I’m lucky that my family is really supportive, if perhaps confused as to why I did not teach, especially when I did not have a scholarship and had very inconsistent work. It can be hard to have conversations with them about my research, although they do try and I try with them.

AK: How does your research approach the role of the university today, or higher education? One thing that comes up for me – while listening to you – is about who is and isn’t seen to be in the physical space of the university – in the popular, or common, imagination.

RJB: So, at the moment I am thinking about this in two ways – firstly, in relation to how workers are organising industrially and what they are organising around, and secondly, in relation to a more political, normative question, which is about what the university is for, and what activism in higher education can be for.

Industrial organising of course shifts in line with changes in the material conditions of work, social attitudes about work and particular forms of work, and the composition of the workforce. There is a strong and continuing tradition of trade unionism in higher education in (so-called) Australia, yet the membership and priorities of labour organising in our sector has changed markedly in a relatively short time period. As O’Brien (2015) documents, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) is a relatively young union, resulting from an amalgamation of unions covering different university workers with distinct needs and class interests. Further complicating this is the increasing dominance of precarious labour.

This relates to our earlier discussion about ‘widening participation’, in that precarious workers are more likely to be women, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people, etc. I think because academia is commonly associated with privilege – and of course universities are privileged spaces, particularly Group of Eight universities – there’s been some necessary unlearning in terms of who higher education workers are, what their needs are, and how union structures need to change in response to that. I see centering untenured academics as one approach to exploring the ways in which the organising logics and practices that have been developed can meet some needs more than others. However, it can also show how workers have organised to shift union priorities, both in relation to their own industrial conditions and broader struggles. Examples of this can be seen in the activities of casuals’ networks within and across NTEU branches over the past few years.

Of course, for many academics, political work goes beyond their own industrial conditions – this is not new. Many people get into academia in the first place because they see the academy as an avenue for intervening in particular social issues or advancing the interests of marginalised communities of which they may themselves be a member. There is an ongoing tradition of academics using the platform and resources accessible through the university, both material and immaterial, to contribute to political struggle, as exemplified by decolonising perspectives on education (see Smith, Tuck, & Yang, 2019). Although the capacity to enact such a politics is clearly strained by the present conditions of academic labour (see Pereira, 2016), there remains continued investment in the radical potential of research – it’s certainly something I hold on to, sometimes uncomfortably.

AK: I spend a lot of time thinking about the naïve and romantic, but not at all uncommon ideas about university that I once had and for many outside the university, this is still the image we have of it. It’s quite different to the world you are researching.

RJB: I think that realisation is really painful for a lot of people too. I’ve had this recurrent thought since my undergraduate studies: in light of casualisation and its effects, commercialisation and privatisation, the complicity of the university in awful things, etc. – at what point is the university not worth defending?

Clearly, I wouldn’t be enrolled if I didn’t think that there were things that are worth defending or reviving, or changes that are worth fighting for. I have great admiration for the activist-oriented research I described, as well as the transformative potential of education, whether it takes place in the classroom, lecture theatre, or picket line. But it is hard to hold onto this, harder still to consider what I might be willing to comprise on in order to remain in these spaces and continue these kinds of work.

I’m in a very early stage in my career, and I do talk about this with friends and colleagues at different stages of their careers, including those who are at a much later stage. I can’t imagine how difficult it is to watch these changes unfold in the long term – to see what it has meant for their legacy and what it might mean for our future. I’m very grateful to those who keep up the fight for those who are starting out, just as I’m sure they are grateful to those who strive to sustain it.

AK: Is there anything else you want to add?

RJB: I’d probably just like to add a caveat to an earlier point I made. I think the strongest mobilisations of precarity are those that make these connections across workers’ struggles, because I think that can help us to recognise our shared interests and, in turn, harness the different forms of power available to us.

While this potential certainly influences my own interest in focusing on two very different groups of workers – untenured academics and sex workers – there’s a need for caution with respect to the generalising tendency I highlighted earlier. I think there is a risk of falling into a comparative mode, which can give rise to false equivalences, or points of connection that may be forced or inappropriate. I’m most inspired by analyses that grapple with the tensions of solidarity without assuming or forcing commensurability, and which privilege the view from the margins. That’s the hope and goal for my own research.