‘The sand’s going to run out at any minute’: A collaborative autoethnography of class, gender and precarity in academia

This article contributes to feminist debates that seek to shed light on the politics of the contemporary neoliberal academy, contributing insights into experiences of early career academics on teaching-only contracts. Through collaborative autoethnography it explores configurations and intersections of the temporal with precarity, class and gender. We draw upon experience(s) of navigating academia as early career academics, reflecting on our journeys from doctoral study to and through the academic labour market, from fixed-term precarious contracts through to securing ‘permanent’ full-time academic contracts. We focus on ways in which temporalities have served as a structuring force in our working and personal lives, shaping experiences of navigating academia on both a micro and macro scale. We grapple with themes such as everyday experiences of time, precarious timelines, ‘working against the clock’, ‘staying afloat’ and ‘finding the time’. We further consider way(s) in which our experiences have been further compounded by socio-historical positions, attending to intersections of class and gender given our differing class backgrounds, circumstances, life stage and the timeline of history and biography.