The discourse of academic precarity and an embodied narrative of exhaustion

An exhaustion occurs from being absorbed into the discourse of academic precarity. Higher degree research, academic conferences, casual teaching: these emerge as sites of exhaustion. I attempt an affective and embodied narrative of this exhaustion. How does precarity impose itself on the body? How does the body respond to it? As a gendered and racialized body that remains on the move and occupies space, temporarily, within the academic sphere in Australia, I explore autoethnography as an act of reparative writing. I focus on events and encounters ladened with traces of infrastructural inequalities and dialogic disconnect. They manifest in an array of academic practices and cultures: in writing ethics applications; in the incessant explaining of ‘culture’ and the failure to translate context in front of a quiet and unconvinced audience; in finding oneself scapegoated by neoliberal parameters of diversity and inclusivity. Academic practices, ironically and paradoxically, both enable and obstruct my movement. That which catalysed my transnational mobility from Bangladesh to Australia as an international student now induces in me existential immobility as an early-career researcher. Grounding theoretically on Ghassan Hage’s notion of ‘stuckedness’ and Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘stickiness’, I articulate this sensation of moving in place and going nowhere.