Victoria Lister

Employee voice and silence research shows workers’ ability to express dissatisfaction is impeded by a range of factors. This paper focuses on two: the power asymmetry inherent in the employment relationship, and work context. It examines early career academics (ECAs) – mainly doctoral students, associate lecturers, and assistant professors – many of whom are immersed in atypical, employment or employment-like relationships that are frequently experienced as disempowering. A scoping review provides a frame for understanding ECA voice and silence. It finds there is little on ECAs in the employee voice and silence literature. However, broader concepts of voice and silence are discussed in higher education research on doctoral students and other types of ECAs. Complex work arrangements, difficult supervisory relationships, and hierarchical norms stifle ECA voice. Supervision conceptualised as co-created ‘critical friendship’ facilitates voice. Studies that expand knowledge of ECA voice and silence are recommended, especially as concerns about ECA wellbeing grow.

To enter a profession like academia, individuals undergo rigorous socialization processes. Some of these are positive; however, others have been linked with poor mental health in early career professionals in particular. Why and how professions create and perpetuate environments in which such outcomes are permitted is not yet understood in research on academic mental health. The sociology of professions literature offers explanation: professions, via those in their upper echelons, engage in symbolic violence and other acts of aggression that normalize harmful behaviors. These, we posit, have a negative effect on the mental health of lower-ranking professionals. As academics are under-explored in this literature, the medical profession acts as a proxy. Insights into this group are valuable - academia and medicine are professions with shared characteristics, and the mental health of academics is comparable to that of high-risk medical professionals. The discussion paves the way for future research on the connection between profession and academic mental health.

Conference attendance is a feature of contemporary academic work and an accepted way of building academic identities and networks through the dissemination and promotion of ideas, achievements and research. However, our personal experiences have caused us to problematise the traditional conference and consider alternatives which mitigate its associated problems yet achieve its aims. In this paper, we use collaborative autoethnography to engage in inquiry about the roles of conferences, and their inhabited notions of representation, membership and inclusion/exclusion. We use personal experiences of virtual confer-ring to highlight that many agreed-upon purposes of attending conferences can be effectively achieved through other means. We explore how particular ways of engaging with technologies enable responsive gathering spaces, relational knowledge production, kinship and community; and facilitate the development, and promotion of scholars and scholarship. We offer a view that confer-ring interactions in online/virtual spaces can support collegial, feminist and egalitarian sharing and knowledge exchange.