gender and diversity to go

Howdoesoneactuallyidentify an excellentacademic? How do we recogniseprofessionalacademicperformance, when we encounter it? How do we find, or evencreate, meaningsbehindterms as “rigour”, “excellence” and “internationality”?

On the example of academic performance evaluation in hiring decisions, in this talk Claire discusses the challenges of defining “good work” and even, a “good worker”. Her work presents the problems in pinning down performance in intellectual and creative labour and the following problem to use these ideas of performance as justification within a meritocracy logic (Littler, 2017). Claire discusses how Whiteness, masculinity and classism create fragile images of high performing workers in a burn out society (Han, 2015). The talk presents questions to reflect on when evaluating performances from CVs and job interviews, but also invites to a discussion on how to allow for alternative performativities of “academicness” within the contemporary research structure.

By Dr. Claire Jin Deschner 

Dr ClaireJinDeschnerworks at theproject “go diverse – gender- anddiversitycompetentacademicemployeeselection” at the Office forEqualOpportunities at theUniversity of Bremen. Claire’sdoctoralresearch at theUniversity of Leicester, School of Business, focused on theconstruction of performancenormsfrom her post-colonialandqueerperspective.

Keywords: academic performance, performativity, diversity

Han, B.-C. (2015). TheBurnOutSociety. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Littler, J. (2017). AgainstMeritocracy. New York City: Routledge.