The Centre for Labour Studies is hosting a research seminar, featuring guest speakers Andrea Sigrún Hjálmsdóttir (University of Akureyri), Krista Bonello (University of Malta), and Lena Wånggren (University of Edinburgh). The seminar will focus on Gender and Work-Life Balance among Postdoctoral Academics.

Andrea Hjálmsdóttir’s talk will focus on gender and work-life balance among post-doctoral academics in Iceland: Recent research from Iceland indicates that although a good work-life balance seems a far reach among doctorate holders, the women describe more strain in their everyday lives. The flexibility as offered in academia can become a double-edged sword, as the widespread ideas and practices of neoliberal managerialism with emphasis on performance indicators make the work even more stressful.

Andrea Hjálmsdóttir is an assistant professor at the University of Akureyri and a doctorate candidate at the University of Iceland. Her research area includes work-life balance, gender equality among PhD holders and adolescents’ attitudes towards gender equality.

Krista Bonello and Lena Wånggren will be sharing insights from their recent book, Working Conditions in a Marketised University System: Generation Precarity. They will be focusing on gender and work-life balance among precariously employed academics in the UK, through an intersectional lens. They draw upon testimonial data spanning seven years, offering evidence of how precarious labour conditions have persisted, shifted and intensified.

Krista Bonello is a Research Support Officer with the Centre for Labour Studies, and a visiting and casual lecturer with the Department of English and Faculty of Arts, at the University of Malta. In addition to co-writing Working Conditions in a Marketised University System, she has recently coedited the book The Double Binds of Neoliberalism: Theory and Culture After 1968 (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2022) with Guillaume Collett and Iain MacKenzie.

Lena Wånggren is a researcher and teacher at the University of Edinburgh. She works on nineteenth-century literature; literature and science/medicine; gender, intersectionality and social justice; with publications including Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (2015) and Gender, Technology and the New Woman (2017). She is a trade union representative with many years of experience working on equalities and anti-casualisation, most recently serving as President of UCU Scotland.

If interested in attending, please register by sending an email.