ABSTRACT
Early career researchers (ECRs) are a vital part of the Higher Education landscape. However, their experiences are often underrepresented in discussions of Higher Education, for example the UK’s Stern Review. This chapter considers the experience of one group of ECRs, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme. It also draws on one project within this programme, Connecting Epistemologies. Connected Communities was a British research council funded programme ‘designed to help understand the changing nature of communities in their historical and cultural contexts and the role of communities in sustaining and enhancing quality of life’. Connecting Epistemologies was funded as part of the middle rounds of Connected Communities, following a research development workshop in Edinburgh during the summer of 2013. The ‘empowerment’ through flexibility that ECRs ‘enjoy’ through short term project working recreates them as subjects of neoliberal power.
