ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an ethnographic study of power and authority mechanisms, the gendering of these mechanisms and how these mechanisms are experienced, reproduced and possibly subverted by junior academics at a Slovenian University. The study is based on in-depth interviews with 22 assistant and associate professors at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (referred to as FDV hereafter, based on its acronym in Slovene).1 The relations of power and the experience of these relations at the level of these professors’ subjectivity take place against the backdrop of the transformation of the socialist welfare state into a capitalist market society in Central-Eastern Europe, and, accordingly, in the context of neoliberal transformations of the institutions of higher education within these states. Our focus is on how local cultural, social and academic tradition and gender culture, on the one hand, and contemporary transformations of higher education on the other (marketization, a climate of insecurity, increasing competitiveness and surveillance, etc.) are experienced, reproduced or consented to by individuals in academia. We will argue that FDV serves as a metaphor for any kind of academic organization in Central-Eastern Europe, which is one particular articulation of the wider system of gender and other forms of domination in a specifi c historical setting.