ABSTRACT
Academic environments differ between cultures and faculties, with some more hierarchical, and less supportive of women and minorities than others. Academic structures are often complex, competitive, and stressful, and one may be expected to work as many as six days a week. Affecting an individual’s survival and success within academia requires alignment of the outer and inner layers and contingencies within the individual’s ecological system. Outer-level contingencies may initially consist of having the economical means for basics including university tuition, enabling or not enabling an individual to pursue an academic career. Inner-level or proximal contingencies consist of collaborative relationships, leadership, colleagues, and friends, but also an inner drive: for example, to improve some aspect of society or the situation for groups of individuals. In this chapter I will present sources of tensions and support encountered within academia with a basis in my experience as a woman professor in Special Education and as a behavior analyst in Sweden. I will combine my personal story with a section on the Swedish “Folkhemmet” (the people’s home), a strong humane political ideology with epistemological roots in social solidarity and equality, followed by a section on the Swedish post-modernistic movement within teacher education and how my interest in applied behavior analysis evolved. The importance of collaborative partners and friendships in academia, and how those and my own continual reflection on how to avoid direct confrontation with mainstream pedagogy have affected the growth of behavior analysis in Sweden, will be discussed.
