Probationary or Second-Class Citizens? Postdoctoral Experiences in the Swiss Context: Gender Campus

Probationary or Second-Class Citizens? Postdoctoral Experiences in the Swiss Context

This chapter analyses the academic citizenship experiences of postdoctoral researchers in the Swiss context. Adopting the notion of ‘probationary citizenship’, the chapter provides new insights into the contradictory expectations placed on early-career academics, together with an analysis of their implications for the gendering of academic citizenship more generally. In the Swiss context, the transitional status of a large number of postdocs offers a variety of potential outcomes in the form of relatively stable positions (and thus limited or even full academic citizenship) or in the form of voluntary or involuntary exit from the academic labour market (i.e. non-citizenship). Within this framework, the chapter identifies one of the core aspects of the postdoc experience that has been relatively undocumented earlier; namely the ‘divergent prescriptions’ male and female postdocs face at different stages of a typical academic career path, and their consequently divergent experiences of membership and recognition.

In: Sümer, S. (eds) Gendered Academic Citizenship. Citizenship, Gender and Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 65–101