gender & diversity to go - an online lecture series at lunchtime

The performance politics of academic evaluation - How „good work“ is shaped by discourses of gender, race and class

14th of July 2022 / 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm 
Speaker: Dr Claire Jin Deschner (go diverse, Office for Equal Opportunities, University of Bremen)

How does one actually identify an excellent academic? How do we recognise professional academic performance, when we encounter it? How do we find, or even create, meanings behind terms as “rigour”, “excellence” and “internationality”?

On the example of academic performance evaluation in hiring decisions, in this talk Claire discusses the challenges of defining “good work” and even, a “good worker”. Her work presents the problems in pinning down performance in intellectual and creative labour and the following problem to use these ideas of performance as justification within a meritocracy logic (Littler, 2017). Claire discusses how Whiteness, masculinity and classism create fragile images of high performing workers in a burn out society (Han, 2015). The talk presents questions to reflect on when evaluating performances from CVs and job interviews, but also invites to a discussion on how to allow for alternative performativities of “academicness” within the contemporary research structure.

Please find more information about the event series here.