CASUAL RESEARCHER
MEMBER STORY
On the treadmill of precarious labour I’m an anthropologist and early career researcher at the University of Adelaide. I’ve just begun work on a three year, half-time research contract, on an ARC-funded project studying social and cultural aspects of water management and water risks in South Australian agriculture. The focus is on near-urban farming regions including McLaren Vale just south of Adelaide, and Langhorne Creek, which sits on a floodplain near Lake Alexandrina right at the very end of the Murray-Darling system. The project is led by colleagues in Anthropology and Geography, and we’re looking at relationships between practice, policy, local cultures and histories of water management. I find the ways practice is informed by social and cultural factors fascinating (and timely, when it comes to water and environmental matters), and I’m lucky to be working with great people on this project. It’s been a lot of fun getting back into fieldwork, which I haven’t done much of since finishing my PhD five years ago. Most of my time since PhD completion, however, has been spent on the treadmill of precarious casual labour which would be very familiar to a lot of NTEU members – semester-long tutoring and lecturing contracts, picking up bits and pieces of research work here and there. I love teaching, and have had the opportunity to deliver courses in really interesting areas and with some engaged and enthusiastic students: anthropologies of eating, drinking, and consumption. But all the while, I’ve been watching opportunities for more permanent work dry up.
Bill Skinner, University of Adelaide
There are now only about half the number of academic staff in my department than there were when I began my PhD a decade ago. As staff leave, they are simply not being replaced. I can see the weight that this is placing on overworked faculty members: teaching and
To tell your story to the NTEU member community, please contact Helena Spyrou
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APRIL 2021
