Postdocs and Their Lived Precarity in Neoliberal South African Universities

Résumé

The precarity of postdoctoral research fellows (postdocs) has become endemic since the 1990 Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility and the Dar es Salaam Declaration on Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility of Academics. This article seeks to clarify why postdocs seem to be facing extreme forms of precarity and vulnerability in South African universities. It questions why the intellectual and academic communities have largely ignored or fundamentally rejected the conditions of precarity, homelessness and facultylessness, and contemporary enslavement lived and experienced by many postdocs. It argues that postdocs share the predicament of those most likely to be from what Enrique Dussel calls modernity’s underside. Even when formally free, postdocs often face situations of oppression and exploitation. It contends that the specificity of contemporary postdoc slavery can most usefully be understood through considering its defining dimensions together with those of the contingent workforce. Drawing primarily on my lived experience as a postdoc in two South African universities and supported by literature on the subject, this article deploys a biographical method and offers a critique of postdoc experience through the lens of Black Existentialism.

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