Addressing Precarity, Planning the Future - PhD and PostDoc Meet Up
5 September 2025, University of Bern
Communities Before Careers
Academic institutions put careers before communities. As intermediary staff, we are acutely aware of this. We are liminal beings: between students and professors. Our status could be an opportunity, to mediate between hierarchies. The problem is that it is only temporary. Rather than building communities, we have to be competitive and prioritize our careers.
And yet we are a large community, representing 85% of all academic staff in Switzerland. And we do build communities, taking on crucial responsibilities at our departments, such as teaching and supervision, or many forms of institutional housekeeping. How come our institutions still account for us and our work only in temporary terms?
The DocPostDoc Commission of the Swiss Anthropological Association addresses this question by sharing and pooling the collective experience of intermediary staff. We think this is important because the conditions under which we work differ, between cantons, universities, career stages, or positionalities. These differences make it difficult to know each other and to find a collective voice while existing institutions that should represent us fail to do so.
Maybe our discipline can do a better job in bringing us together, for us to make our voices heard, and to work against precarity as we produce knowledge from a place of precarity.
- What should be the agenda of the DocPostDoc Commission?
- How can it bring us together while accounting for the differences between us?
- How should we use it to organize?
If you want to have a say in these questions, come to the constitutive meeting of our Commission in Bern on September 5, 2025!
PhD candidates can sign up via CUSO: https://www.cuso.ch/activity/?p=1112&uid=7883.
Postdocs can sign up by contacting the DocPostDoc Commission representatives: https://www.sagw.ch/seg/kommissionen/docpostdoc-commission
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If you want to learn more about the DocPostDoc Commission’s ongoing initiatives and opportunities to contribute, subscribe to our mailing list (https://lists.seg-sse.ch/mailman/listinfo/docpostdoc-list) or become a member (https://www.sagw.ch/fr/seg/commissions/docpostdoc-commission).