Drawing academic freedom: A field of tension between decent and precarious working conditions among fixed-term academics

This study examines from an emic perspective how fixed-term academics in the UK experience academic freedom in light of their working conditions. While traditional accounts portray academic freedom as a heroic right, an obligation serving the common good, this research draws on Deleuze’s concepts of the virtual and the actual to explore how academic freedom is experienced in the mundane and local. Based on interviews and participant-produced drawings with 21 fixed-term academics in the UK, the findings reveal participants’ virtual ideals of academic freedom tied to notions of decent work alongside actual trajectories marked by precarious work. Considering the actual and virtual together, the study conceptualises academic freedom as emerging between these two halves, in a continual flux of potential and lived reality. This novel conceptualisation of academic freedom encompassing both virtual and actual elements enables us to move beyond grand narratives and instead foreground the often-overlooked contextualised experience of individual academics. The proposed virtual/actual approach to freedom offers a conceptual map to trace the multiple, evolving trajectories that academic freedom can take, suggesting that rather than a pure and unique ideal, there are many forms of academic freedom unfolding and emerging simultaneously across contexts.