Niki Dados

Many studies of the nineteenth century Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have been concerned with the economic, social and political influence exerted by European colonial governments through the accumulation of knowledge about the region and its subsequent military domination. The case of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century demonstrates that European techniques of knowledge production were also strategically adopted by ruling elites outside the colonial metropolises. Ottoman adoption of European technologies and techniques were politically entwined with the empire's territorial claims against nascent nationalisms and a calculated move towards knowledge-based forms of government administration in the quest to hold onto power. Cartographic and demographic methods used by the Ottomans produced new assemblages of territory and population that profoundly reshaped the objective of government and the conduct of imperial administration. Statistics and geography became the choice tools of social progress and advancement, underpinning the numerous reforms of the nineteenth century aimed at rationalisation and centralisation.

The expansion of Australia's higher education system in the past three decades has been built on a model of student-centred funding that has made universities heavily reliant on enrolments. In response to fluctuating student numbers and funding uncertainty, universities have expanded their reliance on temporary forms of employment. The result has been extensive fragmentation of the academic labour market, and the reorganisation of the academic role and professional identity.

Knowledge workers in temporary employment are contracted to undertake specific, time-limited tasks, the bulk of which are in teaching. However, research remains central to professional identity formation, career progression, and future employment. Through engagement with the research process, precarious knowledge workers develop their disciplinary scholarship and expertise, and build a portfolio of publications that demonstrates their grasp of abstract knowledge in relation to a profession.

Precarious knowledge workers are generally not paid to develop their professional scholarship or produce research, yet these activities remain central to academic professional identity, disciplinary expertise, and career progression. Consequently, precarious workers engage in research and publishing in an unpaid capacity. This adds value to the knowledge economy by extracting unpaid labour time, and subsidises the higher education sector. As the contributions of precarious workers to knowledge accrue benefits to the sector and its institutions, labour insecurity erodes professional identity, hinders career progression, and creates social and economic precarity for the workforce.

This self-published report on precarious work and knowledge production examines the results of a survey conducted in 2018 under the title ‘Insecure Work and Research Outputs in the Australian University Sector’. The report reflects on the unpaid and undervalued contributions of precarious workers to research and knowledge in the university sector by drawing on existing literature in light of the survey results.

The findings of the survey demonstrate that (1) precarious employment operates on a continuum, with respondents working across roles and forms of employment over many years, (2) professional identity is being reshaped by precarious employment, (3) precarious knowledge workers make an important and undervalued contribution to research, (4) precarious work subsidises the higher education sector and undermines the sustainable production of knowledge.

The report and accompanying documents can be downloaded here: https://notesinprecaria.wordpress.com/precarious-work-invisible-labour/

In the last two decades, insecure work in universities has grown
exponentially in many countries, alongside the rapid marketisation
of higher education. Reflecting the neoliberal ideal of a flexible
workforce, research and teaching is now routinely carried out by
precariously employed, hourly paid academics. In Australia, where
we work, the bulk of teaching is now carried out by these ‘casual
academics’ (Coates and Goedegebuure, 2010). Of course, casual
teachers are needed to meet short-term needs – to fill in for sick
staff, give one-off specialist lectures or provide insights into current
practices, for instance – however, they should not be used to meet
ongoing teaching needs. Structural dependence on casual academics
poses a range of risks. It undermines the academic career path, and
thereby the profession as a whole; threatens the quality of university
education, posing a reputational problem for the sector and individual
universities; and creates industrial injustice for casual academics who
are locked into a permanently insecure marginal status. In this chapter,
we focus on the possibilities for challenging casualisation through
‘statistical activism’, to force stakeholders to address these risks.

Chapter in Data in Society https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/data-in-society

Many studies of the nineteenth century Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have been concerned with the economic, social and political influence exerted by European colonial governments through the accumulation of knowledge about the region and its subsequent military domination. The case of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century demonstrates that European techniques of knowledge production were also strategically adopted by ruling elites outside the colonial metropolises. Ottoman adoption of European technologies and techniques were politically entwined with the empire’s territorial claims against nascent nationalisms and a calculated move towards knowledge-based forms of government administration in the quest to hold onto power. Cartographic and demographic methods used by the Ottomans produced new assemblages of territory and population that profoundly reshaped the objective of government and the conduct of imperial administration. Statistics and geography became the choice tools of social progress and advancement, underpinning the numerous reforms of the nineteenth century aimed at rationalisation and centralisation.

Neoliberalism is generally understood as a system of ideas circulated by a network of right-wing intellectuals, or as an economic system mutation resulting from crises of profitability in capitalism. Both interpretations prioritize the global North. We propose an approach to neoliberalism that prioritizes the experience of the global South, and sees neoliberalism gaining its main political strength as a development strategy displacing those hegemonic before the 1970s. From Southern perspectives, a distinct set of issues about neoliberalism becomes central: the formative role of the state, including the military; the expansion of world commodity trade, including minerals; agriculture, informality, and the transformation of rural society. Thinkers from the global South who have foregrounded these issues need close attention from the North and exemplify a new architecture of knowledge in critical social science.

This essay examines the role of the photograph as a material object in the writing of contested histories. Working with archival materials documented by artists from Lebanon, it explores questions of representation, gender and subjectivity through material culture produced in the Arab World.

This paper is written as a set of postcards that examine the history of colonial material culture with reference to Beirut and its contemporary representations. It was written using material from my PhD research while I was completing my thesis.

Front pages of PhD thesis submitted in 2010. Full thesis can be downloaded here: https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/36091

Abstract:
Beirut is a city, a memory of a place, a place in memory, stories told and untold. Beirut is a slippery idea, a concrete reality, a liability, an abstraction. This project begins by asking what Beirut might be other than the name of a populous city on the eastern Mediterranean and how, by what means, in what shape, it has arrived in Sydney and in other cities in the world. It is not the sociological or demographic dimensions of these questions that matter most, but the possibility that asking these questions might enable certain as yet undefined processes to unravel, allowing Beirut to invent its own concepts and tell us something about the life of the city and the memory of place. The project is not only about being lost and found in Beirut, it is also about losing and finding Beirut’s trajectories on global maps of knowledge. In the aftermath of Edward Said’s landmark Orientalism, it is time to mark the space between Beirut as an object of knowledge and an Orientalist construction, and Beirut as a city and a lived space. It is necessary to approach the city from a perspective that does not enclose it in a discursive formation that would be at once a historical past and a spatial void. The question of writing about the city and of inhabiting the everyday spaces of the city is no doubt inextricably entwined with the question of knowing the city and of constructing knowledge about the city. The project takes this doubling as a cue by unfolding from the space between these two ways of knowing and writing. In writing the city, Beirut emerges as a knowing subject and as an imaginary that is embedded spatially and historically in knowledge itself.