CFP - Academia on the Frontline For reasons ranging from the global crisis and the shrinking job market to disillusion with the establishment of academia but also including wanderlust, identity, worldviews, research, and not least the proactive hiring of mushrooming universities around the world, an increasing number of academics at different career-stages spend time at institutions located in socially disadvantaged environments, politically unstable areas, regimes of dictatorship, segregated contexts, and war zones. For some this means returning home, for others it means moving far away from the place/s that they call home. As a result, while there is an increasing level of confrontation with the issues and challenges that until recently have been typical of fieldwork settings, universities are also becoming the crossroad of multi-layered interests and forces. These interests may be further exacerbated by neoliberal economics, restrictive or conditional funding, monitoring and surveillance, or the politics, policies and practices associated with ideological or religious extremism. Or, academic institutions’ organizational dynamics and pedagogical and research-related objectives may themselves reflect forms of instability, contestation or be the subject of scholarly debate

Academia on the Frontline aims to explore these dynamics, and understand the strategies and the solutions worked out by academics with experience in the above-mentioned settings. We especially welcome proposals which address and analyze the challenges and risks associated with professional appointments in sites characterized by multiple socio-economic disadvantages, instability, insecurity, marginalization or exclusion in either the Global North or South. Proposed but not exclusive foci are: originality and authorship; participatory research, authority, and representation; government and non-government funded research; advocacy; outsourced and outsourcing research; (cultural) mediation; gender, class, ethnicity, belonging, sexuality, and power at the workplace; teaching, learning, and curricula adaptation. Multidisciplinary approaches are solicited from academics in all domains, such as the Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Business, and Medicine. Authors may use a variety of methods including qualitative, quantitative, historical, ethnographic, financial, economic, and management analysis. Abstracts between 500 and 1000 words plus a short biographical statement should be sent to Livia Holden livia.holden@lums.edu.pk and Emma Varley emma.varley@lums.edu.pk Feedback and advice are most welcome, too. ‘A/REF’ publisher is envisioned.