What’s love got to do with it? Precarious academic labour forces and the role of passion in Italian universities
Busso, SandroORCID: 0000-0003-2739-4559 and Rivetti, PaolaORCID: 0000-0002-1794-0504
(2014)
What’s love got to do with it? Precarious academic labour forces and the role of passion in Italian universities.
Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques, 45
(2).
pp. 15-37.
ISSN 1782-1592
This article examines the role of passion among precarious labour force in the Italian academia. By relying on C. Wright Mill’s distinction between “passion as a reason” of action and “passion as a motive” to represent and discuss one’s employment condition, the article concludes that the symbolic strength of passion is correlated to its applicability both as a tool to govern recruitment in neo-liberal academia and as a strategy to fit recruitment criteria and “become employable”. The article is based on more than four-year long documentation and participant observation in political initiatives and campaigns organised by precarious, non-tenured research staff in Italian universities.