Introduction

Research and innovation (R&I) in academe is a precarious business. Considered highly desirable by policymakers at local, national and international levels (Veugelers et al, 2012), it is nonetheless fraught with difficulties (Treussard and Arnott, 2017; Kuzma and Roberts, 2018). This chapter explores these difficulties as they arise in the context of Digital Humanities in academe in three Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden). It asks how women and men working in Digital Humanities fare in this emerging area of work. Digital Humanities (DH) is a knowledge production domain that conjoins humanities disciplines, conventionally associated with a strong female presence in terms of student and staff numbers, and technology, an arena more commonly associated with a strong male presence (OECD, 2019). DH is also a domain that depends extensively on collaboration (Deegan and McCarthy, 2012) since its inter- and multi-disciplinarity, minimally already encoded in the conjoining of technology and humanities, requires interaction between humanities scholars and technology experts (Griffin and Hayler, 2018), often from several disciplines. This collaboration is in itself already demanding (Griffin et al, 2013a, 2013b), partly because it defies the ‘lone scholar’ tradition that has been common in the humanities, and partly because very different, and differently demanding, knowledge arenas are brought together.

To date, and in contrast to the US (Zorich, 2008) and to some extent the UK, DH in the Nordic countries exists mainly in centres, labs, fora and other such formations within the university – formations that are largely atypical for higher education institutions that still function mainly along the divisions of faculties and departments. This atypicality in itself has consequences regarding the (relative) precarity of R&I in academe as that manifests itself in DH. It is part of the precarizing culture and practices that pervade much of contemporary employment (Berardi, 2009; Standing, 2011). In this chapter I explore these precarities and their gendered effects and consequences for those who work within DH. Theoretically, I frame this chapter in terms of the four durable inequality mechanisms identified by Charles Tilly (1998): exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation and adaptation. Of these, and based on my data, I focus in particular on two mechanisms: opportunity hoarding and emulation. But I begin by discussing the literature on R&I in academe in its relation to DH, and Tilly’s four mechanisms, before describing my research methods, the participants, my data and their analysis. I shall then discuss three issues that emerged in the interview data as factors that produce precarity for research and innovation in academe, before analyzing their implications.

Digital Humanities as research and innovation in academe

DH as a knowledge domain has a fairly recent history in academe, dating back to the 1980s and 1990s (Kirschenbaum, 2012). It co-emerged with the arrival of new information and communication technologies in universities (Duhaney, 2005; Levin et al, 2012), which invited the digitalization of data and their digital exploration. Originally concerned with the creation of digital versions of analogue data (for example in computational linguistics and of library collections), it quickly expanded, aided by the rapidly increasing affordances of digital tools, to encompass the creation, curation and analysis of materials both analogue and born digital across a significant range of humanities disciplines. In the Nordic countries, as much as in many other countries which embraced this higher education innovation, DH was institutionally configured as research groups, labs, centres or forums. These formations are in many ways atypical for higher education institutions (HEIs) and their decision-making structures (Griffin, 2019) which tend to continue to operate largely through faculties and departments. However, these atypical HEI formations were also part of the diversification of university subdivisions that occurred largely in the 1980s and 1990s, partly in recognition of the increasing ‘importance of academic research for technology, innovation and economic growth’ (Veugelers, 2014: 3) and changing funding regimes in higher education.

R&I in academe have been viewed as key drivers for economic growth for some considerable time (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000). In recognition of this, HEIs have transformed in the past 30 years or so, even though ‘the history and legacy of universities can make them resistant to change’ (Blass and Hayward, 2014). Part of this transformation has been the accelerated establishment of research centres of different kinds within universities (Etzkowitz and Kemelgor, 1998). These centres share certain characteristics which render them precarious. Etzkowitz and Kemelgor argue that centres ‘represent less of an institutional commitment than departments: they need no permanent staff’ (1998: 272). As a university tactic ‘in [the] academic struggle for funds’ (1998: 274), ‘centres are temporary bodies that may close if funds run out’ (1998: 277). Altogether, this signals the ‘transferring [of] risks and insecurity onto workers and their families’ (Standing, 2011: 1), which Guy Standing diagnoses as a key aspect of the neoliberal labour market and of the emergence of the precariat. It, in a nutshell, describes the situation DH has found itself in in many European countries including the Nordic ones in the past 25 years or so. It heralds the precarization and unsettled work conditions which afflict much cognitive work in contemporary academe. Academic institutions, of course, and ironically perhaps, seek to safeguard their own existence through this process of the precarization of the staff. The traits described earlier make these centres part of the ‘endless transition’ which Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff diagnose as being a key characteristic of contemporary academe’s place in the R&I nexus, described by them as the triple helix of university-industry-government relations.¹ As they also suggest, not only is there an unsettled dynamic among the helixes but also within each one, unsettledness is part of its specificity. While unsettledness may be described as the necessary corollary of, or synonym for, innovation, transformation and change, it has consequences for those who work in conditions of unsettledness, and for those who seek to innovate under those conditions, whether as institutions, funders or researchers. These consequences will be explored later.

Unsettledness and Charles Tilly’s inequality mechanisms

The unsettledness of HEIs as research and innovation hubs, and their peripheralization of DH in atypical institutional formations occur in a context where ‘inequality regimes’ prevail (Acker, 2006). Charles Tilly (1998: 10) has identified four mechanisms which sustain these regimes: exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation and adaptation. These mechanisms are based on distinctions being made between categorical pairs (for example woman, man; professor, student) that are constructed as standing in an asymmetrical relation to each other. That asymmetrical relation produces inequalities. Exploitation involves the use and benefit of resources from which those who help to produce them are excluded. Opportunity hoarding refers to people having access to and using resources within their own network that they simultaneously deny others whom they regard as outside their network. Emulation involves the reproduction of existing models of institutions and practices which reproduce the inequality mechanisms already inherent in them. Finally, adaptation references the adjustment of oneself, one’s situation, one’s environment to existing norms, practices and structures such that one reproduces their particularities and biases in the new context. These mechanisms thus (re)produce durable inequality. It is worth noting that Tilly’s inequality mechanisms describe relations between people working in institutions rather than institutional mechanisms as such. In that sense they lead back to individuals. However, as will become clear later, much of the opportunity hoarding and emulation that occurs in R&I contexts is undertaken on behalf of institutions which condone and support those mechanisms. There is hence an institutional and structural component to the persistence of these inequality mechanisms. Of these inequality mechanisms, two in particular – emulation and opportunity hoarding – manifested themselves in my data.

Tilly’s inequality mechanisms continue to have salience in contemporary academe (Griffin and Vehvilainen, 2021). Their explanatory force becomes evident when one considers the experiences detailed by my interviewees, DH practitioners working in HEIs in Finland, Norway and Sweden. I shall now turn to these and describe the research process, participants, data collection and analysis, before turning to the discussion of my data.

Methodology and data analysis

Between 2017 and 2018 the author conducted one-on-one, semi-structured interviews in English with 30 DH practitioners, 17 women and 13 men, from Finland, Norway and Sweden. The interviewees’ ages ranged from 29 to 62. The interviewees were purposively selected by searching university and research funder websites; the main criterion was that the participants should work in or with DH. Both women and men were interviewed to get a sense of how they experienced their working conditions and the latter’s genderization. Thus women and men generally agreed that those mainly working with technology, for example as programmers or technicians, were usually men, and this proved to be the case in my sample. Of the 23 interviewees who were, broadly speaking, academics, 14 were women and nine were men – the majority were therefore women. Since DH is still in a state of disciplinary unsettledness, and involves collaborations across knowledge domains, many job descriptions emerged when the interviewees were asked what their current job was. The descriptions included professor, associate professor, assistant professor, temporary lecturer, researcher, postdoc, PhD student, technician, programmer, director of studies, course coordinator, director of a DH centre, collaboration manager and others. Some had more than one job description, being, for instance, both a director of a DH centre and a professor, or a programmer and a researcher. This is partly because a number of them had multiple jobs, being for example split 50/50 across different posts (Griffin, 2022).

Most interviews were conducted face to face but some were done online, related to participant availability. They were given information sheets about the project and asked to sign consent forms allowing the use of their anonymized interview data in subsequent publications. All interviewees were pseudonymized, and their institutions and other identifying traits eliminated from the transcribed interviews. The interviews lasted between 43 and 70 minutes. They were audio-recorded and transcribed, then uploaded into NVivo 11 Pro for thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). That analysis, done in the form of close repeated readings of the interviews and coding according to emerging inductive and deductive themes, produced a range of themes such as ‘interdisciplinarity’, ‘mentoring’, ‘male mentor’, ‘leaving job’, ‘going into industry’, ‘supportive institution’, ‘support for DH’, ‘career blocking’ and so on. These were then re-read and grouped together according to larger themes such as ‘support’, ‘career progression’, ‘working conditions’. Re-reading those themes revealed how institutional structures and practices in their entanglement with gender produced precarities for DH practitioners that had important consequences for their working lives. These will be explored next through three issues that were typical for DH as an emerging field.

Issue 1: Uncertain support – the case of the work that was closed down

DH as a knowledge domain has both female and male staff but with a fairly conventional gendered divide: the researchers are often women, the ‘techies’ tend to be men, a situation that was confirmed across the board by my interviewees. Terras (2012) describes this bipolar situation in terms of women tending to function as the ‘other’ in this environment since some of them may lack the technical education and know-how to translate their research ideas into ‘doable’ DH projects. As one, Britta, told me: “Without the technicians, the two men who helped us, nothing could have been developed.” And as another female interviewee told me: “The very early days, I suppose it was male-dominated, you know, throughout, there were very few women who were interested in this side of, this kind of research” (Aava). Even in 2018 when I interviewed her, she said, only “20 per cent in our faculty are female professors”. Another female interviewee put it like this: “It’s a bunch of guys, they are adorable, but you know, it’s a little bit like the Silicon Valley show. The administration is a girl, you know, and that’s it” (Nina).

Several of the interviewees who came into this environment as young female doctoral students or postdocs reported significant difficulties with the male professors leading these research environments in which the women felt frequently unsupported and sidelined. As one woman said: “I didn’t get any support at all, I mean the support I got was that I was invited to be part of the project, but I was very much left on my own … it was terrible, [those] years were not good in any way, I think it was kind of devastating because I was lost” (Lena). Another interviewee described being bullied by her male professor when she was doing her PhD, and while she ultimately resisted this behaviour, it did make her leave the university “disillusioned” and work in private sector research for a number of years. Another woman described how lack of support from the senior male professor meant that her work was closed down, meaning that she was deprived of opportunities to apply for further funding in her DH research area when her money ran out to the point where she had to look for work elsewhere.

Her experience occurred at the interface of gender, seniority and the embedding of a new discipline, DH, into academe. The professor in question, a linguist, had “hired one to the group who was more into DH in order to make it more experimental”. However, “when we actually tried to work with it, he [the professor] got afraid because of reviewing or yes, you know, publishing and so on”. In the interviewee’s view those who started to “get scared” were men “who wanted to polish their careers in a more traditional way”. Here we have evidence of Tilly’s inequality mechanism of emulation where people, in this instance men, seek to profile themselves professionally by emulating traditional ways of promoting their careers, here through the publishing of conventional research articles. This is not unreasonable given that careers in academe depend significantly on researchers’ publication profile as a key criterion for their advancement (Balsmeier and Pellens 2014). The professor in question “didn’t want to endorse further ideas … he didn’t believe in our results, so he got very conservative along the way” (Lena). Etzkowitz and Kemelgor (1998: 282) refer to professors’ ability to limit what researchers can do. But in this instance the informant saw what happened as part of a wider question of the legitimacy of DH as an innovation in the institution. As she suggested, “that’s part of what people in Digital Humanities … like always see as like their biggest problem, convincing people that this is valid, it works … very often they feel people don’t believe in them or think it’s real research” (Britta).

Treussard and Arnott (2017) talk of ‘bubbles in academe’ and the issue of how one knows when to (dis)invest in an innovation. DH as an innovation in academe had to, and continues to have to, establish its legitimacy in the university and, as part of that, suggesting that DH is ‘just like other disciplines’ is a powerful but also potentially highly conservative mechanism that invites emulation and hence the reproduction of existing biases, including those of gender. It also does not encourage the university to recognize change but rather invites it to maintain the status quo. Britta, the interviewee referred to earlier, was eventually forced to move into an administrative role within the university to secure her livelihood since her DH work was closed down.

All this was in stark contrast to many of the interviewed men’s experiences. They expressed a great sense of support from male colleagues who had encouraged them into jobs and careers – the classic boys’ network –, even if their academic credentials did not meet the job requirements at the time they started that job (Griffin, 2022). As Jens, for example, said:

‘I always felt supported and always felt that I got, you know, I’ve been helped into being promoted, why I have been able to stay in academia for this long after doing my PhD is that I have been invited to be part on several research projects … and this has really helped my career, and it’s all because of these male project leaders, and they have been very supportive in that sense.’

Here there was a clear sense of Tilly’s opportunity hoarding in that men supported other men to enter into university careers within DH. However, as indicated, this was mostly not the case for the women, many of whom on the contrary talked about being actively discouraged from pursuing their interests or career aspirations.

Issue 2: The vicissitudes of interdisciplinarity

Since DH requires collaboration across radically different knowledge domains, work within the field gets caught up in the ‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering, 1995). This entails unsettledness as a condition of collaborative practice. It emerged in the example of Britta earlier, in her professor’s anxiety about the reception and acceptance of more experimental DH work within the field of linguistics. Britta also revealed that “every year you can apply for research time based on publication and stuff, and other stuff as well, but developing tools or making new research corpuses or whatever it is that you do in DH is not part of that reading”. This lack of institutional recognition of DH work had contributed to the lack of support she experienced at micro level from her professor who grappled with the fact that new paradigms of research often have a hard time achieving institutional recognition. As she described it:

‘The [male] professor was quite sceptical … he hired one to the group who was more into digital humanities in order to make it more experimental but when it came to be or when we actually tried to work with it, he got afraid because of reviewing, or, yes, you know, publishing and so on. So that halted things … he didn’t want to endorse further ideas of that and got really … he didn’t believe in our results, so he got very conservative along the way.’

This problem of recognition was already evident at the point of recruitment. As a male interviewee put it:

‘people talk about interdisciplinarity … you know, as something that should be … supported but then in fact, in quite a few cases, when decisions, for example, teaching are made, or on hiring people, quite a few people tend to focus on this kind of a disciplinary background that they can say, well, this person who has a degree in, a BA from here, an MA from here, and a PhD from here, so let’s take that person.’ (Anders)

Although there is slippage here from the question of disciplinarity to that of the alma mater (in the repeated ‘from here’), the implication is clear: deviation is not welcome. Institutional practices such as recruitment processes which insist on monodisciplinarity as a condition for employment through the expectation that one’s publications are all clearly within a specific discipline or disciplinary field thus try to force adaptation to existing norms by requiring individuals to submit to the prevailing demand to be monodisciplinary in one’s profile. Unsurprisingly, another interviewee, Britta, like Anders, asserted that she could not compete career-wise with others because she had done too many different things to be identified with a single discipline.

Anna, however, yet another interviewee, said of herself: “I am a researcher in not any particular field, but I have a field, an interdisciplinary field, that I feel I belong to.” This stance was fairly unusual. The more common response from both female and male DH practitioners was to disavow any identification with DH and instead to assert an academic affinity with the discipline in which they had been trained (Griffin, 2019), for example linguistics, history or anthropology. Jan summed this problem up as follows: “multi-disciplinarity is one challenge, also the novelty of the whole field … there is as yet no long tradition of research in the field of digital humanities”. The opportunities that the unsettledness of a new knowledge domain produce are missed when absence of tradition becomes a criterion for excluding practitioners in new domains from full participation in the university.

It is worth noting that across my interviewees there was consistent and unselfconscious slippage across the phrases trans-, multi-, post- and interdisciplinarity. The DH practitioners were much less concerned with defining these terms than with exploring how working across disciplines in an emerging field impacted on their work experiences. I use the term interdisciplinarity here since the imbrication of humanities with technologies is one of the hallmarks of DH but in the awareness that a huge literature and debate attends terms to do with trans-, multi-, post- and interdisciplinarity (for example Klein Thompson, 1990; Strathern, 2004; Moran, 2010).

An interdisciplinary disposition can go back a long way. Five women in particular in my sample had very divergent disciplinary backgrounds which began at school where they were good at both natural sciences and languages for example. The assumption that different knowledge domains require different and potentially mutually exclusive kinds of aptitudes, and that some subjects are ‘serious’ while others are not, is widespread and feeds into the anti-interdisciplinary stance that is pervasive in education institutions to this day. One of my interviewees, for instance, had been keen on rhythmic gymnastics and dance at school, which she wanted to study but her parents’ view that she ‘should have a decent first degree first’ prompted her to go from Norway to France to take a degree in engineering. She returned to dance much later but, missing certain mental rigours of engineering, then went into human-computer interaction (HCI) to combine her interests in human movement with the affordances of HCI. Encouraged by a mentor she set up her own company to develop particular hard- and softwares but that company eventually went bankrupt because, from her particular perspective, her innovation was ahead of the curve, and it was not understood. At the time of the interview employed in academe in an innovation collaboration manager capacity, she said of herself: “I have this very complex background … I don’t have this, you know, like ideal path. … I don’t have this deep niche knowledge within a specific field … so it’s not easy to benchmark me against other candidates, for example. I think it’s been difficult to create a good CV” (Berit). Another interviewee, Elsa, studied technical physics but then found “maybe physics was not that interesting … so I was more interested in partying and also language courses” which in turn became her springboard into corpus linguistics.

Interdisciplinary backgrounds, often forged between high school and university, served as useful starting points for becoming involved in DH, not least because as an emerging discipline it is not hampered by the norms and conventions that attend more established disciplines. Eleven female and nine male interviewees talked about their divergent backgrounds, usually combining interests in arts, humanities or social science domains with interests in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM). They would say things such as “my history is a bit curled and swirly” (Anders), or “Somehow I’m not disciplinary any more. … I could even use the term post-disciplinary” (Harriet), or “I’ve for a long time thought of myself as being in a sort of interzone that’s not defined as traditional, from a traditional disciplinary standpoint” (Knut). These non-disciplinary educational and professional histories and self-definitions propelled my interviewees into DH where practitioners, according to one interviewee, had “one thing in common, and that is that they are not, they are not afraid of being outside their comfort zone” (Marta).

But this very openness also meant that they bucked institutional trends. As Olof put it: “there was a dream that people could take some part in different departments … [but] it has turned out it has in practice been very difficult having things going on in between different departments”. Here divergence from conventional structures and disciplinary divisions created obstacles in realizing the potential of interdisciplinarity. It led some to returning to the conventional disciplines they had left behind. The unsettledness that interdisciplinarity entails could not sustain them in the positions they had assumed, not least because it was not amenable to emulation of conventional disciplinary structures as these manifest themselves in the organizational structures of the university.

Issue 3: Caught in [sic] the Scylla of project work and the Charybdis of unsettled funding

The establishment of DH in Nordic universities coincided with increasing pressure to gain external funding in a context where the professional norm in the Nordic (and some other European) countries was that following on from one’s PhD, one would go through an often quite extended period of many years of working as a postdoc on projects before securing a permanent position (OECD, 2021). Permanent positions in Nordic universities are usually tied to teaching-related funding which universities receive as a block grant. Those on permanent teaching contracts can buy themselves out of (some of) that teaching by obtaining research funding. However, there are also significant numbers of academics who work as researchers, existing solely on externally gained competitive funding, in other words, under precarious work conditions. And, increasingly, many academics are on so-called permanent contracts but their employment is nonetheless subject to them bringing in external funding. As Michel, working in a Norwegian university and half employed in a DH archive, half in a traditional department, described it: “my position … was always depending on a sort of funding. I mean it was called permanent … but it was dependent on attracting external funds, but here then the archives got a real permanent position.” This complicated scenario, with ‘real’ and not really permanent contracts generates instability and suggests the casualization of staff, with a diversification of contracts, which evacuates these contracts’ meaning since ‘permanent’, for instance, does not de facto mean permanent any more. It leads to exploitation by universities of their staff where, as Etzkowitz and Kemelgor (1998) argued, institutions show limited, some might say no, commitment to their staff whom they try to put into expendable positions through the contracts they issue. Such expendability, however, comes at a price: staff who do not feel valued do not feel loyal to their institution in turn, and will readily depart for ‘greener sites’. Unsettledness in the form of temporary contracts thus exerts a price, in particular the loss of highly qualified staff, often at inopportune moments such as in the middle of a project (Griffin, 2022).

Project work is by its very nature time-delimited and hence precarious. It foreshortens the horizon of possibility to the duration of the project. In many contexts, junior researchers also cannot apply for project funding in their own right but are dependent on being invited into a project by a more senior researcher making an application. This means that their employment depends on having the right connections and personal networks rather than on academic competence alone. Lena described this as follows:

‘like your employment at university, everything is about securing funding and the only way to do this is through external funding and like, knowing people … applying for money yourself … is difficult as long as you’re a junior researcher … the only option seems to be to know the right people and get invited to be part of their projects because otherwise you would lose your position, no matter how you got it’.

This situation lends itself to the preferentialism associated with old boys’ networks that constitute, in Charles Tilly’s terms, a form of opportunity hoarding since it allows senior staff to shoe juniors of their own ilk into positions. Unsurprisingly one female interviewee told me: “from my old graduate school … there’s at the moment six people with permanent jobs, five of them are men”. These men, Nina said, “were instantly given positions in their networks. Permanent”.

Project work is in that sense a social enterprise (Griffin et al, 2013b), a tricky business when one works in an emerging field. Aarne, one of my interviewees told me, “when I was writing my thesis I was kind of alone in my department, there was no kind of like-minded supervisors around”. Such lack of connection had knock-on effects. Berit said: “when I finished my PhD … I didn’t have any funding for continuing it, and I hadn’t been so proactive in trying to find it either, and part of that was because I didn’t really know the academic system”. Lack of mentoring reflected in ignorance about the academic system here led to temporary unemployment. Britta, too, commented on this lack of mentoring, saying that the PhD students she started with “were quite lost” and that “almost nobody in [her Humanities discipline] got finished with their PhD because they did not know how to do it”. Britta’s experience is not unique; completion rates across the Nordic countries for PhDs are poor. In Sweden, for example, only 23 per cent of 2009 female PhD entrants had completed their degree after five years; in Norway only 35.1 per cent of 2014 female PhD entrants had completed their degree after five years (Sadurskis, 2018; Statistics Norway, 2020). More women than men reported such lack of mentoring and lack of initiation into research and innovation funding regimes, which often continued into postdoc positions. Britta, for example, talked of a PhD student who “always met resistance from professors and so on … so she had to do everything herself, and find mentorship within peers and her own hierarchy, so to speak”. She said that “in the humanities, they’ve never been organized with mentorships”. This meant that the doctoral students “were quite lost, almost nobody in art history got finished with their PhD because they didn’t know how to do it or where to go”. Lena described a terrible work situation with the male professor leading the DH project she worked in and “not feeling supported in what I did. … I never got any substantial feedback from him, he never asked to read anything that I wrote … it was so badly organized and being like at the start of your career, I think it made me feel kind of helpless”. Nina also said, “I didn’t feel I had that kind of support.”

The unsettledness of R&I funding, conjoined with institutional inertia to intervene, effectively creates unproductive environments. As Lena described it: “It was terrible … because everything was quite unsure during a long time because we didn’t know if we would lose our funding or what would happen, we didn’t have proper leadership in the lab. … I don’t think a lot of people felt very well during that period … a lot of people also quit during this process.” Lengthy periods of uncertainty without key appointments were not uncommon. As Nicole told me: “we were like three years without [a professor] after [female Norwegian colleague] left before they let us advertise positions”. Nicole attributed this to the emergent nature of DH: “it speaks volumes I think about their sort of like ‘oh, I don’t know, is it a real subject?’ I think they’ve still … not been quite sure if it is a real discipline or not, you know?”

One thing that institutions and to some extent researchers in DH had not bargained for is that DH itself is very different from conventional Humanities subjects in that it no longer relies on just a “well sharpened pencil”, as Petra put it, but involves technological infrastructure, itself in many ways an innovation which institutions find difficult to handle. Academics and institutions can apply to research council infrastructure funds or private foundations to acquire technological equipment such as eye-movement tracking equipment, ‘cave’ environments (with surround screens), or floor screens but these then have to be serviced and maintained and became obsolete very quickly as technologies move on. Nina had several stories related to this. She told me: “the floor screen we have, it’s been leaking for three years and nobody is fixing it because it is more expensive, and then we don’t use it for anything other than showing people things”. She also said: “we have invested in two massive angled screens. Nobody knows why they were angled … we need a coder to run them, and they have a life expectancy that will cost a lot of kronor to fix.” The prohibitive cost of fixing things also spelt the death knell for cave technology at another university: “the caves in [Danish university]. Fantastic when they came out. For two years. And then too many expenses and they could not keep it up” (Nina). Nina’s view was that universities, in contrast to private industry, failed to understand technological infrastructure in the Humanities as a process that needed long-term iterative investment on multiple fronts to maintain it and use it. However, often only one or two researchers work with that technology, making it an expensive resource. Humanities as the Cinderella of academe in terms of infrastructure investment has radically changed with the arrival of digital methods and tools but this has yet to become fully acknowledged by higher education institutions.

The pattern for funding for DH more generally was either entirely external, or a mix of some limited university funding and external grants, all on time-limited terms. Inevitably when, as was the case in Norway, “national funding disappeared, the centre was reduced” (Olof). Sven told me that: “some project money was about to end … we had redundancies, so we had to, what do you say, lay off or fire people”. This process affected women more than men because they were the majority of the researchers. So while the technicians were retained, according to Sven “to do with the funding”, the researchers were let go. To forestall a recurrence of this situation, Sven said, “we put a lot of effort into applying for money”. But in the age of competitive research funding “it’s never easy to get money” (Sven). Another interviewee, Knut, described having no continuing money to maintain the database he had been funded to set up, saying, “even kind of some basic maintenance things right now are a problem”.

For emergent R&I, universities are not a safe source of employment. As Dirk put it: “they pay our salaries and if they don’t do that any more, they don’t”. His centre was funded by the Faculty, “so that means three years and then we have to apply for a new period, and it’s not a lot of money”. This is in a context where research councils may announce strategic funding on a particular topic but, as one programme manager in Finland put it to me, “it rarely happens that an academic programme … receive another programme more or less directly in the same field”. In other words, strategic priorities are changed after three or five years, signalling the end of the related funding, unless one can squeeze one’s project in under another heading.

The majority of my interviewees talked extensively about the precarities that arose from such short-term, insecure funding. As Lena said of her situation: “I mean the future seems quite insecure. … I have a position right now and I know I have funding for a couple of more years, but after that I don’t know what happens.” Nils pointed to the contradictions in his institution’s attitudes towards this situation: “everybody knows this [bringing in external funding] is the conditions for being here … in academia that’s also a major condition, competing about financing, but you are not supposed to talk about it that way. You do a lot but you also try to uphold some kind of idea that you are actually part of this organization for different reasons, you know?” This recognition and simultaneous disavowel of the realities of academic employment in R&I, reflected in Michel’s description that the archive he worked in was “owned by the university but not part of the university”, testifies to the university’s uncertain relation to the changes in its practices and procedures, and staff’s difficulties in negotiating these. Unable to continue just to emulate previous practices and unable to fully absorb the new conditions, the university emerges as a greedy institution, ready to exploit its labour force while unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of these shifts.

Discussion and conclusion: The price of unsettledness and precarity

R&I in academe, of which DH is one manifestation, have to contend with the unsettledness that changing precarized labour market conditions entail, and which the imperatives of innovation – change and transformation – demand. However, as the earlier discussions show, that unsettledness comes at a price. The institutional organization of R&I into centres heralds their provisional nature, since centres as atypical – even if proliferating – formations do not signal institutional commitment to their continuance or the permanent employment of their staff. As emerging epistemological and methodological fields such as DH seek to establish themselves, part of an increasing drive to foster interdisciplinarity, they are invited to be part of the university while also remaining apart from it. In so far as they are invited in, they are also invited to emulate the organizational practices into which they are inserted which encourage them to reproduce the biases and particularities already inherent in the organization. This is especially evident in terms of how these centres are asked to legitimize themselves (for example through standard measures such as publications), which, however, can be difficult to do if the practices the new knowledge domain entails, such as digitizing collections or producing born-digital scholarly work, are not recognized in conventional research assessments or when staff are recruited.

Emerging interdisciplinary knowledge domains offer opportunities for those with a divergent education history who defy the mono-disciplinary imperative that governs much conventional academic work, and in this study both women and men with divergent backgrounds responded to those opportunities. These knowledge domains invite researchers who are content to be outside their comfort zone and curious beyond the boundaries of a single discipline. However, they also condemn these staff to hover on the edge of academe, with uncertain employment prospects because of that very interdisciplinarity, and, through the prevailing funding and project culture, in perpetual pursuit of the next project or grant. The acquisition of such grants which benefits the university in terms of its research profile is done at great cost to the researcher, since time to prepare applications is not usually part of any grant allocation process, and there is no guarantee that they will be duly included in new project work even if it is based on their ideas (see also Chapter 7 in this volume). One might argue that this constitutes an institutional form of exploitation in Tilly’s terms. Especially for women who may take time out to have a family this is a threat to their career. Women in this study in particular could find themselves excluded, already at doctoral and postgraduate level, from the opportunities to get jobs extended to their male peers, a classic version of Tilly’s (1998) opportunity hoarding among men where senior males would invite juniors into projects and jobs that set these young men up for their academic career.

Universities’ lack of commitment to the R&I they encourage was also evident in the materially compromised working conditions that the interviewees spoke of. Institutions expect new formations within them to emulate their existing context. However, that context, for instance the low-tech history that accompanies humanities disciplines, is inadequate to the R&I that contemporary new knowledge domains such as DH bring with them. The inadequacy of much of the technology provision that DH centres or labs had – inadequate because inadequate thinking and resource provision had gone into the fact that these technologies need to be serviced, maintained, and that they also become obsolete – retards possibilities for innovation and new research to take place. Especially in the case of women, some of whom had clearly been ahead of the curve with their work, it led to them abandoning the work they did and moving into administrative or other posts within the university. This implies a concomitant loss of expertise and knowledge to the university, with highly trained staff moving out of R&I into secure administrative posts that, however, contribute only to the bureaucratic processes of the institution and not to its R&I. The point here is that emulation and adaptation are mechanisms to reproduce existing structures, but these mechanisms are inadequate to the contemporary demands of our changing academe.

The agility demanded of those working in R&I needs to be matched by institutions becoming more agile. In ‘Agile methods for agile universities’ Michael Twidale and David Nichols (2013) discuss institutional manifestos to foster agility, based on underlying principles and values. Agility, however, does not mean expendability, or a heedless embrace of unsettledness as a permanent condition. It demands a considered disposition which acknowledges the complexities of changing knowledge domains and combines a proper assessment of what is needed with appropriate care for those working at the forefront of research and innovation.