ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one particular aspect of academics lived experience, namely their growing insecurity that stems from increasing opportunities and threats to their work and careers. Specifically, it explores how faculty's experience of and responses to insecurity are helping to reorganize relations, primarily among academics, and consider the implications of this. The chapters approach is inspired by Dorothy Smiths method of institutional ethnography which aims to explicate the subtending social relations that give any aspect of the social its particular form, and thereby enable people to better understand their experience and more effectively intervene to create positive change. Faculty are also lobbying external parties, such as public and private funders, in order to increase the profile and resources accorded to their research areas and fields and/or otherwise enhance the rewards associated with engaging in them. Academics attempts to change institutional and professional priorities and practices also objectively intensify their insecurity.
