Re-storying women casual academics' lived experience to make public ongoing disadvantage

Having previously established the ‘binary/irony of the central physical and teaching space that women casual academics inhabit within Australian universities, against their lack of presence in the existing discourses around higher education’ (Crimmins, 2015) this presentation situates the absence of women casual academics in the discourses around casualisation as a feminist issue. In particular, against a backdrop of quantitative data that establishes a gendered division of labour in Australia’s Higher Education I will employ arts-informed processes to re-present the personal stories of women casual academics in the form of a verbatim drama. The re-presentation will both centralise the voices of six ‘yet to be voiced’ (Arnot & Reay, 2007) women academics from across three universities, and identify both their common and idiosyncratic experience of casualised labour. Finally, in a bid to address Rindfleish’ (2009) request for more stories to be heard in openly public spaces that recognise the ongoing disadvantage women experience in academia, I will explore the use of ‘bicultural’ forms of communication (Blankenship & Robson, 1995) through which to express the storied lives of women in academia