Translating Academia: Skills, Language, and Belonging for First-Generation Students

The narrowest definition of first generation to academia refers to whether one's parents attended university. But beyond this definition, different positionalities and national contexts mean that some academic environments are more valued than others. Family structure can also shape our sense of belonging. For instance, if the parent who attended university was largely absent from one's life, the guidance or cultural familiarity that might otherwise have been passed down may simply not have been there. Similarly, having a sibling who pursued higher education, or who is an academic, can greatly impact one's capacity to navigate academic demands. And that's before we even begin addressing how gender, class, race, religion, and ethnicity shape the extent to which the university feels like a place we are entitled to be part of, and to which we can contribute just like our peers.

For this introductory session, we will explore different definitions of first generation to academia, compare them with our own experiences and challenges, and hear from EUI professors and postdoctoral fellows who are themselves first generation to academia. Our objective for this meeting is to plant the seeds for what will, hopefully, become a community beyond this workshop.

As academia becomes increasingly professionalized, and competition for a shrinking number of positions intensifies, calls for funding, jobs, and other opportunities are saturated with terms like "cutting edge," "excellence," "high impact," "leadership," and "innovation." This language can make these opportunities sound like they were never meant for people who already question whether they belong in academia.

During this session, we will identify such language and examine how we can translate it to make it less threatening. We will also work together to identify activities that we may have dismissed and could be translated into these terms. The overall objective is to surface this language, render it less opaque and dismantle its excluding function.

Academic lives are precarious, often implying short-term contracts and moving from one place to another, with no knowledge of where we will land once our one-to-three-year contract terminates. This is a burden to everyone, regardless of whether they are first generation to academia or not. However, because those who are first generation to academia often come from working-class backgrounds, with little to no resources to rely on, dealing with this uncertainty becomes a greater challenge. What's more, in the current age, where opportunities from every corner of the world can reach our emails, and with less guidance or know-how about how to approach the academic market, this uncertainty comes paired with an abundance of opportunities from which we need to choose.

Rather than thinking through alienating frameworks like "strategy," the objective behind this session is to think, together with experienced professors and early-career scholars, about how one can avoid getting lost in this sea of opportunities — be it conferences, invitations to collaborate, or other commitments — during the PhD and beyond. The idea is to reflect personally on how much we are willing to sacrifice for our career, and to practice listening to ourselves — including learning to say no — rather than reacting from a place of fear that any missed opportunity will define our future, or from the belief that, as beggars, we cannot be choosers.

With acceptance rates for grants and prestigious postdocs ranging between 4% and 15%, it may sometimes seem like we are not yet ready to apply for them, or that the chances of getting one are so slim that applying is a waste of time. My own experience, including both rejections and successes, shows otherwise. The fact is that as much as one needs a solid project, success is also about luck (who reads your application), and grant applications require a set of technical skills of their own: knowing how to apply, how to analyze a call, how to identify its language, and how to adopt it.

With that in mind, this session will offer a realistic approach to such applications, hopefully removing some of their aura, and breaking the work into manageable steps. We will address when one is ready to submit a grant application (hint: when you are eligible), how to use tools from other sessions to unpack what's being asked of us, and how to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the different documents and materials we need to produce. The objective here is simple: to make sure no one shies away from applying to such opportunities under the pretence that they are not ready, or that it is too competitive.

Neo-liberal academia pushes for individual work and individual achievements. The truth is that, like other meritocratic myths, no one makes it on their own. There have always been people along the way who offered some sort of support, in academia and beyond. For those of us who are first generation to academia, the myth of a world in which everyone around us simply knows how to navigate things, and only we don't, can make asking for clarification, help, or advice feel especially difficult. Similarly, for those of us who grew up with financial precarity, speaking about money can feel like an impossible task, one that exposes something about ourselves we'd rather keep private. This is even more true if we didn't have a supportive and attentive supervisor, or if we find ourselves in a competitive environment that paints academia as a place full of busy people ready to steal our work.

Without undermining the violence people experience in academia, or the inherent violent structures of academia, this session starts from the belief that many people are more than happy to help, if we have the courage to ask. It is also about how to form a community and a safety net that works for you, especially in cases where your supervisor doesn't offer one. Lastly, because speaking about money can feel just as exposing as asking for help, this session will also address how one can speak about money in academia: asking about salary and conditions, and negotiating the terms we are offered.