Fixed Term Contracts as Grief

I recently finished reading Madonna in a Fur Coat, an impulse buy, funded by a research budget I needed to spend before my contract ended. I had no idea what the book was about, but it was slim enough to feel like a manageable way back into reading fiction, so I took a chance.

Without giving too much away, the book is about grief, in its obvious form, and in forms far less visible. I have been sitting with its central message for days now, turning over why grief felt like the right emotion to carry it. At one point, the protagonist speaks about grieving the person he once was: the life he had, the life he might have had. We travel with him through that loss, slowly understanding the weight behind what others read as weakness or passivity. It stayed with me because grief, I kept thinking, takes so many shapes. We grieve the death of people we love, but we also grieve earlier versions of ourselves: the people we were before life foreclosed certain possibilities.

I was reading the book as my fellowship position was coming to an end, and I wasn't entirely sure how to name what I was feeling. After finishing it, I think the word is grief. I was grieving the loss of a job, but also the loss of a community. The end of a contract reaches further than the work itself: institutional email addresses disappear, access to journals and books vanishes, the networks you have quietly built over years become harder to reach and easier to lose. While preparing my FHEA application recently, I found myself switching between two email accounts (one of them already archived) trying to piece together what I had taught, what students had said, what conversations had mattered. It struck me that the connections we build inside institutions are just as fixed-term as our contracts. The people who relied on an email address to reach us, the relationships that existed in those corridors and seminar rooms: those end too.

This is happening against a particular backdrop. In recent weeks, the higher education sector in the UK has been marked by wave after wave of job cuts, concentrated heavily in the humanities, accompanied by the familiar and exhausting argument that these disciplines have no place in an economy defined by capital. This is unfolding at the same moment that race riots have been spreading across British cities and towns, as though the defunding of the disciplines best equipped to help us understand that violence is somehow coincidental. The timing does not feel accidental.

There is also the question of where academics go when the institution releases them. The demise of X has left many without a natural home in the digital space. Most have migrated to LinkedIn, but a platform built on surveillance capitalism feels like an awkward fit for people whose work is oriented around critique and community. We grieve, then, not only the temporary nature of our employment but the lives we build around it, and the growing difficulty of sustaining those lives in the spaces that remain.