Being a successful academic, or just keeping up with the academia, requires mobility. In Finland, for instance, the funding application to the Academy of Finland must include both collaboration with international partners and mobility plan where the funded scholar(s) make research visits to universities or research institutes in other countries. Though some extra funding is available for scholars with families, sometimes a longer than few days’ mobility is undoable because of family or other intimate relations, or the lack of money. To stay in the academia, the mobility must be between research institutes, whereas the mobility to other sectors, like to industry, is often considered as undesirable because in certain fields, like in medicine, but recently in most fields, this kind of mobility shows as a lack of scientific productivity in one’s CV. In other words, it is not easy to come back to the academia once you have left it. In my presentation, I will discuss what kinds of gendered implications do these meritocratic requirements of our current university policies have? How do they affect the career experiences and trajectories of women who work in the fields of bio- and health technology? What kinds of borders do they need to cross to survive in the academia; what kinds of gendered practices are going on in and around these borders; and how do they (re)construct the (gendered) meanings of being an academic, and the gender equality in Finnish universities? I will consider these questions through the women’s career interviews we have made, with the lens of new materialism. Following Karen Barad, this means “knowing in being;” thus understanding the research process itself as a phenomenon under study where all agents, like our interviewees, I as a researcher, the interview methodology, as well as the socio-material realities of the university intra-act to make boundaries emerge.

Tiina Suopajärvi is a feminist anthropologist who works as a senior researcher in Nordwit, a Nordic Centre of Excellence collaborating with scholars from Uppsala University and Western Norwegian Research Institute. The Tampere team of Nordwit studies women’s career experiences and trajectories in the fields of health and biotechnology in and outside of the academia. The aim of the project is also to co-create good practices to support women in their careers in the RDI environment of Tampere region. In addition to new materialism, Suopajärvi focuses on the anthropological and feminist studies on emotion, place, embodiment and design. Previously, she has studied, for example, ageing in a smart city.

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