Women on the Cusp

Navigating the Path from Early Career to Tenure
in Southeast Asian Social Sciences

This roundtable brought together women scholars from across Southeast Asia and the United States to reflect on the fraught transition between early-career and mid-career stages, particularly within increasingly neoliberal and illiberal higher-education systems. The following speakers participated:

Dr. Bencharat Sae Chua,  Lecturer, Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies, Mahidol University and regional director, Southeast Asia Coalition for Academic Freedom

Dr. Tyrell Haberkorn,  Co-Chair, Human Rights Program and  Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dr. Hurriyah, Director, Center for Political Studies; Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Universitas Indonesia

Dr. Sol Iglesias, Associate Professor, University of the Philippines-Diliman and co-convenor, Women in Southeast Asian Social Sciences (WiSEASS)

Dr. Amporn Marddent, Assistant Professor,  Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University, Bangkok, and Founding Director of the Center of Excellence on Women and Social Security at Walailak University in Southern Thailand

Dr. Vilashini Somiah, Senior Lecturer and Coordinator, Gender Studies Programme, Universiti Malaya and Research Associate, Harvard University Asia Center

The aimed to tackle the question of what challenges do women face as they transition from “early career” status to the mid-career level, in which responsibilities may expand while some forms of support shrink. The discussion grew to encompass several issues, particularly: (1) the power and challenges of being scholar-activists; (2) the urgent need to defend academic freedom amid rising illiberalism; and, (3) the illegitimate pressures of the neoliberal model of higher education. The roundtable was held on 14th November 2025 as part of the 30th Anniversary conference of the Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program (SEASREP), “Southeast Asian Studies: Ideas, Audiences, Approaches, and Aspirations” at the Institute of East Asian Studies, Thammasat University-Rangsit in Thailand.

Rethinking the Early Career-to-Mid-career Continuum

The transition often assumed in Western academic models does not map neatly onto Southeast Asian contexts. 

Hurriyah opened by highlighting the contradictory expectations placed on early-career scholars in Indonesia: “You might have the title and the workload of a tenure… but not the institutional capacity and also support that should come with it.” For women, these burdens multiply: “You carry a lot of responsibility, but you still have to keep proving… that you belong there… I sometimes joke… that I have the duties of a professor but the job security of a graduate student.”

Similarly, Bencharat (Ben) commented that if a tenure track means job security, where there is a career path to ensure job security and that one can grow in the academe, then there is no such thing in Thailand. Contracts may be up for renewal annually or at slightly longer durations, two or five years, for example. 

Meanwhile, there is incredible pressure “to publish or perish”—but only journal articles are counted. Failing to meet a required minimum number of publications might mean that one is not allowed to supervise students or be responsible for academic programs. Ben’s remarks underscored that mid-career scholars in Thailand face heavy administrative pressures tied to state-driven standardization and global ranking systems. The situation is exacerbated by the lack of unionization in academic institutions.

Tyrell discussed the Australian context, where she had been an early career researcher.  She observed that while there was a tremendous amount of support and interest in hiring female early career researchers, there was no pathway created for them to stay where they were hired and become members of the senior faculty.

In the United States, once a woman is tenured, the service burden overwhelmingly lands on her because women are often easier for university staff to work with, while men often refuse administrative roles outright. Tyrell lamented that women in the academe are “constantly asked to pick up all kinds of slack”. While she is not always able to take this advice, she cites sociologist Tessie McMillan Cotton, who advises women: Get used to disappointing people.

The speakers all described networks of supportive women as critical to survival in academia, including across institutions. Mentorship, for instance, can be collaborative and community-building that is politically grounded, not about hierarchy. However, more than one speaker expressed that they ask themselves often, even every day: Should I leave?

Vila admits to being disheartened about the academic profession: “I do not have the heart to tell my PhD students or any new ones that want to come in that this is a good idea anymore.” She recounted a former PhD student who left academia entirely to become a kindergarten teacher — and noted that among everyone she knows, that person is “the only one who smiles with all her teeth.” 

Integrating Scholarship and Activism

A core insight of the roundtable was the rejection of “balancing” academia and activism, as well as working with a broader community outside the university.

Hurriyah described herself as a “scholar activist” who inhabits “two different worlds”: “I love calling myself a scholar activist… it’s like two different worlds for me… academia and activism.” 

She reframed the issue not as balance but integration: “I tried to shift my mindset from balancing these two worlds to integrating the two worlds.” She explained what integration means: “I stopped… trying to separate my academic work from my advocacy and started to let them inform each other.”

Tyrell agreed, advising that we: “(u)se knowledge in the service of being critical of injustice… in as blunt and empirically rich of a way as is possible.” She noted that there is more space today for such work than there was 20 years ago.

Amporn recounted her experience establishing  a research center focused on women and social security at Walailak University, among other institutions in the South of Thailand. She emphasized the importance of articulating a clear institutional and ethical commitment to community engagement, noting the need to “speak out loud that we are people who aim to work together with the community, with a particular focus on gender mainstreaming and equality.”

Vila noted a telling asymmetry underlying this discussion. She wondered why virtually every female scholar was also an activist, embracing a responsibility to address structural injustice. But when she put the same question to male colleagues, they reasoned that they were simply scholars whose work, at most, would “speak to policy.” This gendered distribution of activist labor, she argued, is not incidental but built into how women’s scholarly roles are defined and expected.

Neoliberal Academia

Speakers agreed that neoliberal reforms have produced demobilizing and illegitimate pressures on scholars.

Amporn described the structural challenges facing community-engaged scholarship in Thailand. She argued that national higher education policies—particularly those prioritizing Scopus-indexed publications and performance-based ranking systems—have significantly undermined the value of locally grounded, socially engaged research. She illustrated these pressures through her own experience: the closure of her former department in Cultural Studies due to low student enrollment and its limited capacity to generate institutional income, research funding, and high-impact publications. As a consequence, she and her colleagues were reassigned to general education programs, reflecting broader institutional shifts toward market-oriented academic governance.

Caught between the community she came from and institutional barriers, she found herself navigating a structure designed to standardize rather than support meaningful scholarly work. Still she found ways to continue to sustain her links to her community: “I live in the university, I work at the university, but because of my discipline (anthropology allows) me to connect with the villagers, with NGOs, CSOs.” But the administrators and government authorities have the power to “align” scholarship with rules and regulations governing higher education in the country.

Hurriyah noted that early-career scholars are simultaneously overworked and unsupported, forced to meet global publication standards without institutional resources—a model that is structurally unfair, particularly for women.

Vilashini (Vila) reframed the stakes of this experience in pointed terms: “The more critical and the more critical the idea, the more likely it’s said outside of the university.” This is not, she was careful to note, because universities are oblivious — her institution is well aware she has opinions. Rather, the university has simply ceased to function as a platform for larger, more challenging ideas. Being a university member has become, in her words, an identity marker rather than an intellectual home. When everyone in the institution is reduced to a foot soldier or factory worker — producing articles, filling forms, feeding rankings — the space for the kind of critical thought academia once promised has quietly closed.

Across the panel, the consensus was clear: neoliberal metrics produce unjust and demobilizing academic structures, limiting intellectual autonomy and reinforcing gendered burdens.

Academic Freedom 

Illiberalism and authoritarian repression shape career trajectories, research agendas, and personal safety. For the panelists, their work often places them directly in politically sensitive terrain.

Given shrinking spaces for protest and free expression, including places like the United States, Tyrell observed that universities are “the place where I work, but it’s not the site of social transformation.” The U.S. campus protests around Palestine in spring 2024 crystallized this for her. Student organizing was extraordinary, and the relationships it forged across faculty, staff, and students were genuinely hopeful. But the institutional response — universities coordinating policies that prohibited members from making political statements — made the point unmistakably: “Wow, the university really is dead.”

As a leader in the Southeast Asia Coalition for Academic Freedom, Ben warned that university bureaucracies are increasingly aligned with state controls over knowledge, shrinking spaces for dissent.

Conclusion

As moderator, Dr. Sol Iglesias noted that WiSEASS events previously aimed at helping women cope and succeed within the system’s parameters. The roundtable, however, clarified that the system itself is: unjust, untenable, demobilizing, and illegitimate. This marks an important shift for WiSEASS: from individually navigating academic precarity to collectively imagining a transformed future for the profession.

This roundtable underscored that the early-career to mid-career “cusp” is shaped by structural precarity, gendered inequality, demands of the neoliberal economic model, and shrinking academic freedom. Instead of offering simple survival strategies. The speakers insisted on the political necessity of scholar-activism, collective solidarity, and structural critique.

The call to integrate scholarship and activism—rather than balancing them—captured the panel’s ethos. The event thus stands as a catalyst for WiSEASS to push beyond professional navigation toward redefining and fighting for a more just academic future.