The State of Mind of Working as an Academic in Anatolia: The Willingness to Believe in a Different World

Abstract

In this autoetnographic study, by focusing on the mood of my employment, I will try to examine how Imanufacture consent to work as an academician at a university in the Eastern Black Sea in Turkey.While showing how my working life is shaped by the mood of the “young republican woman” imageand also how it contradicts with, this article emphasises that the mood of working life cannot beunderstood without focusing on its relation with gender ideology. By strengthening the connectionbetween emotion/affect literature and labour theories, the article suggests the mood of my working asan academician is a desire to believe the world could be different and explores this mood by focusingon the main parts of my working history: arrival to the working place, transforming it and fulfillingthe requirements of working. These titles explore not only how such a mood is constructedhistorically but also how it is reconstituted in daily life. I hope that the article, which provides adiscursive analysis about women’s paid employment by drawing on the studies on the mood, willcontribute to the debates on the relationship between mood, labour process and gender ideologies.