INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Introductory Note to Special Issue: "Scholars in the Margins: The Complex Lives of Postdocs in Higher Education"

Na-iem Dollie

Chief Editor. Education as Change. University of Johannesburg. eac1@unisapressjournals.co.za. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4252-6978, https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/EAC/index

This special issue of Education as Change is a compendium of articles that interrogates the complex lives and academic stations of postdoctoral researchers. From as far afield as China, Germany, and South Africa, the writers offer registers of the challenges that postdocs face in their efforts to not only function as engaged researchers in global institutions of higher learning, but to actively participate in creating conditions within their institutions that will get their research and their teaching institutionally recognised and rewarded. The articles that appear in this compendium argue that universities and their policies do not adequately support postdoctoral fellows in their endeavours to overcome their conditions of precarity, and to become the future academic leaders and academic administrators they are presumably trained to become.

The Guest Editors, sociologist of science Heidi Prozesky from Stellenbosch University and higher education studies scholar Mlamuli Hlatshwayo from the University of Johannesburg, have put together a multidimensional set of articles that goes a considerable distance in exposing the dilemmas and contradictions of postdoctoral lived experiences. The Guest Editors will write an Editorial once all the peer-reviewed articles are published.