A Guide to Surviving a Career in Academia: Navigating the Rites of Passage

Navigating an academic career is a complex process – to be successful requires mastering several 'rites of passage.' This comprehensive guide takes academics at all stages of their career through a journey, beginning at graduate school and ending with retirement.

A Guide to Surviving a Career in Academia is written from a feminist perspective, and draws on the information offered in workshops conducted at national meetings like the American Society of Criminology and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Through the course of the book, an expert team of authors guide you through the obstacle course of finding effective mentors during graduate school, finding a job, negotiating a salary, teaching, collaborating with practitioners, successfully publishing, earning tenure and redressing denial and, finally, retirement.

This collection is a must read for all academics, but especially women just beginning their careers, who face unique challenges when navigating through these age-old rites of passage.

Emily Lenning is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Fayetteville State University. Her areas of interest include state crime, the social construction of deviance, media representations of crime and justice, and transgender issues. Her most current work explores the systematic and mass rapes of Nigerian women at the hands of state-endorsed military groups and the problematic nature of gendered language.

Sara Brightman is a Ph.D candidate at Western Michigan University. Her areas of interest broadly include feminist theory, global feminism, feminist criminology, state-corporate crime as well as feminist epistemology and methodology. Recent projects have focused on state violence by police against women in Pakistan, and state-corporate violence against women in Nigeria.

Susan Caringella is an internationally known expert on rape, feminism, and criminology. She has published in academic journals and written books on topics ranging from rape to violence against women, legislative change, sociological, criminological and feminist theory, political ideology and public opinion. Her work has been widely cited and recognized with national, state, and university scholarship awards and honours.