Intersectionalized Professional Identities and Gender in the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries

Introduction

Digital Humanities (DH) has emerged as a new field of academic employment in the past 20 years or so. It conjoins knowledge domains conventionally female-dominated (Humanities disciplines) with technology domains that have been regarded as male-dominated. While there has been much research on women within technology-driven work environments (e.g. Etzkowitz et al., 2000; Hacker, 2017; Kramarae, 1988; Roan and Whitehouse, 2007; Webster, 1996), there has been no research on DH as an emerging employment context or of gender in that workplace.

This article draws on original, Nordforsk-funded, ¹ qualitative research conducted in 2017/18. Its key research question is how gender, the domain formation of DH as a materialized workplace, and professional identities within it, are imbricated in a field characterized by what one might describe as ‘intersectionalized identities’. The article suggests that the management of such ‘intersectionalized identities’ within DH has particular effects, producing ‘vacated spaces’, both as metaphorical and as material gaps that illuminate organizational and structural complexities in the establishment of this new workspace. The article briefly surveys the literature on professional identities before charting the development and specificities of DH as a field of employment in three Nordic countries. It then discusses the research process and participants, and some of the project findings. Here it utilizes a core concept from contemporary feminist theory, intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991; McCall, 2005), to coin the notion of an ‘intersectionalized identity’ as characterizing DH employment in Nordic academic culture. It also draws on Gill et al.’s work (2017) on postfeminism, and on Sørensen’s discussions (2017) of choice within neoliberalist employment paradigms, to contribute to that debate from a somewhat different angle. The concept of ‘intersectionalized identities’ serves to analyse how certain kinds of contemporary professional identities are made in dialogue with and as a result of their organizational contexts. The article argues that such professional identities are articulated through specific practices and behaviours. It thus makes three contributions to the field of technologized work, gender and employment. First, empirically, it presents findings from original research into the under-researched area of DH as an emerging academic employment field. Second, theoretically it proposes the notion of ‘intersectionalized identities’ to explore the experiences of working in this field. Third, it reframes the idea of ‘choice’ as it is conventionally discussed in relation to neoliberal discourses on, for example, work–life balance in order to contribute to critical debates on contemporary employment studies in late-capitalist cultures such as the Nordic ones.

Making professional identities

Research on professional identities is extensive, notably in fields such as school teaching (Blackmore et al., 2018; Hall and McGinity, 2015), medicine (Broadhead, 2017; Cruess et al., 2016), nursing (Browne et al., 2018; Kyratsis et al., 2017; Rasmussen et al., 2018) and law (Jackson, 2017; Scott, 2018; Sommerlad, 2007). Here we find rich literatures on topics such as professional identity formation and development (Nadelson et al., 2017; Nesje et al., 2018a), professional identity development in the age of unstable careers (e.g. Nesje et al., 2018b; Savickas et al., 2009), of teachers in university contexts (van Lankveld et al., 2017), on transitions from being students to becoming professionals (Clement, 2014; Jackson, 2016; Nyström, 2009), professional identity and career change (Khapova et al., 2007; Williams, 2010), and much besides.

Much of this literature shares a particular trait with Hatmaker’s (2013) ‘Engineering identity: gender and professional identity negotiation among women engineers’. It assumes certain homogeneities; for example, of colleagues (all engineers), of workplace (engineering site), of work (as single professional identity), of careers (linear, progressive, continuous). As is common in literatures on professional identity dealing with highly gendered workplaces, Hatmaker’s article also highlights both the gender biases that govern such workplaces, and how women seek to resist these. The homogeneities informing these literatures, including Hatmaker’s article, reflect fairly traditional assumptions about work that continue, indeed, to be relevant to many workplaces and across many work contexts (Rubery et al., 2018).

However, much employment no longer conforms to this model (Alberti et al., 2018; Bersin, 2017; Scholz, 2017), or, indeed, never did. The standard employment relationship (Rubery et al., 2018) for academics in the Nordic countries, as discussed below, is quite unlike that of academics in Anglophone cultures (where employment also varies to some extent), for example. DH as an employment field is moderated, regarding its impact on its practitioners ‘by organizational characteristics and resources’ that are the product of the higher education (HE) and research policies of these countries (Lup et al., 2018: 627) over which DH practitioners have little control.

Ploughing an uncertain field: DH as an emerging area of employment

DH, named as such, emerged as a new employment field in the mid- to late 1990s, first in the USA and, very gradually, elsewhere. Grounded in disciplines such as library studies (concerned with finding ways of digitizing collections), linguistics (analysing language corpus data), archaeology (developing digital tools such as aerial photography and digital modelling), history and literature (text mining, author attribution, the production of digital literature) and communication studies (the exploration of online and social media), it has expanded into an extensive domain of developing and using digital tools and forms of analysis in Humanities disciplines. To date (2019), across Europe, DH exists almost exclusively in research centres, networks, laboratories and projects (see Matres, 2016; Nygren et al., 2015). In the USA, DH has become much more institutionally established (Zorich, 2008). Irrespective of its location, DH as an academic employment field is under-researched, although as a highly technologized employment area it is in some ways emblematic of the labour market changes that characterize contemporary developed economies (Huws, 2003, 2014; Standing, 2011). These include, for the purposes of this article, the technologization of knowledge production, the roles of wo/men within digitized knowledge production, divisions of labour within digital work world/s, work precarization, changes in public-sector employment and changes in notions of professional identity (Weeks, 2011: 37–77).

DH as an academic employment field has five specific traits that apply in most contexts where it is prevalent. First, it constitutes contested academic terrain – there is a lively debate as to whether it is a discipline, a perspective or a methodology (see, for example, Gold, 2012; Griffin and Hayler, 2018). In this it resembles early debates about Women’s and Gender Studies whose status was also in question in the 1970s and 1980s when it became instituted in the academy.

Second, it is a multi- or interdisciplinary domain. ² This means that working in DH almost always involves collaboration (Griffin et al., 2013) with multiple persons from diverse fields.

Third, professional roles within DH and their nomenclature are not (yet) fixed. This is because conventional academic career structure and hierarchy designations, such as professor, associate professor, etc., are not the sole designations in play. It is also a function of the mix of disciplines involved in DH; thus, one may have a variety of colleagues not designated by academic rank (e.g. lecturer, assistant) but by task (e.g. systems developer, programmer, web developer). Importantly, in conventional academic departments, task-designated jobs are often service jobs (e.g. secretary, administrator) rather than academically ranked positions. This plays an important role in DH workplace gender politics as will be discussed further below.

A fourth trait of DH is that it is differently institutionalized in diverse countries. Thus, in Sweden, Norway and Finland there are DH centres, laboratories, etc., but no departments. This means that DH entities are often marginalized materially and symbolically within universities, meaning that they may lack appropriate physical locations (they may, for example, be located in basements of buildings, or in buildings other than where their core staff are housed), and that they are not represented on key decision-making bodies within their institutions because they do not fit the conventional structural or disciplinary university divisions which institutions utilize for participation in decision-making (e.g. departmental or faculty boards, representation by discipline, or disciplinary domain).

Finally, and this is a fifth DH characteristic, currently significant numbers of DH staff are largely or entirely autodidacts. They are not digital natives who grew up with computers as part of the everyday. In this study of 30 DH practitioners, the mean age for the 17 female respondents was 44.7 (range 29–62) and for the 13 male respondents was 44.25 (39–50). This means that they were adult when common digital tools such as blogs (1994), the user-friendly version of R, a particular software tool (2000), Skype (2003), Twitter (2006) and the iPhone (2007) appeared, with no ready education in their use. Often, they have no specific formal technology education, and no systematic technology training as part of any professional development training. In many ways, these individuals constitute a specific generation in contemporary digital and technology employment genealogies. However, the research participants reported on here are also the people educating the next generations of DH academics. Their histories will therefore shape their pedagogic and instructional practices, in turn influencing younger generations of scholars. It is hence important to understand the particularities characterizing the research participants, detailed below, after a brief excursus on HE in the Nordic countries since this sets the context in which DH practitioners’ professional identities are intersectionalized.

Higher education in the Nordic context

The HE institutions in the Nordic countries ³ are particular: their employment patterns differ in certain respects from Anglophone HE contexts. First, HE is free in these countries. Second, universities receive block grants based on complex performance-related formulae, with (capped) student numbers constituting a significant dimension of this. However, unlike, for example, in the UK, they have no second block income stream for research. Such research income has to be gained competitively, mostly through applications to external research funding bodies. Organizational entities, such as centres or labs, without associated student numbers, common for DH, therefore rely largely on competitively acquired research funding and have few or no permanent posts. Generally, ‘permanent’ contracts are limited in number; HE workers wanting to become academics spend many years working – before, during, in between, and after their degrees – in diverse occupations inside and outside of the academy. These positions, including in the Humanities and Social Sciences, are also fractional rather than full-time. Fractionality is thus built into the academic employment system, not merely through the research funding system which mostly allows for only a percentage of worker time to be accounted for in a grant, but also supported by, for example, the possibility of being fractionally on sick leave (at 30% or 50% or any other percentage of one’s full-time hours), a practice that is not common in Anglophone cultures. This fractionality is discussed further below. Now, however, the research participants and the research process will be outlined.

The research participants and the research process

The purpose of this study was to understand practitioners’ gendered experiences of their careers within the emergent academic employment field of DH in Sweden, Finland and Norway. The key variables were that participants had to work in DH, and to interview roughly equal proportions of wo/men. In the event, 17 women and 13 men were recruited between July 2017 and September 2018. Participants were purposively selected through searching online staff lists on DH websites at five universities in each of the three selected countries, and through searching research funder websites for staff working in funded DH projects. The Nordic countries have relatively few HE institutions. ⁴ To maintain confidentiality, participants’ institutions are therefore not named. The study involved 17 Swedes (11 women, six men), seven Finns (three women, four men) and six Norwegians (three women, three men). Three participants (two women and one man) were white but not from the Nordic countries; a further participant, of Chinese background, was raised in the Nordic countries. All other participants were white. This reflects the dominance of white people in Nordic academe, and the colonial and immigration histories of the Nordic countries. ⁵ All the participants were working in funded DH projects, as directors or research co-ordinators of DH labs or centres, as DH lecturers, systems developers, or programmers. Their employment status was inflected by rank and/or task, and importantly, by the specificities of the fractionalizing Nordic HE employment system detailed above.

The participants were initially approached by email and then interviewed in a semi-structured manner. They were asked about their current post, their employment histories, their education, experiences of being mentored, experiences of the role of gender in DH, family history around technology, formal technology training, ways of updating themselves professionally, their view of Digital Humanities as an academic discipline, and interesting current developments in the field. All interviews were conducted in English. Hence, all participants (with the exception of four: two native speakers, and two whose first language was not a Nordic one) experienced the same situation of speaking in a second language. Participants were asked to sign consent forms so that the interviews could be audio-recorded and the data used in subsequent publications. All participants were interviewed individually: 12 by Skype, and 18 face-to-face. Interviews lasted between 50 minutes and 75 minutes.

All interviews were transcribed, uploaded into NVivo 11, and coded using a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967: 105). Texts were read carefully multiple times to identify and code for core themes that emerged within them. The emergence of these codes was partly a function of interviewees’ responses (hence not knowable in advance) and partly predicated upon the topics addressed through questions related to the interview guide and therefore known before coding. The latter were ‘partially known’ since within the interviews questions arose from how interviewees responded. Two code levels were used: descriptive ones or ‘topic-oriented codes’ (Kelle, 2004: 480), such as gendered employment histories, educational histories, multiplicity of roles, technology training and technology competence. These related to text segments of interviewees’ accounts regarding those issues. The second level was analytic and summative. It involved grouping together descriptive codes under headings, or ‘nodes’ as they are called in NVivo, that provided analytical frames such as ‘experience of intersectional identity’. From these the key theme of participants’ intersectionalized professional identity emerged.

Thinking intersectionality and ‘choice’ in postfeminist contexts

As Allison and Banerjee (2014) note: ‘intersectionality has gained traction as a major empirical paradigm in the social sciences’ (p. 67). Coined within feminist legal race politics (Crenshaw, 1989), it explores ‘race, class and gender’ (Holvino, 2010: 248) in ‘inequality regimes’ (Acker, 2006) as these prevail in many contexts, including in employment and organization studies. Acker’s work is particularly suggestive here because she is concerned with ‘specific organizations and the local, ongoing, practical activities of organizing work’ (p. 442), which reproduce complex inequalities. She defines ‘inequality in organizations as systematic disparities between participants in power and control over goals, resources, and outcomes’ (p. 443), and regards such inequalities as ‘loosely interrelated processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities within particular organizations’ (p. 443). The issues of organizing of the local activities, control over resources and outcomes are important as they map onto the organizational structures that the literature on intersectionality references to highlight the relation between identity categories and structures that promote inequalities. ‘Race, class and gender’ has become something of a mantra, sometimes treated as given ontological categories rather than as subject to change (see Carbado, 2013: 812, for a list of criticisms of intersectionality). Cho et al. (2013: 797, footnote 5) acknowledge that some of their work (e.g. McCall, 2005) has contributed to this emphasis on identity categories but they also state that ‘the recasting of intersectionality as a theory primarily fascinated with the infinite combinations and implications of overlapping identities from an analytic initially concerned with structures of power and exclusion is curious given explicit references to structures that appear in much of the early work’ (2013: 797). Crenshaw (1991: 1242), for example, talks of ‘structural intersectionality’ and its dynamics as ‘multilayered and routinized forms of domination that often converge in … women’s lives’. Yuval-Davis (2006) uses the notion of ‘social divisions’ to disentangle the ‘different levels at which intersectionality is located’ (p. 195). Cho et al. (2013: 786) seek to open up the ‘debates about whether there is an essential subject of intersectionality and, if so, whether the subject is statically situated in terms of identity, geography, or temporality or is dynamically constituted within institutions and structures that are neither temporally nor spatially circumscribed’. Mohanty warns against the use of intersectionality ‘disconnected from its materialist moorings’ (2013: 972). In line with this, and with Acker’s work, this article argues that the intersections of subject locations are made up of markers of subjectivity, such as race, class or gender, and also, for example, of the employment contexts within which they operate, in other words, there is a dynamic constitution of the subject within organizations and structures.

This importance of context has been repeatedly emphasized in discussions of intersectionality (e.g. Lewis, 2013: 873; Phoenix and Pattyrama, 2006: 187). It is sometimes expressed as ‘axes of difference’, as ‘vectors of inequality’ (MacKinnon, 2013: 1020), or as ‘the need to always pay consistent attention to the historical and social contexts in which the categories invoked (analytically and/or experientially) are produced, made meaningful and deployed’ (Lewis, 2009: 205; emphasis as in original). These contexts, including in organizations (Acker, 2006), already produce inequalities through their very structuration and organizing practices in entanglement with those of race, class and gender. The paratactic structure of ‘race, class and gender’ can downplay that diverse dimensions of inequality operate to different degrees and in different ways. As Crenshaw (1991: 1265) suggests, the struggle over which differences matter ‘raises critical issues of power’, and with that of agency – a word not often used in discussions of intersectionality.

Mohanty (2013) has shown that intersectionality theory is somewhat at odds with contemporary postfeminism and its emphasis on agency, individualism and choice (Gill et al., 2017: 227) – notions that underline self-actualization as determined by individual endeavour. Gill et al. (2017) rightly talk of ‘this contradictory landscape of contemporary culture’ (p. 226), where foreshortened temporalities (the speeding up of work processes as well as work intensification), precarity in employment (Standing, 2011), ‘the emphasis upon individualism, the retreat from structural accounts of inequality, and the repudiation of sexism’ (Gill et al., 2017: 227) can go hand in hand with a resignation (Kalfa et al., 2018) regarding the conditions of work in which people labour, and which promote persistent inequalities. Mohanty (2013) inveighs against these working life conditions in the neoliberal university, citing Weber (2010) who ‘notes that the congruence of postfeminism and neoliberalism privileges entrepreneurial success and the ideology of individual agency as a solution to social ills’ (2013: 974). Postfeminism is invested in ‘actional’ or agentic subjectivities – subjectivities determined by the agency and choices they exercise or action, hence actional. In this, postfeminism emphasizes the individual against the structural or wider social, economic and political constraints that might impact on individual opportunities. Discussions on ‘choice’, which conjoin neoliberalism and postfeminism, are telling: women’s choices within organization and employment literatures are routinely presented in binary terms as either/or, as in the well-worn phrase work–(family)life balance (Sørensen, 2017), or ‘having it all’ versus ‘opting out’ (Toffoletti and Starr, 2016). The notion of the work–life balance rests on multiple (un)articulated assumptions, such as the binarism of work and life (as if the two were discrete domains, and that despite the increasing recognition of the collapse of the private and the public, including in working life), their singularity (‘work’ and ‘life’), their unitariness or homogeneity as opposed to any possible multiplicity (e.g. care is viewed as being either about childcare or about eldercare, but not about multiple simultaneous forms of care including, for example, for a disabled partner and child simultaneously). Feminist discussions of the work–life balance have of course contested such binarisms (see, for example, Abendroth and den Dulk, 2011; Chatzitheochari and Arber, 2009; Healy, 2004; Munkejord, 2016), but the binarist phrase has stuck as the shorthand for what is discussed.

Binarisms are part of sense-making condensations (Sørensen, 2017: 302) structuring public and private discourses. However, against the uncoupling of the ontological subject positions produced within intersectionality theory and the actional subjectivities of postfeminism and ‘choice feminism’ from wider social and structural concerns, this article suggests that their intertwining queries some of the assumptions that underpin contemporary discussions of gendered work. Re-coupling these concerns also means thinking about the meaning of agency in this context. Here the use of ‘intersectionalized’ is proposed, stressing the final syllable to suggest that contrary to contemporary emphases on individual choice and agency as choice feminism would have it (e.g. Hakim, 2000), women and men are not only the subjects but also the objects of workplace processes and actions that are neither their choice nor in their control. The use of ‘intersectionalized’ is meant to signal this lack of agency regarding certain aspects of one’s working life. The word constitutes a form of resistance against prevailing postfeminist notions of agency that hold individuals but not workplaces to account. To demonstrate this, the article now turns to how the interviewed DH practitioners talked about their professional selves and practices.

Working in DH in the Nordic countries

DH in the Nordic countries remains organized in entities such as labs and research groups that favour provisionality. Therefore, there are no long-term stable income streams associated with DH, and its long-term vitality depends largely on external income-generation. This is not a matter of individual choice but of HE and other policies. The combination of these economic conditions and the career structures available to academics in the Nordic countries with limited full-time permanent employment opportunities mean that temporary project work is the norm. A ‘career’ in DH in terms of continuous, full-time employment with a progressive seniorization trajectory is effectively not possible; instead, people move from project to project on a temporary and uncertain basis in a quasi-rhizomic manner.

These conditions create ‘choice constraint’. DH practitioners in the Nordic countries in academe are not able to ‘choose’ a conventional career in DH, no matter how hard they work or how entrepreneurial, or self-motivated they are. They can choose to work in DH but within the parameters set by higher education and other related policies. This contradicts the ‘neoliberal free-choice discourse’ (Sørensen, 2017: 305) that governs assumptions about the choices wo/men have in pursuing (or not) careers.

A further constraint is that many, if not most, positions are fractional; when applying for research funding, one can usually only ask for a percentage of one’s salary. This has to be supplemented by other work, for instance in other projects, or as an academic administrator, also likely to be fractional. The effect is a ‘mosaic work portfolio’ where individuals’ full-time work consists of multiple fractional posts, often on different timescales (10% in project X for one year, 15% in another for three years, etc.). Many of the interviewees commented on this, for example:

I am a researcher slash programmer slash a little support for specific equipment because … but mainly I’m a researcher and co-ordinator in a large, European, actually Swedish … project (…) I am a participant, mainly, in projects with other people … (Anders, Swedish, 47)

This multiplicity of jobs, often two, sometimes more, constitutes one of the intersectional dimensions affecting DH workers’ professional identity. These intersections were not chosen by them: they pre-structure their employment field. It is in this sense that this article argues that these workers were intersectionalized; meaning that they operate under choice constraint, imposed upon them by the more general work conditions that apply in DH in the Nordic countries. In using the word ‘intersectionalized’, this text suggests that intersectionality is not a given, but a process with specific manifestations and outcomes. It is an effect of individual subjectivities intersecting with social norms, and with structuring organizational and employment practices determining workers’ employment opportunities. Hence, it is done, not given. This ‘done-ness’ also means it can be un-done or done differently. Agency and choice do exist, but they rest with the organizations and funders which employ the workers rather than with the workers themselves (whose main choice, unless they submit to these pre-existing inequality regimes, is to quit or change employment tack).

DH practitioners’ mosaic employment portfolio and their sense of having an intersectionalized professional identity was partly associated with entering DH from other Humanities disciplines, and with DH not (yet) constituting a fully established discipline. The question is, how did this affect them? Birgitta, a 48-year-old Swede, describing herself as an art historian who had worked in DH projects, talked of resistance from the leading professor in her DH lab: ‘He didn’t want to endorse further ideas … he didn’t believe in our results … people need publishing … and they want to build a career’. Experimenting in DH and creating new digital tools and archives were not regarded as research, according to this professor. Birgitta moved into an academic administrative role after having developed what was, from her perspective, an overly mosaic work portfolio: ‘I have done so many career moves so my CV is not as extended [in art history per se]; I think I” here?] have a hard time competing with others …’. Having ranged across academic domains or worked interdisciplinarily counted against her. This is a well-established finding from interdisciplinarity research, contradicting public mantras of the importance of interdisciplinary work to find solutions for contemporary societal challenges. Birgitta also said of a colleague, a director of a DH centre at another university: ‘Some of the stuff she’s done in DH doesn’t get points … when every year you apply for research time based on publication and stuff …’.

The non-recognition of academic work conducted in DH was one reason why some participants re-thought their work location. Another reason repeatedly cited was the difficulty of working in an environment where aspects of their intersectionalized professional identities were not valued. Selma, a Swedish professor of visual and media culture in her early 60s with a background both in technology and in visual arts, had spent several years at a technology institute but found that:

As a Humanities researcher I was completely on my own … the other people … didn’t ask the same questions as I did. One of my colleagues said once: ‘We can’t just sit there and analyse things. That would be boring.’ … they sort of thought designing was the thing … I felt a bit alien because of that.

She moved (back) to a traditional university to be with other people with similar academic concerns.

Being split between workspaces was common among DH scholars. Such splitting was reinforced by DH’s spatial organization. In the studied institutions, DH either had no physical space at all, or was located in basements or other marginalized sites. Asked if their DH centre had an actual physical space, interviewee Nina said: ‘Yes. But I’ve never been there.’ Andrea, a 29-year-old PhD student, interviewed in the local DH lab, said: ‘the technicians don’t sit here, really, … this is just the lab with the equipment, … there are generally no staff down here’. The phrase ‘down here’ indicates the basement location of the lab. Just one person passed through during the whole interview (90 minutes). Other DH lab spaces were equally empty, and this mid-morning in the middle of term. It should be noted that ‘labs’ included office, teaching and experimental spaces. The male director of one Swedish DH lab and many of its staff had their offices along a corridor on the fourth floor of one building while their lab was in the basement of another. The spatial configuration of DH as a segregated marginalized space thus mirrored and materialized the split mosaic portfolio that many DH scholars work to. This, again, was not a matter of these scholars’ choice but of institutional decisions about space designation. It articulated the spatialized intersectionalization of which these workers were the object.

In this fractured structuration, where individuals work across different sites and diverse work scenarios, the issue is not, or not only, as much so-called choice feminism would have it, one of work–life balance, but one of work–work balance where work–work refers to multiple worksites. Jan (40, Swedish) talked about the multiplication of meetings that having several employments simultaneously involved, the amount of time it took to move physically between different sites, and the difficulties of working to diverse workplaces’ and projects’ deadlines. He described his main problem as ‘getting cooldown time’ as he was trying to service multiple projects in different locations.

Living an intersectionalized work life structured by multiple work–work balance demands and multiple forms of marginalization had clear effects on the DH workers. Here just three of these are discussed: (a) a sense of professional alienation, and difficulties in establishing belonging due to mosaic work portfolios; (b) the production of ‘vacated’ workspaces, both actual and symbolic, as a function of this alienation; and (c) a ‘tool-ic’ or functionalist view of DH.

In Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines (1989), Becher describes how academics are professionally socialized through a range of rites and rituals, domain-specific accoutrements such as stethoscopes for doctors, specialist vocabularies, methodological territories, and material bases. This establishment/enactment of professional identities through somatic, behavioural, material, symbolic and epistemological, iterative practices has been extensively researched (e.g. Bevort and Suddaby, 2016; Korica and Molloy, 2010). However, no such practices have been fully established in DH yet. Unlike for Women’s and Gender Studies in its early days when such practices also did not exist but where strong ideological commitments to feminism underpinned the desire to belong, DH has no equivalent motivation that helps to mitigate its limited institutionalization and professionalization. It is therefore not uncommon to find Nordic DH practitioners who dissociate from the field, with statements such as ‘I wouldn’t count myself as a researcher in DH perhaps per se’ (Petra, Swedish, 30, employed 50% as DH researcher), or ‘I’m not a typical digital humanities person’ (Selma, Swedish, early 60s). This dissociation meant that practitioners tended to feel that they did not ‘belong’. As one male DH lab director put it: ‘If there is a conference that is focusing on media, I’m not a media scholar. When I go to digital humanities, I’m not a digital humanities scholar.’ This dissociation and lack of belonging, coupled with the spatial disaggregation produced by how DH centres were materialized, then led to ‘vacated spaces’ where not only the DH space remained uninhabited but where professional DH identity was vacated too.

Vacating that identity took two forms: an identification with a different, prior discipline and/or a tool-ic view of DH, thus signalling its subordination in the intersectional order of things. One female DH practitioner said: ‘I think we are trained to be corpus linguists’ (Petra); this was her identity. Another woman, a director of a Swedish DH centre who ‘didn’t do any digital things before I started my postdoc’, saw her engagement with DH as ‘I need tools and skills to use these tools’ (Britta, 40). Such statements were common. They served to relegate DH to a subsidiary domain, commensurate with how research funders supporting it project by project, and institutions setting it up in out-of-the-way spaces and under-resourcing it, constructed the field.

DH as a gendered employment domain

As the quotes up to this point have shown, both women and men experienced themselves as intersectionalized in terms of their professional identity – they frequently grappled with a distributed work life characterized by multiple disciplinary, job and spatial affiliations. These were not of their choosing but an effect of the inequality regimes in place in their work contexts and how employment opportunities in Nordic HE are structured. The DH emerging work environment was also clearly gendered, in particular in relation to role distribution and engagement with digital technology. As Arne (Swedish, 46) put it: ‘On the tech side there are men, and on the research side there are women’. This horizontal division was evident despite the mosaic work portfolios that women and men alike inhabited.

This horizontal gendered division of labour matched a vertical one: the women tended to be research leaders and the men technology service providers (‘technical support’), an inversion of the more common expectation that men lead and women act as service providers. In Sweden and in Norway, women rather than men tended to be the directors of DH labs or centres, at a ratio of 2 to 1. These women articulated a strong gender awareness of how being female impacted on their work lives. Nina (50, Swedish), for example, said: ‘Of course I have been the only woman in the ministry’s big data panels and so I’m invited because of my gender, but I’ve also taken advantage of that. So, basically, it has worked for my benefit.’ ‘Of course’ here signals the ‘this is just how business is: accepting the status quo’ (Gill et al., 2017: 239) that Gill and colleagues discuss in relation to the rise of postfeminist sensibilities at work.

However, Nina’s interview produced a much more complex sense of navigating gender than an appeal to postfeminism suggests. She also spoke of having been bullied by her male professor as a postgraduate, and not just her. None of these young women spoke up, however, because, as she put it: ‘I thought this is the way that academia works’. Nina also spoke of other male colleagues, later, who were extremely supportive: ‘I’ve had men who have systematically pushed me forward …’. Nina was one of several female interviewees who talked about this. Gender thus operated in complex ways, producing contradictory landscapes of put-downs and opportunities, distributed differently across the professional life course. Several female interviewees told me stories of being bullied and sexually harassed, often as PhD students or as young temporary staff. No male interviewee had a similar story. And as is well documented in other narratives of sexual harassment in work environments, the women usually left their position without having had redress, while the men, if confronted formally, were at worst put into a different work context within the same institution. The interviews thus showed both complex understandings of the operations of gender and also indicated how gender might impact differently at different points in one’s professional life course.

Acting as service providers could create gender-role dilemmas for the male participants, which they sought to mitigate in three ways: by getting more involved in the research, by emphasizing their knowledge as a form of expertise that complemented the research, or by foregrounding how their work environment was less hierarchical and hence they were listened to. Sven, who had mainly worked with women and found them to be ‘very generous’, said, for example: ‘I offer to, or I ask if they might, if I can be on a paper as a co-author …’. Jan (Swedish, 40) stressed: ‘We succeeded a lot [in this DH lab] that we are not hierarchical … people are listening to your side or your perspective’.

Those male DH practitioners who acted predominantly as service providers for a range of projects utilized diverse DH methods and tools, while the women who were predominantly researchers mostly tended to employ one specific digital method, such as eye-movement tracking, or certain kinds of corpus linguistics tools. Three of 15 women interviewees ranged more widely digitally; all combined formal technology training (e.g. a degree in computer science or informatics) with training in an arts or Humanities discipline. They had fathers and/or brothers who had introduced them to computers and often to gaming. Women who focused on one digital method or tool had come to technology late (e.g. at doctoral/postdoc level) and had limited or no formal technology training.

The pattern among the men was different, even where they combined technology and arts training. Their range of technological skills often turned them into service providers. Unlike the female participants they were, however, also much more likely to report continuities between their technology-driven work and their home lives, starting with having been teenage early adopters, gamers and parental-garage programmers, and ending with seeing no division between their professional and their personal lives in terms of their digital engagement, as Ove (62, Finnish) for instance said. Some of the men thus had a more immersive relation to their digital work life than the female interviewees. Despite those differences, most women and men alike disavowed their relation to DH, instead viewing their professional identity in terms of other disciplines or functional roles (e.g. being a systems developer).

Conclusion

Professional identities in the emerging employment field of DH in the Nordic countries are influenced by many intersecting factors, including not only matters of ontological subjectivity but also, importantly, matters of structural and organizational specificities. These produce ‘choice constraint’. Intersectionality theory, though referencing structural constraints, rarely discusses them in any detail, nor does it conjoin the issue of agency with that of intersectionality. Bringing the two together means shifting the focus much more strongly onto the structural factors that render professional identities intersectionalized. The article has begun to sketch what the effects of such intersectionalization might be in terms of professional identity. In particular, they result in vacated spaces, literally and metaphorically. This has negative implications for what is an important emerging employment field, DH, as intersectionalization undermined the participants’ commitment to their work. As Nina (50) said: ‘My loyalties towards [my] university are very, very fragile’. In an age when technologization has become the new normal and knowledge production on this is urgently needed, such dispositions are deeply worrying. They speak to the need to address how intersectionalization operates at structural and organizational levels, and how and what kind of professional identities might be fostered to enable the flourishing of a field that is crucial for our times, not least in its opportunities for women to adopt leader roles.