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

In this autoetnographic study, by focusing on the mood of my employment, I will try to examine how I manufacture 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” image and also how it contradicts with, this article emphasises that the mood of working life cannot be understood without focusing on its relation with gender ideology. By strengthening the connection between emotion/affect literature and labour theories, the article suggests the mood of my working as an academician is a desire to believe the world could be different and explores this mood by focusing on the main parts of my working history: arrival to the working place, transforming it and fulfilling the requirements of working. These titles explore not only how such a mood is constructed historically but also how it is reconstituted in daily life. I hope that the article, which provides a discursive analysis about women’s paid employment by drawing on the studies on the mood, will contribute to the debates on the relationship between mood, labour process and gender ideologies.