Meaning-making in academic work under precarity: a phenomenological study of university professors in Colombia

This study examines the ways university professors working in conditions of labour precarity construct meaning in their academic work and relationship with the university. Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological approach inspired by Max van Manen, it interprets the lived experiences of professors who, despite contractual insecurity, remain in teaching as a way of inhabiting and giving form to their world. The findings emerge through four lifeworld existentials: lived existentiality reveals family trajectories in which teaching is inherited and experienced as destiny; lived relationality ilustrates the ways in which bonds with students and colleagues sustain the meaning of vocation; lived spatiality contrasts the alienation of the corporate world with the university as a symbolic refuge; and lived temporality expresses a lifelong commitment to teaching rooted in formative experiences. The study illuminates the existential embeddedness of academic work amid precarity and invites reflection on the university as a lived and meaningful space.