Presented by the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

The seventh episode of Hiring Rituals focuses on contingent labor in academia, a diverse group that includes Visiting Assistant Professors, Lecturers, Adjuncts, and anyone else whose jobs fall outside the aspirational and increasingly rare tenure-track line.

In this episode, we start by asking: what are contingent faculty? And what makes them contingent? We then explore how academia as an industry has changed over the past five decades, focusing on the adjunctification of the academic labor force since the 1970s. We also learn more about the promises and pitfalls, real or imagined, that go along with entering into the contingent labor force. We invite you to keep listening to hear from researchers and labor organizers as they share resources and strategies for what you can do when you find yourself in a contingent role or if you find yourself faced with the all-too-common decision of whether or not to pursue contingent academic work. In the order you’ll first hear them introduced, these are: Deepa Das Acevedo, Sue Doe, Seth Kahn, Jenny Morse, Tobias Higbie, Adrianna Kezar, Erin Hatton, and Maria Maisto. The full transcript is also available.

Distributed in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association

Contingent Labor Podcast Chapters

You may listen to the full podcast above or on the Apple podcast services. If you only want to listen to specific chapters, you can do so below.

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter Two: What is Contingent Faculty?

Chapter Three: How Has Higher Ed Changed as an Industry?

Chapter Four: What Keeps Contingent Faculty Contingent?

Chapter Five: National Structures and State-Level Variation

Chapter Six: Institutional Structures and Processes

Chapter Seven: How is Higher Ed Changing Today?

Chapter Eight: Once You Know, Now What?

APLA Precariat Fund

We ask people who find listening to the podcast useful to contribute to an APLA fund to help precariat academics with emergency health care and moving costs.  The money accumulated in this mutual aid fund will be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis every summer.  We are asking that you help support fellow scholars in need of financial help as they move between non-tenure track jobs, or deal with unexpected health costs.  Your donations will help form a mutual aid society moderated by APLA and be greatly appreciated. Directions and a link are below.

Guests

Deepa Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Alabama. Before coming to Alabama, she was a Sharswood Fellow in Law at Penn Carey Law. She received an AB in Politics from Princeton and a JD and PhD in Anthropology from The University of Chicago. Deepa’s research blends original ethnography, anthropological theory, and legal doctrine to study how law constructs, reflects, and challenges conceptions of personhood and freedom. She writes both in work law with a focus on the gig economy and in comparative constitutional law and law and religion, with a focus on India. She has conducted fieldwork in India and the US. Her monograph, The Battle for Sabarimala, is under contract with Oxford, and her edited volume, Beyond the Algorithm, was published by Cambridge in 2021. Her scholarly writing appears in Law & Social Inquiry, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, PoLAR, Modern Asian Studies, and several law reviews. Her research has been supported by the SSRC, ACLS, and the American Philosophical Society, among others.

Sue Doe is Professor of English and Executive Director at the Institute for Learning and Teaching at Colorado State University (CSU). She is also Director of the CSU Center for the Study of Academic Labor and former Chair of the Faculty Council. Sue teaches courses in Composition, Autoethnographic Theory and Method, Reading and Writing Connections, Research Methods, and GTA preparation for writing instruction. She does research in three distinct areas: academic labor and the faculty career; writing across the curriculum; and student-veteran transition in the post-9/11 era. Coauthor of the faculty development book Concepts and Choices: Meeting the Challenges in Higher Education, she has published articles in College English, The WAC Journal, Reflections, and Writing Program Administration (among others) as well as in several book-length collections. Her recent collection on student-veterans in the Composition classroom, Generation Vet: Composition, Veterans, and the Post-911 University, co-authored with Professor Lisa Langstraat, was published by Utah State Press (an imprint of the University Press of Colorado) in 2014

Erin Hatton is Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Buffalo. Prof. Hatton’s research focuses on work and political economy, while also extending into the fields of social inequality, labor, law, and social policy. Her first book, The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America (Temple University Press, 2011), weaves together gender, race, class, and work in a cultural analysis of the temporary help industry and rise of the new economy. Prof. Hatton’s second book, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment(UC Press, 2020), analyzes four very different—and unusual—groups of workers:  incarcerated, workfare, college athlete, and graduate student workers. Drawing on more than 120 in-depth interviews across these four groups, in this book she uncovers a new form of labor coercion and analyzes its consequences for workers in America.

Adrianna Kezar is the Dean’s Professor of Leadership, Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education, and Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. An expert on change; leadership; diversity, equity, and inclusion; faculty; STEM reform; collaboration; and governance in higher education, Kezar is well-published with 26 books/monographs, over 100 journal articles, and over 100 book chapters and reports. She has acquired over $22 million dollars in grant funding and has worked on grant-funded projects exceeding $35 million dollars on a variety of projects to fundamentally improve higher education.  At the Pullias Center, Kezar directs the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, The Change Leadership Toolkit for Advancing Systemic Change in Higher Education, Building a Culture of Shared Equity Leadership in Higher Education and the Faculty, and Academic Careers & Environments (FACE) projects. She consults with government agencies, accreditation bodies, foundations, state systems, consortiums, and individual campuses. Kezar is regularly quoted in the media, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, Washington Post, PBS, and NPR (national and local stations), among others.

Jenny Morse is Senior Clinical Professor in the Management Academic Department at Colorado State University College of Business where she teaches practical writing skills for business communication drawing on her experience in publishing, her ongoing work as a freelance writer and editor, and her 10 years teaching creative writing and composition. She earned her PhD in English from University of Illinois-Chicago in 2013. Currently, Jenny ghostwrites for a prominent CEO with articles published in Forbes, Inc, The NY Report, Geek, and others. Her literary criticism has appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Thought, the Montreal Review, The Ofi Press, and Seismopolite. Her poetry has been published in Borderlands, Terrain, Quiddity, Wilderness House, and the Notre Dame Review, among others. Outside of writing and teaching, Jenny runs, hikes, and skis when home and otherwise travels frequently. She has visited 5 continents and all 50 states (including 2 U.S. territories).

Maria Maisto (SFS’89, MA’92) serves as Director of Communications for the Kennedy Institute of Ethics (KIE) at Georgetown University as well as for the newly forming Emergent Ethics Network and its other member centers: along with the KIE, the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics, the Environmental Justice Program, and the Center for Digital Ethics. Maria has worked in higher education for thirty years as a contingent faculty member, as an advocate, as nonprofit executive staff, and as university staff.  She has written and spoken widely on the subject of higher education labor practices and their impact on the ethics and quality of higher education. She is also a founding member of New Faculty Majority.

Tobias Higbie is Professor of History and Labor Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Professor Higbie is a labor historian whose research explores the intersection of work, migration, and social movement organizing in the United States. His current research (with Gaspar Rivera Salgado) focuses on new immigrants and labor unions in Los Angeles and Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s. His most recent book, Labor’s Mind: An Intellectual History of the Working Class, illuminates the world of working-class self-education and labor movement education that seeded the union upsurge of the 1930s and prefigured the rise of university-based labor scholarship. His first book, Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930 (winner of two book awards), is a study of migrant labor and the politics of belonging that showed the centrality of so-called marginal workers to the development of American industrial society.

Higbie led the effort to launch UCLA’s Labor Studies interdepartmental degree program and served as the program’s chair from 2019–2022. Before that he was chair of the UCLA Labor and Workplace Studies program from 2014–2019. Before coming the UCLA in 2007, Higbie was an assistant professor in the Institute for Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois (2005–2007), and the Director of the Center for Family and Community History at the Newberry Library (2000–2005). As a graduate student, Higbie was part of a large-scale organizing campaign to win bargaining rights for graduate student employees. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois and is a member of the American Federation of Teachers.

Seth Kahn is Professor of English at West Chester University, where he teaches courses primarily in rhetoric and writing. He has served as co-chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Committee on Part-time, Adjunct, and Contingent Labor and currently serves as co-chair of the Council of Writing Program Administrators Labor Committee. His recent publications include, “What Is a Union?” in A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators; “‘Never Take More Than You Need’: Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty and Contingent Labor Exploitation,” in Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty; and a co-guest-edited special issue of Open Words on “Contingent Labor and Educational Access.”

Further Information

Center for the Study of Academic Labor (CSAL)

CSAL is an interdisciplinary research center that supports scholarship, commentary, artistry, and activism on contingent academic labor and the future of higher education. Learn more.

Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

The Delphi Project is dedicated to enhancing awareness about the changing faculty trends using research and data to better support faculty off the tenure track and to help create new faculty models to support higher education institutions in the future. Learn more.

New Faculty Majority (NFM)

NFM is dedicated to improving the quality of higher education by advancing professional equity and securing academic freedom for all adjunct and contingent faculty. For this purpose, NFM engages in education and advocacy to provide economic justice and academic equity for all college faculty. NFM is committed to creating stable, equitable, sustainable, non-exploitative academic environments that promote more effective teaching, learning, and research. NFM is part of the broader movement for human and worker rights. Read more.

Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE)

IRLE is an interdisciplinary institute at the University of California, Berkeley that connects world-class research with policy to improve workers’ lives, communities, and society. IRLE promotes better understanding of the conditions, policies, and institutions that affect the well-being of workers and their families and communities and aims to inform public debate with evidence about inequality, the economy, and the nature of work. Read more.

Production Staff

This podcast was created by Elisabetta Carosi (sound editor); Jennifer Curtis (editor); Josh Babcock (production assistant and narrator); and Ilana Gershon (producer).

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