Nov 10 2012

2013 OCUFA Conference Addresses the Austerity Agenda

Category: Conferences,University Finance — Bob Hanke @ 6:34 pm

Academia in The Age of Austerity

Governments in Canada and elsewhere have embraced “austerity” as a necessary public policy to eliminate budgetary deficits and ensure future prosperity.  How has this “austerity agenda” affected faculty, students, administrators and institutions in Ontario, in Canada, and globally?  Is “austerity” inevitable, or are there alternatives?   And what might universities do now, and in the future, in response to the “austerity agenda” or possible alternatives?

The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Association’s 2013 Conference –   “Academia in the Age of Austerity” – will seek to answer these questions and more. Join us for two days of insightful presentations and engaging discussion with speakers and participants from universities, research institutes, government, and the private sector in Canada, the United States, and Europe.  The conference will critically explore the idea of “austerity” by unpacking the meaning of the term, its implications and impact on higher education, as well as consider other possible policy directions.  Like previous OCUFA conferences, a diversity of views will be sought in each of the keynote and panel sessions.

The conference will take place on January 10-11, 2013 at the Pantages Hotel in Toronto.

For more information about this conference, follow this link.

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Jun 10 2012

Call for Papers — Non-Tenure Track Faculty Conference

Category: Conferences — Bob Hanke @ 5:12 pm

Mid-Atlantic Non-Tenure Track Faculty Conference

“The New Faculty Majority:

Teaching, Scholarship, and Creativity in the Age of Contingency”

October 2012, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (exact date and location TBA)

This conference will be an opportunity to think more deeply about the state of contingent, non-tenure-stream faculty: the intellectual work we engage in and the struggle to survive as committed teachers, academics, researchers and artists in unstable and unsustainable working conditions. Contingent labor constitutes the majority of faculty, yet we are the lowest paid and most overburdened workers. We represent the front line in academic experiences at the undergraduate level and offer irreplaceable interactions with students. We are artists, scholars, researchers and examples of inspired teaching.  How can we use what we know to create a more sustainable and equitable system, one that will benefit everyone at the university? What change is most needed? What does it mean to constitute the new faculty majority at your college or university?

Papers and panels will be invited on the following topics:

— maintaining a scholarly or creative life in an era of non-tenured faculty invisibility

 — art and creative writing panels (framed by your experience of creating this work under NTT working conditions)

 — documenting the institutional experiences of contingent faculty

 — comparative analyses of salary, contracts, and other aspects of employment

 — histories of academic labor struggles

 — best practices for contingent faculty

 — unionization for contingent faculty

 — the proletarianization of the professoriate

Please email nttfconference@gmail.com if you are interested in presenting at or planning the conference. You will be asked to provide a brief abstract of what you can imagine presenting. Panel proposals in addition to those on this list are also welcome.

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May 01 2012

The Union Against Itself: The Mirror Stage of Contract Faculty Labour

Category: Conferences,Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 3:59 pm

by Bob Hanke
Departments of Communication Studies and Humanities

Paper presented at The University is Ours! A Conference on Struggles Within and Beyond the Neoliberal University,  April 27-29, 2012, Toronto, Ontario

In the Production of Living Knowledge, Gigi Roggero focuses on the relationship between autonomy and subordination. As he writes:

The line of the processes of struggle and of hierarchization is not longer … located on the border dividing those within from those outside of the labour market, but is completely internal to it. In the intersection between life and labour struck by the condition of precarity, it is the quality of inclusion that becomes the object of the practices of exit and of voice. The behaviors of living labour, between the search for autonomy and subordination, self-valorization, and competitive individualism, describe, therefore, the material constitution of subjectivity, becoming at once a form of resistance and of potential conflict (Roggero 2011, p. 103).

I want to draw on this rich passage to describe and analyze how CUPE 3903 was put against itself. In response to the acceleration and intensification of casualization of academic labour, the quality of contract faculty’s inclusion in a member-driven, democratic union became problematic. In the following account, I emphasize how organization and mediation must be considered as constitutive in the production of subjectivity. I will close by raising the question of affective bargaining with the union and the shaping of subjectivity.

Currently, CUPE Local 3903 is the bargaining agent for 1726 teaching assistants in Unit 1 and 691 graduate assistants in Unit 3. In Unit 2 representing contract faculty there are 900 members; of these, 687 hold course directorships, 340 hold tutor positions, and 127 hold both positions. Given the changing composition and orientation of the local towards more graduate students, what was remarkable about the 85-day strike in 2008-09 was that contract faculty and graduate students were in solidarity on “job security.” That strike only ended when the McGuinty Liberals passed  Bill 145 – the York University Labour Disputes Resolution Act – on January 29, 2009. After the employer’s war of attrition against the strikers, the neoliberal government acted to regulate the academic labour market by stripping strikers of their collective bargaining rights.

One episode from this strike illustrates how union communication is enabling and constraining. After the strike had already started, a Unit 2 communication committee was formed to develop a communication strategy to inform and mobilize contract faculty. They started a listserv and produced the inaugural issue of the CUPE 3903 U2 Chronicle. Recognizing their underepresentation in the internal and external media, a subcommittee made plans for a press conference to make contract faculty visible and articulate the relationship between job security and the quality of education. This press conference never happened. The executive committee following CUPE National’s communication officer’s centralized, coordinated communication strategy insisted that this conference be delayed until after the forced ratification results were known. In this way, union communication was structured to foreclose the representation of “hidden academics” (Ragagpol 2002).

This is not to say that the issue of “job security” – through sheer repetition if nothing else — was ignored or unreported. Rather, it is to say that it was not attached to those most affected by casualization. The union’s communication strategy failed to make the connection between “job security,” the two-tier faculty employment system, and the threat that contingency poses to academic freedom and governance. As one senior contract faculty member put it, “At a certain level I feel that efforts to keep U2 out of the media represent an ageist attack on who we are. The lack of our voices and our faces… throughout 3903’s media representations is appalling (as is the lack of racialized bodies, differently-abeled bodies, elderly bodies, female bodies).” To put it in a post-autonomist Marxist framework of cognitive labour, if communication is cooperation and production, then what was at stake for contract faculty in this strike was not just putting a face on public service, educational workers but the production of living knowledge of precariousness.

I want to go on to argue that it is out of the memory of defeat that a new path to self valorization and determination would be tried. The union would be put against itself without being transformed. As Antonio Negri suggests in The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, communication is production. To this, I would add that mediation – the space between the subject and reality – as well as organization must be considered constitutive. Despite its legacy of achievements, resources have yet to be allocated within CUPE 3903 to enhance contract faculty’s capacity to communicate, discover who they are, and to network. Moreover, in 2011, another way was tried – restructuring the local – but it ended up having no traction. This has left contract faculty less able to tackle the problem of casualization and to protect themselves from exploitation.

….

To read the rest of this 9-page paper with references, download
The Union Against Itself — The Mirror Stage of Contract Faculty

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Feb 29 2012

The University is Ours!

Category: Conferences — Bob Hanke @ 3:04 pm

The University is Ours! A Conference on Struggles Within and Beyond the Neoliberal University, April 27-29, 2012, Toronto, Ontario

The university belongs to us, those who teach, learn, research, council, clean, and create community. Together we can and do make the university work.

But today this university is in crisis. The neoliberal restructuring of post-secondary education seeks to further embed market logic and corporate-style management into the academy, killing consultation, autonomy and collective decision-making. The salaries of university presidents and the ranks of administrators swell, but the people the university is supposed to serve — students — are offered assembly-line education as class sizes grow, faculty is over-worked, and teaching positions become increasingly precarious. International students and scholars seeking post-secondary or graduate education are treated as cash cows rather than as people who might contribute to both research and society. Debt-burdened students are seen as captive markets by administrators, while faculty is encouraged to leverage public funds for private research on behalf of corporate sponsors.

The attack on what remains of public education has been total. Over the last year we have witnessed the closure of humanities programmes, further tuition hikes, the replacement of financial support with loans, union lockouts, and the accelerated development of private, for-profit universities. Yet at the same time we have seen growing waves of struggle against these incursions, as students, staff and faculty in Europe, Latin America, and across the Middle East organize, occupy and resist the transformation.

Our struggles are not limited to the university, but are a part the widespread resistance against the neoliberal market logic subsuming all sectors of our society. The university is a key battleground in this struggle, and a point of conjuncture for the various labour, economic and social justice struggles that face all of us – workers and students alike. Crucially, these struggles occur on stolen indigenous lands and manifest through colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, ablism and other forms of oppression that hurt and divide us and that shape what sorts of knowledge are considered valuable.

We cannot cede the ideal of the university as a site for struggle and debate. We cannot permit the dissolution of proliferating research, ideas and innovations free from the demands and control of the market. We cannot watch as universities are degraded into a mere site for corporate or state-sponsored research and marketing. The time to mobilize is now!

This conference will connect and chart the varied struggles against neoliberal restructuring of the university in North America and beyond. We envision a series of debriefings on experiences of resistance, the creation of a cartography of local and global struggles, and a strategizing session for students, teachers, workers and activists. We aim to develop a North American network of struggles.

We encourage presentations that raise questions and generate dialogue among the rest of the participants. Ideally, submissions will indicate the specific outcomes they hope will emerge from the discussion. We encourage participation from those with first-hand experience of these crises, and those engaged in the fight for free and public post-secondary education, especially student groups and trade unions.

For a better future for all – join us!

POSSIBLE THEMES:

  • mapping the terrain of campus struggle in Canada and North America
  • connecting with and learning from global struggles
  • waged and unwaged labour in the university
  • abolition of student debt
  • the university and the occupy movement
  • the cultural politics of the neoliberal university
  • the death of the humanities
  • militarization of the university
  • intersections of university struggles other fights against oppression
  • environmental justice
  • beyond public education
  • radical pedagogy
  • academic freedom
  • the politics of research funding
  • the economics of the neoliberal university
  • university and student governance
  • the undergraduate experience of neoliberalism
  • alternative/free/autonomous universities
  • organizing the education factory
  • the suppression of on-campus dissent and organization

The deadline for submissions was January 16, 2012. Please email universityisours@gmail.com if you would like to attend the conference address so organizers can plan for numbers.

This conference is organized by the edu-factory collective in collaboration with the University of Toronto General Assembly.

Conference Website: http://torontoedufactory.wordpress.com/

 

 

Mar 11 2010

System Crash: Risk, Crisis, Literature

Category: Conferences — Bob Hanke @ 11:44 am

Call for Papers

System Crash: Risk, Crisis, Literature

2010 SFU English Graduate Student Critical & Creative Conference
Simon Fraser University: (Thursday June 10th – Saturday, June 12th)
Submission deadline:  March 15th

We are surrounded by the language of crisis: financial meltdown (economic systems), environmental catastrophe (ecological systems), terrorist attack (nation-state systems). These crises permeate our discourses of global, regional, institutional, and personal experience. The university is no exception; it too faces crises of disintegrating disciplinary boundaries, collapsing departments, reduced funding, and radical shifts from textual to visual culture. Despite the material (and discursive) specificities of these recent crises, the language of crisis and concomitant sense of immediacy are nothing new; authors, theorists, cultural producers, and readers have always struggled with the crises of their times. Some attempt to contain crisis, while others attempt to incite it; all make reference the fragility of socio-economic, socio-political and ecological systems that are precarious by their very nature. The 2010 SFU English Graduate Student conference asks the question of how literature and culture engage with crisis now. Thematic streams and suggested panels include: Neo-liberalism and the University, Canadian Literature and Borders, Historical Representations of Crises, Subject Matters, Crises of Form. We welcome submissions on these or on related topics addressed in the questions/keywords below:

KEYWORDS: etymology and history of the crisis – economic history – medium/form/genre – language/linguistics – media and technology – mimesis – copyright – property (private and public) – capitalism – the culture industry – the body – food and food production – sustainable development – consumption – faith/belief – subjectivity – neoliberalism – the nation-state – citizenship – immigration – borders – disciplines/divisions/departments – education.

QUESTIONS: What is the history of crisis? How has crisis been represented? What were/are the mediums, forms, and genres used to represent crisis? How has technology altered form, content, and subjective experience? How has capitalism altered our understanding of the subject and its body? How is the body consumed and commodified? How are geo-political borders, crossings and exiles represented in literature, art or film?

The 2010 SFU English Graduate Student conference is pleased to present two events designed to inform, compliment and expand upon the formal panels of Friday and Saturday. The first encourages creative submissions that deal with the art(s) of crisis and the second is an activist plenary (Saturday, June 12th) that will explore possibilities of social activism in the university. Below is an outline and prompt for creative submissions:

Creative Presentations, Discussions and Investigations: Friday, June 11th:
Reading, rousing, and responding to categorical crises, creative texts may incorporate any or all of the above critical classifications. Conversely, submissions to our creative cluster may seek to challenge or disrupt whatever is holding these theories in place—stirring textual crises that tremble from the level of the word and shake loose the binds of social order. Writers should consider: how do we write “going wrong”? And more importantly, why do we try?

The 2010 SFU Graduate conference is also pleased to announce this year’s Keynote speaker, Dr. Marc Bousquet, author of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage-Nation (2008). Dr Bousquet will be speaking during the first day of the conference, Thursday June 10th.

Proposals for complete panels are encouraged.

Please submit a 300 – 400 word abstract by MARCH 15, 2010 to gradconf@sfu.ca

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