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.