Aug 09 2014

Another University Is Possible

Category: Conferences — Bob Hanke @ 10:10 am

Another University Is Possible: Praxis, Activism, and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy

Riverside Convention Center, Riverside, Greater Los Angeles Area, California
21-24 May, 2015

The Cultural Studies Association (CSA) invites proposals from its current and future members for participation in its thirteenth annual meeting in the Riverside Convention Center, Riverside, Greater Los Angeles Area, California.

Proposals from all areas and on all topics of relevance to cultural studies are welcome, and are not limited to proposals that critically and creatively engage this year’s highlighted problematic.

This year’s theme, “Another University is Possible: Praxis, Activism, and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy,” plays on the World Social Forum’s motto, “Another World is Possible.” It expresses a commitment to the intellectual and political project of a radically different university. Moving beyond policy and pundit-driven discussions of the state and the future of higher education, we seek proposals that highlight socially-engaged scholarship and activism, and projects that explore the transformative possibilities embedded in the present. What forms and formations of research, pedagogy, praxis, and activism have emerged from the struggles being waged in, around, through, and in spite of institutions of higher education? What roles can culture, theory, imagination, and technology play in these struggles? Taking up cultural studies’ historical commitment to the interrogation of the relations among knowledge, power, and social transformation, the 2015 Cultural Studies Association conference seeks to provide an insurgent intellectual space for imagining, enacting, and mapping new forms of knowledge production and scholarly communication and community.

We are particularly interested in work that links the global neo-liberal conjuncture of higher education to local acts of collective resistance and action, and back again. We want to know more about how students, staff, faculty, administrators, and community partners are responding to the current social, legal, economic, financial, political, cultural, institutional, and intellectual challenges and possibilities: student debt as a means of financing higher education institutions; court cases that attack the history and practice of affirmative action; the rise in union activity on campuses; the re-entrenchment of the “humanities” as a division under “crisis”; the emergent emphasis on MOOCs and other online forms of education that extend the already dominant casualization of academic labor; the emergence of public and digital pedagogy and scholarship; the ambivalent politics of academic freedom; the reduction of education to vocational training and degrees to commodified credentials; the role of universities in reproducing or amplifying (rather than reducing) the social inequalities of contemporary capitalism; and the university as a site of capital accumulation and dispossession, among many other trends and tendencies.

To read the complete call for papers, click here.

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Jul 16 2014

The “Other” Contingent Faculty

Category: Contract Faculty,Online Publication,Research — Bob Hanke @ 8:23 pm

The “Other” University Teachers: Non-Full-Time Instructors at Ontario Universities 

by Cynthia C. Field, Glen A. Jones, Grace Karram Stephenson and Artur Khoyetsyan, University of Toronto

(excerpted from HEQCO, Research Publications)

More research needed on the “other” university teachers: Non-full-time instructors

Over the last decade, increases in Ontario university enrollment have outstripped growth in full-time, tenure-stream faculty. Non-full-time faculty, which include sessional and graduate student instructors, play a significant role in addressing increased teaching demands although there is a dearth of public information about hiring trends and considerable variation in conditions of employment.

According to a new study from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), further research is needed into the roles and experiences of sessional instructors, institutional employment trends and the implications for quality and student success.

Project description
“The “Other” University Teachers: Non-Full-Time Instructors at Ontario Universities” is a preliminary exploration of the employment of sessional and graduate student instructors. The study is based on a detailed review of collective agreements and related documentation, and the analysis of institutional data on employment.

Findings
Although most Ontario universities do not report the number of non-full-time instructors, the study found relevant data on the websites of five institutions, where in all but one case, the number of sessional instructors had increased in recent years. Based on the limited public data available, the study found that the ratio of sessional instructors to full-time faculty appears to be increasing at some universities while decreasing or remaining stable at others, suggesting that different universities are making very different decisions related to academic staffing.

Acknowledging that each Ontario university is “an autonomous corporation with the ability to make independent decisions related to employment,” the study found that conditions of employment for non-full-time instructors vary by institution.  At 10 of the universities, sessional instructors are represented by the same association as full-time, tenure-stream faculty, while at the other 10 there are separate unions or associations. And while sessional instructors have various benefits guaranteed under collective agreements, often including some form of job security related to seniority or promotion, the authors note that sessional instructors “do not have anything close to the level of security associated with tenure.” The conditions of employment for graduate student instructors roughly parallel those of sessional instructors, according to the study.

Further research
There may be major differences by university in terms of the balance between full-time, tenure-stream faculty and non-full-time instructors, as well as important implications for Ontario higher education, say the authors, who call for additional research, including:

A province-wide survey of sessional instructors to learn more about their background (academic and professional), employment situation and teaching load, as well as their perceptions and experiences.

A more detailed study of institutional staffing patterns through the collection and analysis of data on employment trends at all Ontario universities; and

A detailed analysis of staffing patterns within selected academic units at different Ontario universities and the implications of these patterns for educational quality and student success.

To read the complete report, click here.

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Jul 06 2014

COCAL and Working USA Call for Papers: Contingent Academic Labor

Category: Conferences,Research — Bob Hanke @ 8:34 pm

Contingent Academic Labor

WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society (WUSA) is devoting a special issue to contingent academic labor in the USA, North America and throughout the world.  The journal encourages cross-disciplinary essays drawn from the social sciences and the humanities that examine the contemporary significance of contingent academic labor using a range of methods and empirical analysis.  Essays should focus on the study of work, labor, capitalism, the state, and bureaucracy.

The editors especially seek essays drawn from presentations at the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor XI conference in August, 2014 in New York City. We encourage submissions by activists and organizers as well academic researchers. Articles can be case studies, memoirs, interviews or oral histories, if they also raise more general points of interest.

We encourage essays that include one or more of the following:

* Reach theoretical insights in addressing the relevance of the status and experiences of contingent academic labor through comparative/historical perspectives.
* Examine the conditions and experiences of adjunct laborers in the context of the political economy of knowledge.
* Compare and contrast contingent academic laborers to analogous workers in the labor market that is referred to as “precarious work”.
* Examine the ways in which the politics and economics of contingent labor intersect with issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and/or sexuality.
* Contribute theoretical insights on the actuality and potential for forgoing bonds of solidarity that increase working class power and build stronger institutions.
* Contribute to the strategic discussion of organizing among contingent academics and the considerations of alliances, techniques, structures, and consciousness.
* Compare and contrast the situation and collective struggles of contingent academics in the US with those in other nations, especially Canada (including Quebec), and Mexico.

Please submit papers by October 15, 2015.
All essay submissions are sent through a peer review process.  Click on the names below to send essays to editorial board members and guest editors.
Joe Berry (Editorial Board)
Marcia Newfield (Editorial Board)
Polina Kroik (Associate Editor)
Immanuel Ness (Editorial Board)

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Jun 28 2014

The Plight of Hidden Academics

Category: Academic Freedom,Academic Integrity,Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 11:50 am

on TVO, The Agenda, June 23, 2014

Many of Ontario’s colleges and universities employ sessional lecturers. What does that mean for the quality of education Ontario students are receiving?

Panelists: Moria MacDonald, Marie Van der Kloet, Bob Hanke

To watch this half-episode, follow this link.

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Jan 11 2013

Hidden Sessionals

Category: Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 6:20 pm

Sessionals, up close
Sessional instructors are now a crucial part of the teaching equation at most Canadian universities. Some say it’s time to include them more fully in the life of the institution.

by Moira MacDonald

(excerpted from University Affairs, January 9, 2013).

They are called sessional lecturers, part-time instructors, contract or contingent faculty and chargés de cours. Some are fresh out of graduate studies, others may have taught for years. Whatever their name, these non-tenured, non-permanent teaching staff share a common desire for better recognition, pay and treatment that more closely resembles how institutions treat full-time faculty.

University Affairs has assembled a sampling of what the pay, benefits, job security and other key work-related conditions look like for sessionals at a range of small, medium and large Canadian postsecondary institutions. Most were randomly chosen, while ensuring geographic representation. York University and University of Toronto were deliberately picked because they have a reputation among sessional teachers and with faculty associations for some of the best contracts for sessionals in the country. Vancouver Community College, which is neither a university nor a member of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, is included (in a separate chart) because its contract with sessional staff has been described as the “gold standard” by the New Faculty Majority, a group of academics in the U.S. that has organized to improve the working conditions of sessionals in that country.

In the charts, salary scales presented are base rates; various academic departments may have their own arrangements for compensating contingent faculty. And, although universities employ a host of different kinds of non-permanent academic staff – including graduate students who may use sessional teaching as a way to gain experience – these charts focus on the teaching members who are no longer students and who teach on a course-by-course basis.

Pay is always a factor and, as our charts show, there is a wide range. But as important a benchmark as it is, it may not be the top job concern.

“The biggest one is job security. Its absence is profound,” says Leslie Jermyn, chair of the contract academic staff committee for the Canadian Association of University Teachers. She currently works on a 24-month, contractually limited appointment, teaching three full courses a year at York. A sessional teacher since 1993, Dr. Jermyn began teaching two years before finishing her PhD.

Her career is emblematic of a way of life. What once was a stepping stone for a PhD en route to a full-time, tenure-track appointment – or an interesting way to use a master’s degree – has become, for many, a way to earn a living. Some teach at more than one institution and in more than one city. To be sure, there are also those who do the job as a complement to full-time work in their fields, including business people, lawyers and civil servants.

To read this rest of this article and see the charts, follow this link.

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