Hi, I’m submitting a Just-In-Time Session proposal by the deadline this Friday 9/22 and could use another few speakers who will be at MLA in Philadelphia. I’ve posted the description (still in draft form!) below. If you or someone you know might be interested and a good fit for the in-person roundtable, please let me know! Ideally we’d have a couple of folks not from the New York City area and/or from less metropolitan areas represented as well.
Thanks in advance,
Daniella Gitlin (daniella.gitlin@GMAIL.COM)
Just in Time: Tales from the Job Market: Is There Hope for Sustainable, Non-Tenured Work?
Program Description:
For years, late-stage graduate students and recent PhDs have faced a largely challenging academic job market. Those with aspirations to join the academy in a more permanent way seek out stop-gaps in the form of coveted postdoctoral fellowships and adjunct positions, and recent scholarship by Robert Samuels—"A Working Model for Contingent Faculty"—even offers hope for creating a more sustainable career as a non-tenured faculty member. We ask: Is this hope grounded?
Session Description:
Using Robert Samuels’ "A Working Model for Contingent Faculty" as a launching pad, this roundtable invites audience members to share their experiences on the academic job market and to discuss more broadly the possibility of non-tenure-track positions as a sustainable professional option. Samuels will serve as a respondent for this session, both as an expert on the research presented in his text and as someone who himself has earned his living as a non-tenure-track academic professional. The session will provide an opportunity not only for Samuels to receive feedback on his recent work in the field, but also a kind of workshop setting for those of us on the academic job market. Audience members and speakers are invited to discuss realistically the non-tenure-track options—which is to say, most of the options—which lie before us, and consider how we might make those options more sustainable for us as individuals. To anchor our discussion, we will review some of the main claims of "A Working Model" to see whether they support or challenge our lived experiences.
Our conversation will be premised on a reading of Samuel’s text as one which espouses a kind of pragmatist take on an essentially existential question that has been at the center of conversations about precarity, especially within humanities disciplines. The other speakers represent professionals at various stages of their careers as academics and professionals who can address the specific opportunities and challenges they have faced patching together enough work and enough job security to sustain themselves, at least until now.
Questions to guide our discussion might include:
- What are some of the practices and policies that Samuels suggests are helpful for making non-tenured positions more sustainable professional options? What are the barriers we have encountered to enacting such practices and policies?
- What, if anything, do we gain or lose by reframing a discourse about precarity and contingency as one about concrete steps we as professionals might take to improve working conditions for ourselves?
- Is it possible to have hope for future professional stability as non-tenure-track faculty without acquiescing to unsustainable terms offered by the job market?