Dear colleagues,
We are excited to invite chapter proposals for a forthcoming edited collection tentatively titled Precarious Pedagogies: Teaching Praxis of the New Majority. As the title suggests, this collection will center the voices of writing instructors working off the tenure track in a variety of precarious positions, though we also invite submissions from writing program administrators and tenured/tenure-track faculty who can speak to the programmatic and institutional impacts of contingent instruction. The collection is under contract with the WAC Clearinghouse for inclusion in the Precarity and Contingency book series, due out in 2027.
As many contingent instructors are not connected to national listservs, we would appreciate your help in circulating this call within your local networks.
Please see the full CFP and submission link below for details, and reach out to the editors (Alex Evans, University of Cincinnati – Blue Ash College, and Bethany Hellwig, University of Cincinnati) at precariouspedagogies with any questions.
Call For Papers
We invite proposals for contributions to an edited collection on precarity, contingency, and teaching.
While much of the scholarship in writing studies journals and books comes from a small group of tenured (or tenure-track) scholars working at elite research universities, the majority of the field’s practitioners work in teaching-focused positions off the tenure-track. As argued by Hassel and Phillips (2022), this creates a dissonance between the field’s publications and the realities of most of its members. This dissonance is amplified by the two-tier arrangement of many writing programs, in which underpaid, part-time, and precarious instructors teach most first-year writing courses and better-paid tenured faculty teach only specialized courses for English majors and graduate students.
We believe the voices of contingent instructors need to be amplified, and this collection will provide a space for that to happen. The editors are seeking a variety of genres, including narrative or autoethnographic explorations of the contingent teaching experience, qualitative or quantitative research studies, or theoretical work. While not a requirement, we will give strong priority to pieces written (or co-written) by contingent faculty over those written by tenured or tenure-track faculty. We invite proposals for chapters engaging with one or more of the following concepts:
– Pedagogy and praxis: assignments, activities, grading schemes, approaches to feedback, and all the other practicalities of writing instruction while contingent. We want to avoid a sanitized picture of contingent teaching and instead showcase the real pedagogical adaptations contingent faculty use to get through their semesters.
– Orientations: entries into precarious teaching, learning institutional cultures while in contingent roles, instructional adaptation to common adjunct or graduate student conditions.
– Disillusionment: the moments when the expectations of academic work meet the reality of contingent labor conditions. This could explore identity shifts (moving from graduate school to adjunct work, for example), the embodied and affective experiences of coming to terms with the labor reality of precarious teaching, or the social effects of being contingent faculty in departmental culture.
– Labor Conditions: the nuts-and-bolts structural elements of contingent working conditions like low pay, lack of benefits, lack of job security, institutional neglect
– Programmatic concerns: managing and sustaining programs reliant on adjunct, ways WPAs can support contingent faculty through curriculum, scheduling, assessment choices
To honor the many demands on contingent faculty time, final versions of chapters will be short: approximately 2000-3000 words.
Proposals should be approximately 250 words. Please submit them using this form by Friday, September 12th 2025. You can contact the editors at precariouspedagogies with any questions.