Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (ALRA)
Issue 8: A Special Issue guest edited by Bruce Kovanen and Andrew Bowman – Poverty in Academia
Although tenured and tenure track faculty once made up 70 percent of academic workers, recent reports from the American Federation of Teachers (2020, 2022) now estimate that 75 percent of academic workers are non-tenure track, with 47 percent holding part-time positions. These changes have ushered in what Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel Scott (2019) refer to as the “gig academy,” which they define as “a university that has become fully dependent on a patchwork of loosely connected contingent workforces to service both its central missions and its day-to-day operations” (p. 36). These contingent workers labor in poor working conditions that include “subsistence wages; lack of benefits, retirement funds, and vacation time; no influence over conditions of work or structures of advancement; and constant anxiety over the possibility of arbitrary termination” (Kezar et al., 2019, p. 36-37).
Meanwhile, 58 percent of students were experiencing food insecurity, housing insecurity, or homelessness, in the year 2020, according to Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice.
Kezar, DePaola, and Scott’s (2019) analysis points to the depth of these changes across academia—faculty, students, administrative staff, and building/food service workers—all feel the pinch of contingency, the pressure of just-in-time labor (Watkins, 2015), and the precarity of these neoliberal economic policies.
This poverty is an existential threat to the academy. In an age of devastating climate change, war, social injustice, refugee displacement, and economic inequity, poverty in academia has far-reaching consequences.
ALRA welcomes proposals for submissions on:
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faculty poverty
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the intersections of educator and student poverty
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the potential impact of the campus poverty crisis on curriculum and university policy
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the effects of campus poverty on student experiences
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the economics of poverty in higher education
Please send proposals to special issue editors Bruce Kovanen and Andrew Bowman via the WAC Clearinghouse Submission Portal.
Updated Schedule
February 2, 2024: Proposals due to the editors.
April 2, 2024: Completed articles due to the editors.
June 2, 2024: Peer review process completed and directions for revisions are sent to the authors.
August 2, 2024: Revised final draft articles due to the editors.
Dr. Kristen Welch, Professor of English, Spartanburg Methodist College
Associate Publisher for Marketing and Advancement, WAC Clearinghouse