…this week's collection focuses on precarity, presenting three quite seemingly different pieces but all on this same topic. One is an Australian report on insecure (precarious) in Australia. The other two are about precarious academic labor in the US: student reactions and a poet's reflection on academia as plantation life, more pleasant for professors than their sharecropper colleagues
Report of the Independent Inquiry Into Insecure Work In Australia. Grant Hobson, a Melbourne based photographer and artist, was asked to produce a series of portraits of people in insecure work for this report:
"Making these images was an exercise in self reflection. These people are, in fact, me. Crippling housing and living costs are compounding the difficulty for artists and creative people to remain independent and productive in our society. Work is a fundamental expression of who people are. If employment in Australia is increasingly insecure, impermanent and dealt to us from the bottom of a deck then the implications are that we are all in for a rough time ahead. I wish to extend my gratitude to all those who graciously volunteered to be photographed as part of this project." Tags: pdf #PFR precarious workers
Some students are complaining about what they describe as a declining academic environment at William Peace University and they want the school president to resign. According to a letter, some, not all, faculty members might agree. The letter was originally intended to be sent anonymously to the school's board of trustees for fear of retaliation, but has since been made public. "We never know which faculty will remain, how many of our classes will be taught by adjunct professors," said Kennedy. "In addition to that, the small classroom sizes that they boast about don't exist." That's motivated Kennedy and others to collect more than 300 signatures to ask Townsley to immediately resign and apologize to students and staff. The students circulating the petition were cited for conduct code violations and could be suspended." Tags: student protest NC
I AM A POET AND I HAVE one of the jobs that poets are supposed to want at our moment in history. I work at a park-like sharecropper estate called a university. I am not myself a sharecropper; I am an associate professor of creative writing. I make $62,500 a year, wildly more than I made when I was a sharecropper (I was one for thirteen years). $62,500 is supposed not to be very much for my “rank,” and I am to be given a raise this year, partly because I am underpaid in comparison to my colleagues locally and nationally. I asked for the raise. I have decent health benefits, dental/mental, etc., and money is deposited for me into a retirement fund every month. I also have access to about a thousand dollars a year to travel to conferences, exclusive parties to which sharecroppers can’t afford to go.I have worked at the park-like estate for six years. I work in one of the heavily used mansion-like buildings that dot the estate. Every weekday I walk down the hall past many doors. Behind some doors work my peers (tenure-line teacher-scholar-writers). Behind other doors work the sharecroppers (adjunct teachers, graduate teaching assistants). Tags: #PFR teaching writing sharecropper metaphor adjunct labor
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