speaking of names and other changes

Yesterday I renamed both this blog and  its companion Facebook page Precarious life and times. Not to worry though -- visitor won't end up in strange places like some did with the domain shift. This change does not affect either url. The Facebook iteration has already been moving away from primarily adjunct issues toward a broader focus on the workplace, economic and social changes accompanying the spread of precarity. Until very recently, this one hasn't been moving at all.

Seiltänzer (Tightrope Walker) Paul Klee (cropped)

What will change? Content. Adjuncts, casuals and other insecure academic labor will still have a prominent place. There more widgets, posts and collections on related topics, and a "What we can do" category coping and resisting.

What is precarity and who's precarious? The category includes more than academic precariat. Is insecure employment the primary or even sole marker of precarious populations? Is it the only benchmark? The connection with the economy and economic inequality is obvious. Disposable and marginalized groups are particularly vulnerable. Their initial precariousness, whatever the cause -- disability, age, race, gender, social and legal status, etc., inevitably pushes them further down in the workforce and decreases mobility options, often drastically.

Could all precarious people together already be the majority? That would bring us full naming circle to the ❝new precarious majority❞...

Faculty Have a Branding Problem

…as New Faculty Majority VP Matt Williams reminds us on his blog, Akron Adjunct, no words minced in title, posts or here as reposted from Matt's blog (also listed in the blogroll on the left sidebar). There's a lot more than just posts on The New Faculty Majority blog. After this cautionary tale, we're waiting for the higher education faculty version of A Christmas Carol. Consider CCAC course cutting shenanigans as the trailer. Stay tuned for the next installments.

College faculty in America have a branding problem.  When even the Vice President of the United States disses you publicly, scapegoating you as the reason that college tuition has skyrocketed over the past twenty years…and when the vice president is supposed to be your ally…and when the vice president’s wife is a community college professor (i.e., he should know better)…well…like a Jeff Foxworthy joke…you might have a branding problem.

Occupy Colleges Now: Students as the New Public Intellectuals

Not adjuncts, not lecturers ~ students. That is the group Henry Giroux identifies as the "new intellectuals." How and why did we miss playing a central role? Have we been chasing the wrong brass ring? In my admittedly personal opinion, changing the world trumps "professional dignity" any day.

Police pepper spray students at a UC Davis demonstration on Friday, November 18. (Screengrab: asucd - Click here for video)

Giroux writes,

Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics, a new set of values, and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part, this means educating a new generation of intellectuals who not only defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, but also frame their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research, teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public spheres available that can provide the educational conditions for students, faculty, administrators, and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated questioning, imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life and the common good.

Time for contingent faculty to combine necessary and pragmatic goals of improving our economic and professional lot with crossing a few borders. It's written into our mission statement. Nor are the two mutually exclusive. The famous Hillel quote comes to mind, "If I am not for myself, then who am I for? If I am for myself alone, then what am I?" Not a bad start for our brand and explaining who we are.

Branding Education

What's in a logo? There's a bad mood rising against the corporate brands, not just among students and faculty in colleges and universities where corporatization is on the rise. No Logo is the warning on the label.


Excerpted from Naomi Klien’s book, No Logo: the chapter, "The Branding of Learning" ~ Click to View

In this excerpt, Naomi Klein discusses the corporatization of education (both in pre-k-12th and at the university level).

(from post by Brit Reed on Defend Education)

In the last decade, No Logo has become a cultural manifesto for the critics of unfettered capitalism worldwide. As the world faces a second economic depression, No Logo's analysis of our corporate and branded world is as timely and powerful as ever.

Equal parts cultural analysis, political manifesto, mall-rat memoir, and journalistic exposé, No Logo is the first book to put the new resistance into pop-historical and clear economic perspective. It tells a story of rebellion and self-determination in the face of our new branded world.


(from Naomi Klein's website)