… just a short, preliminary post with suggestions for following from afar, mostly to get one out before the academic boycott sessions #s119 ("Boycotting Israeli Academic Institutions") and #s148 ("The Academic Boycott: Taking Sides") start. Here's an online reading list to fill in any academic boycott informarion gaps you may have. If you think academia, the MLA and professional associations should be actively support social justice and be involved in movements, then you should follow and speak up in this discussion.
…always good, more often paving stones and cul de sacs. Walking the road, we make it: if not, then not.
Looking at the date on the last post this morning, I realized it's coming on two weeks between posts. October been a busy month, with #CEW2015, a month of social justice actions and a handful of conferences behind us. In drafts, I have three different Campus Equity Week posts: two farewell posts (random observations and link bundles) and one about sausage making for the CEW Archive Project (2001-2015 ~ not limited to this year's event). My intention is to explain the process as clearly as possible: it's a fishing lesson too. The more of us collecting and sharing information the better. During CEW, I ran the archive feed here, at the top of the left sidebar, but recently changed it out for "adjunct" with the intention of rotating topics.
…news sources and conferences division. News, there's a lot of it. Even filtered by topic ~ higher education, academic freedom, adjuncts, contingent faculty, academic labor, faculty unions, organizing, there is still a lot. Sources include higher ed media, mainstream medias, news feeds, blogs, social media and aggregators. If you are social media averse or just "Facebook suspicious" and follow by email notice or rss feed, then you may miss the posts from the precarious faculty network's news blogs syndicated to Facebook and Twitter.
An occasional post here about recent posts on those should take care of that. Precarity Dispatches and COCAL Updates are usually the most active, Both feature news link collections, but not exclusively. PD's are themed (academic freedom, adjunct organizing, higher ed, etc) and more curated. CU is a somewhat tidied up web version of Joe's email Updates ~ primarily contingent academic labor and regular updates on the City College of San Francisco v. accreditors. Lately, re-purposed and renamed, (Uniting for) Equity in Diversity has been more active, thanks to Sean Kennedy's series of posts recounting ongoing conflict between CUNY adjuncts and PSC-CUNY, spilling over into COCAL XI. Adjunct stories abound, with no shortage of narratives or websites/blogs publishing them. With no need to add yet another, Precarity Tales appears intermittently, usually when a story doesn't fit anywhere else, and is still finding itself.
…adjunct conferences & sessions not like this…promise!
…of interest to #adjunct & #ContingentFaculty. This post is list and reminder of upcoming, March and April, contingent faculty relevant conferences / meetings. Hopefully (and with your cooperation), we'll have a fresh list before May.
Our March-April list so far is CCCC/NCTE 2013 (Las Vegas), AFA/USW's Countering Contingency (Pittsburgh), Ohio PTFA with AURCO (), NEA National (Portland), AFT Higher Education Issues (San Diego), NCSCBHEP (the impossible acronym, NYC). Are there others? I don't mean for MLA to get all the conference coverage but can't post w/o information.
Ed note: this Storify, created by Vanessa Vaile, collates shared links and visitor comments from NFM's public Facebook page and does not necessarily reflect NFM policy or opinions of other board members.
.. Check out new features, Petition Junction and Conference Corner. Are you shopping an adjunct or higher ed petition? Got a conference ~ on the horizon or in the rear view mirror ~ to share? Email me link and information on petition or conference.
I've been thinking about conferences, even though NOT thinking about conferences may be the best part of being OUT of the game. So why was I? They are professional forums. Many conferences offer sessions relevant to adjunct/ contingent faculty issues ~ employment, workplace conditions, pedagogy, professional development, etc. It's a different medium than mainstream media, local and college press or even academic press. It's where we connect with like minded and present our case to tenured colleagues. Continuing presence is an expensive strategy so track and coordinat for maximum effectiveness.
MLA 2009, past
AHA 2010, past
CCCC 2010 - recently past
AAC&U, "Faculty Roles in High-Impact Practices" - this weekend, Philadelphia
AFT-NEA - this weekend, San Jose
CEA 2010: Voices - this weekend, San Antonio
TESOL 2010 - ongoing, Boston
Working Class Studies, "How Class Works" - upcoming, Stony Brook
