BYOP: Con Job

Megan Fulwiler and Jennifer Marlow at Con Job group on FB write,

 Check out our updated and extended version of Con Job: Stories of Adjunct and Contingent Labor. We recently previewed this at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and will be completing the full length version this summer.

 

Con Job: Stories of Adjunct and Contingent Labor from Jenn Marlow and Megan Fulwiler on Vimeo.

Reading Room: College in the 21st century

Again Omnivore, the Book Forum blog for the omnivorous reader, presents yet another excellent collection of briefly annotated, (sometimes loosely) themed links, this set on higher education. Recent topics include war, learning from the Great Depression, northeast Asia, math, health care, the nature of messages (very loosely, almost whimsically themed) and endings ~ perhaps even more so. 


Education, especially higher, is a regular theme. Selections cut across scholarly, book reviews, academic and non-academic sources, social media and just social, economics, scholarly and less so topics, the subculture, its future and more. The tone, sources and perspective stand in stark contrast to Joe Berry's COCAL Updates. Taken together, with a Michael Meranze links post from Remaking the University thrown in for good measure: the highered beat as well and more thoroughly covered than by any major higher ed media. 

Jan Steyaert (Fontys): Scholarly Communication and Social Work in the Google Era. Ed note: Don't miss this one » Mark Edmundson (Virginia): Under the Sign of Satan: William Blake in the Corporate University. A review of Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance by Robert R. Locke and J. C. Spender. 

Joe Berry's COCAL Updates 31March12

COCAL Updates in brief & links 

 

Note: Call for Papers (also as attached pdf) for COCAL X, August 10-12, Mexico City. Follow COCAL International on Facebook.  Email joeberry@igc.org, to subscribe to regular updates in brief and links by email. More about Joe Berry.   

Mundo Precario

• Adjunct faculty prop up Higher Ed, seek rights, Pittsburg Tribune  
• John Warner introduces Adjunct Heroes feature on The Education Oronte Churm blog, Inside HigherEd  
• Panel at Left Forum in NYC, sponsored by Dissent Magazine and Verso Books, on organizing the precarious workers. Also includes some info on Excluded Workers Congress, which contingent faculty movement should be relating to. [I was at the panel and it was hot. JB] 

Quick Note: new thread, whatever

You are cordially invited to visit & comment on our (NFM's) new blog thread just for comments. Like the proverbial floating crap game, posts move down as new ones are posted, but I'll try to remember to re-stick the post back to the top of the page every now and again while considering other options.  For now though, here it is: just comment under the identity of your choice. Anonymity guaranteed and always an option.

 

What is it? An experiment, a work in progress, whatever you choose to make of it. Go alone with me here. Humor me. I'm experimenting so want to start out open ended and see where it takes us.  Will it be the (hand or other) writing on the wall, another iteration of  _____ (fill in the blank with preferred designation) narratives or something else altogether? Call it the whatever thread. Should more specific guidelines become necessary, we can set them together.

Suggestions invited, questions answered, friends and strangers alike welcomed,  trolls ejected. 

On the precariat

Among candidates in the "Naming Games" (a periodic event among adjunct/ NTT/ contingent faculty), precariat and variants on it keep come up more as the tanks of globalization roll through our cavalry lines. Back in 2002 when I was doing the Valencia AAUP Chapter newsletter and webpage, I fancied "precarious faculty" for its "call a spade a spade" directness. At that time, Canadian NTT faculty were called that as often as sessional. Every one working without a safety net.

Since then, the global precariat has grown, extended increasingly to "knowledge workers" of all stripes, and become a more widely identifiable term. It's back in the running. In the UK and NL, the Precarious Workers Brigade brings together artists, designers, writers, teachers, "insecure" university lecturers, freelance web workers ~ knowledge workers in education and culture.

Whether or not a variant or some other terms catches on among us remains to be seen. Self naming of a large, diverse group is ultimate crowdsourcing. By definition, no individual, group, organization or even consortium of organizations controls the process. Making it stick later with the Department of Labor is yet another matter.

In the meantime, I'm exploring the precariat here and around the world, primarily but not exclusively, knowledge workers (go Gramsci!) to aggregate and curate sources. I added sites and alerts to the feed reader to bundle and widgetize, started a Storify series (first entry below) and am also developing a "Welcome to the Precariat" newspaper in Paper.li.