Negotiating Precarious Positions: Strategies for Working As and With Adjuncts, and Other Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Positions in Cinema and Media Studies
Deadline: June 20, 2016
Edited by Beth Corzo-Duchardt, Dawn Fratini, and Isabel Pinedo
The increasing reliance on adjunct labor has created a two-tier system in academia and diminished the professional prospects of a growing number of graduates. What can we do to advance the working conditions of adjunct and other contingent faculty? We invite proposals that address specific challenges, features, and potential solutions to the overuse of contingent academic labor in cinema and media studies programs. Our hope is to generate a discussion that employs strategic optimism and a sense of what can be done, rather than an overwhelming sense of crisis, by identifying pockets of resistance and effective short-term, medium-term, and long-term strategies. Towards that end, we seek to build a dossier that addresses this issue at multiple levels, from micro-level tactics to improve working conditions or resist the shift to contingent labor to macro-level analyses that locate these issues in larger institutional and political contexts. Examples of concrete instances that bridge these different levels of analysis are particularly welcome.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Best practices for those hiring, mentoring, and evaluating contingent faculty.
- Strategies for advancing adjunct/contingent faculty rights and benefits at the institutional and/or national level.
- The benefits and risks of converting part-time to non-tenure track, full-time positions with salary, benefits, and job security, and the impact of such conversions on the struggle to rebuild the tenure system.
- Strategies for converting contingent positions into full-time, tenure track lines.
- Strategies for funding conversions from adjunct to full-time lines, whether tenure track or non-tenure track.
- How the roles of unions, legislatures, and institutional cultures impact efforts to rebuild the tenure system.
- Proposals for how SCMS might support faculty in contingent positions and work to decrease their marginalization in academia.
- The benefits and risks of using a rhetorical strategy that links poor student learning with adjunctification.
- The benefits of contingent faculty positions for filmmakers, media artists and journalists.
- Dealing with the crisis as contingent faculty through mediated representations such as the adjunct memoir or social media.
We welcome proposals for essays addressing these and other topics relevant to the precarious position of non-tenure track faculty within the Academy. Submit a 250-word abstract for a proposed 1500-word essay, briefly describing the essay topic, and a 150-word teaching biography to Beth Corzo-Duchardt at [email protected] by June 20, 2016. The completed essay (including all images and links) will be due by July 30, 2016.
For more information, visit the Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier CFP at: http://teachingmedia.org/?p=5643&preview=true
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