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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

“Drown[Ing] A Little Bit All The Time: The Intersections Of Labor Constraints And Professional Development In Hybrid Contingent Faculty Experiences, Courtney Adams Wooten, Brian Fitzpatrick, Lourdes Fernandez, Ariel M. Goldenthal, Jessica Matthews Mar 2022

“Drown[Ing] A Little Bit All The Time: The Intersections Of Labor Constraints And Professional Development In Hybrid Contingent Faculty Experiences, Courtney Adams Wooten, Brian Fitzpatrick, Lourdes Fernandez, Ariel M. Goldenthal, Jessica Matthews

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

Faculty teaching during COVID-19 have been asked to adapt to a wide range of instructional modalities that have often increased the labor they experience without commensurate compensation. Hybrid courses, which were already popular pre-pandemic, have become even more common as schools and universities have rushed to adapt instruction to students’ needs. This article reports on interviews with faculty teaching hybrid courses to investigate their perceptions of the labor involved in teaching in this instructional modality, drawing connections to the labor many faculty are experiencing as they adapt to hybrid or other, similar instructional modalities. It then argues that targeted professional …


Administrative Rhetorical Mindfulness: A Professional Development Framework For Administrators In Higher Education, Melvin E. Beavers Mar 2021

Administrative Rhetorical Mindfulness: A Professional Development Framework For Administrators In Higher Education, Melvin E. Beavers

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

As part of the post-secondary educational landscape, online programs and courses help institutions reach and enroll more students. To meet the needs of increased enrollments in online education, part-time faculty are often hired to teach online courses. Part-time contingent faculty represent a growing majority across many fields of study in colleges and universities. As Rendahl & Breuch reported, first-year courses, specifically freshman composition, are increasingly taught online. This study uses a mixed-methods design to examine how, and in what ways, writing program administrators (WPAs) approach preparing part-time faculty to teach writing online. The findings reveal that WPAs often encounter workload …


We Could Convert The Lines, But Not The People: A Postmortem On Changing Working Conditions In A Writing Program, Jamie White-Farnham Mar 2021

We Could Convert The Lines, But Not The People: A Postmortem On Changing Working Conditions In A Writing Program, Jamie White-Farnham

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

In the conversion of part-time adjunct instructor positions at a small college, institutional limits and personal perspectives on what it means to be an adjunct instructor clashed with both newer principles and decades-old arguments in rhetoric and composition to improve working conditions.


Emotions In Academic Writing/Care-Work In Academia: Notes Towards A Repositioning Of Academic Labor In India (& Beyond), Anuj Gupta Mar 2021

Emotions In Academic Writing/Care-Work In Academia: Notes Towards A Repositioning Of Academic Labor In India (& Beyond), Anuj Gupta

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

In this article I seek to reflect on a rupture that happened in my college-level writing classroom in India when a student chose to write about her experience of rape and accompanying life-long trauma in a literacy narrative assignment. This rupture, and the ways in which I struggled to engage with it, were initially discomforting but eventually led to strong convictions about the need to reposition academic writing and labor in Indian universities in a manner that sees the epistemic value of emotions in academic writing and the ethical value of care-work in academia as essential ingredients required to create …


Studenting And Teaching With Chronic Pain: Accessibility At The Intersection Of Contingency And Disability, Beth Greene Mar 2021

Studenting And Teaching With Chronic Pain: Accessibility At The Intersection Of Contingency And Disability, Beth Greene

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

While much attention is given to undergraduate students with disabilities, far less is devoted to graduate students, particularly those who also act as faculty: Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs). This article discusses issues of accessibility encountered by these contingent faculty members, specifically GTAs who have invisible disabilities, and how approaching discussions of contingency and disability with an ethos of transparent vulnerability—a level of transparency that necessarily leads to vulnerability—can help combat the stigma that continues to surround contingency and disability in higher education.


Away With The Apprentice: Graduate Worker Advocacy Groups And Rhetorical Representation, Zachary B. Marburger Nov 2019

Away With The Apprentice: Graduate Worker Advocacy Groups And Rhetorical Representation, Zachary B. Marburger

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

While graduate workers have a long history of organizing and advocating on their own behalf, concerns specific to their unique identity as both laborers and students have not yet permeated the discourse surrounding worker rights in higher education. Using Edward Schiappa’s work on how definitions are created and circulated, I position that the work and labor of the graduate student is under-discoursed because of the mundane definition of the graduate worker as an apprentice first and foremost. Drawing on the public literature of the Committee on Rights and Compensation (CRC), a current effort to unionize graduate workers underway at the …


Snapshots Of #Wpalife: Invisible Labor And Writing Program Administration, Megan Mcintyre Nov 2019

Snapshots Of #Wpalife: Invisible Labor And Writing Program Administration, Megan Mcintyre

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

Writing program administration work is a significant reality for many within the field of rhetoric and composition, and though such work has long been part of our disciplinary fabric, it often remains invisible to departments and institutions. In this article, I offer two brief snapshots of how writing program administration work is often obscured by seemingly brief documents or interactions, which elide the complex communicative and political work at the heart of program administration. I then offer a hashtag-based Twitter community, #WPALife, as one potential way of making this work more visible and of building the capacity to create more …


(Mis)Alignments Between Institutional Mission Statements And Service Learning Handbooks, Charisse S. Iglesias Nov 2019

(Mis)Alignments Between Institutional Mission Statements And Service Learning Handbooks, Charisse S. Iglesias

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

Institutions self-identifying as social justice advocates are expected to perform social justice roles through their disciplines, policies, and actions (Feldman, 2008). Applying Tania Mitchell’s critical service learning framework (2008), this study examines (mis)alignments between service learning handbooks and their respective institutional mission statements. The first phase was a critical discourse analysis of the service learning handbooks to measure expressions of reciprocity. The second phase was a content analysis of the corresponding institutional mission statements to analyze conceptions of community engagement, social justice, etc. Findings reveal how institutions frame handbooks, considers how that framing undermines reciprocity, and analyzes how universities practice …


Fast Professor: Strategies For Surviving The Tenure Track, Patricia Welsh Droz, Lorie Stagg Jacobs Oct 2018

Fast Professor: Strategies For Surviving The Tenure Track, Patricia Welsh Droz, Lorie Stagg Jacobs

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

In response to Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s 2016 manifesto on academic deceleration, The Slow Professor, the present article posits that the slow approach is dangerous for those seeking tenure, but is nevertheless a fruitful resistance philosophy to be adopted once tenure is achieved. For those seeking tenure, we advise an alternative philosophy, FAST professing, as a means to mediate workplace stress and offer to those on the tenure-track a pragmatic alternative to premature slow professing. We outline the nature of the stress in today’s academic climate, suggest identifying the major sources of stress, and finally, offer strategies to …


Terms Of Time For Composition: A Materialist Examination Of Contingent Faculty Labor, Jesse Priest Oct 2018

Terms Of Time For Composition: A Materialist Examination Of Contingent Faculty Labor, Jesse Priest

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

Bruce Horner’s seminal book, Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique provided Comp-Rhet WPAs with a methodology for infusing our conversations about work and labor with a holistic understanding of how these reflect on the lived experiences of students, teachers and administrators. Drawing on empirical data including surveys of contingent faculty at a large northeastern research university, as well as textual analysis of teaching material and an NCTE position statement, I propose the inclusion of a materialist-oriented conceptualization of time to the discussion began by Horner and others. Using the lens of how time is allocated, I argue for …


Rhetorical Listening And Strategic Contemplation As Research Tools: Learning From Edwin Hopkins And Early Attempts At Labor Reform In Composition, Rebecca Gerdes-Mcclain Oct 2018

Rhetorical Listening And Strategic Contemplation As Research Tools: Learning From Edwin Hopkins And Early Attempts At Labor Reform In Composition, Rebecca Gerdes-Mcclain

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

This paper is a personal and historical study of the labor conditions of composition teachers, in which I present the work of Edwin Hopkins, a professor at the University of Kansas from 1889 to 1937, who collected data on composition teaching between 1909 and 1915 in an attempt to reform the labor conditions of composition teachers. The paper is necessarily personal because I employ rhetorical listening, developed by Krista Ratcliffe, and strategic contemplation, developed by Jaqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch, as research methods for engaging with historical and archival research. Both of these methods require careful analysis of my …


"Collegiality As A Dirty Word? Implementing Collegiality Policies In Institutions Of Higher Education", Courtney Adams Wooten, Megan A. Condis Oct 2018

"Collegiality As A Dirty Word? Implementing Collegiality Policies In Institutions Of Higher Education", Courtney Adams Wooten, Megan A. Condis

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

Abstract: Collegiality is integral to the healthy functioning of any academic department and is a necessary professional attribute for new faculty, who often spent their graduate school careers with relatively little involvement in institutional politics, to develop. However, the recent trend to explicitly outline tenure and promotion requirements for collegial behavior gives us pause. We question if a collegiality statement for tenure and promotion could function as yet another obstacle between faculty from background that have historically been underrepresented in the academy (women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, people with disabilities, etcetera) and their bids for tenure.


Don't Rock The Boat: Curricular Choices Of Contingent And Permanent Composition Faculty, Amy Lynch-Biniek Oct 2017

Don't Rock The Boat: Curricular Choices Of Contingent And Permanent Composition Faculty, Amy Lynch-Biniek

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

No abstract provided.