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Diversity As Contingent: An Intersectional Ethnographic Interrogation Of And Resistance Against Neoliberal Academia’S Exploitation Of Contingent Faculty In General Education Diversity Courses, Kelly Louise Opdycke

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Since its inception in the late 1970s, neoliberal academia has increasingly relied in under-paid contingent faculty to carry its teaching workload. During this same time, neoliberal academia began to take up ‘diversity’ as a way to sell its brand. This dissertation stands at the crux between diversity branding and the exploitation of contingent faculty. Specifically, I explore how teaching General Education diversity courses through precarity impacts contingent faculty affectively and emotionally. Michel Foucault (1979) describes those who live in the context of neoliberalism as homo economicus, or entrepreneur of the self. As one becomes stuck in contingency, they begin to …