As public spending for higher education continues its decades-long decline (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014), and university boards and administrators seek ways to balance their budgets, faculty (and staff) labor has been targeted as a way to make ends meet. Attacks on faculty labor can take different forms, such as reducing or eliminating…

Contingent faculty are often under-resourced, suggesting that crucial aspects of our discipline receive inadequate support. Moreover, while the discipline increasingly relies on tenure-ineligible faculty, it has made few contributions to the scholarship on academic casualization, an employment trend in which temporary contracts replace stable…

Performing failure presents radical opportunities for reimagining the world. Drawing from critical autoethnographic accounts, I utilize performance as a method to examine individual and structural failures in the online classroom from my perspective as a contingent faculty member. I contend that online education structurally compels teachers into…

This essay focuses on the communication studies' introductory course -- classes dominated by contingent labor -- to explore contingency within our disciplinary "front porch" (Beebe, S. A. (2013). Message from the president: Our 'front porch'. "Spectra," 49(2), 3. Retrieved from…

In this paper, we examine the process of decomposition as well as the struggle for recomposition of academic labor, which we understand as a contradictory positionality within so-called "gig academy." Ours is a rhetorical intervention to, first of all, explicitly connect contemporary working conditions in academia to the general process…

Contingent faculty in higher education markedly outnumber those considered tenured or on the tenure-track, with about 73% of faculty serving in nontenure-line positions (American Association for University Professors, 2018). The term contingent faculty refers to college and university instructors who may work part-time or otherwise off the…