Past Calls for Proposals

Call for Proposals

Issue 8: A Special Issue guest edited by Diana Silverman - Poverty in Academia

Approximately 40 percent of the professoriate is paid poverty wages, classified as “part-time” employees despite teaching a “full-time” course load, in positions with few or no employer-funded benefits. Meanwhile, 58 percent of students were experiencing food insecurity, housing insecurity, or homelessness, in the year 2020, according to Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice. This poverty poses existential threats to the academic enterprise, above all student outcomes. In an age of devastating climate change, war, social injustice, refugee displacement, and economic inequity, the poverty in academia impedes educating the electorate that determines policy, and, in this sense, academic poverty poses dangers to the human experience on earth.

ALRA welcomes proposals for articles on faculty poverty; the intersections of educator and student poverty; the potential impact of the campus poverty crisis on global policy; the effects of campus poverty on student outcomes and experiences; the economics of poverty in higher education; the consequences of campus poverty in terms of the role of higher education in a well lived life and in the education of voters, as well as in terms of the place of higher education in society.

Please send proposals to special issue editor Diana C. Silverman, Ph.D., at argento235@alumni.princeton.edu.

Schedule

February 2, 2024: Completed articles due to the editor.

March 2. 2024: Peer review process completed and directions for revisions are sent to the authors.

April 2, 2024: Revised final draft articles due to the editor.

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (ALRA) is a peer-reviewed open access academic journal launched in 2016 by the Center for the Study of Academic Labor (CSAL) at Colorado State University. ALRA is supported by a generous grant from CSU Open Press. The journal encourages ongoing research on matters relating to tenure and contingency in the academy, both nationally and internationally. Along with our center and website, we offer a research home for those undertaking scholarship in areas broadly defined as tenure studies, contingency studies, and critical university studies. To meet this objective, we invite a wide range of contributions, from the statistical to the historic/archival, from the theoretical to the applied, from the researched to the creative, and from empirical to essayist forms. Our editors and reviewers include social scientists, artists, and theorists specializing in labor issues.

We hope that you enjoy Issue 7. Here’s the link if you missed it: https://wac.colostate.edu/alra.

The Center for the Study of Academic Labor and ALRA welcome varied genres, such as scholarly articles, reports, policies, position statements, essays, organizing and advocacy toolkits, photographs, photographic essays, personal narratives, social science research, original art, artifacts of curated performance art, op-eds, reviews in print and multimedia formats, etc., so long as they associate favorably with the Center and Journal’s theme. We also welcome histories of academic labor efforts; for instance, if your institution or program has engaged in efforts to establish or improve practices and policies and would like to have a backup location for archiving the papers, please send them our way and we will work with you on creating a secure, digital file. If you do not see a genre mentioned that you are interested in pursuing, please contact the lead editors, Sue Doe and Sarah Austin (sue.doe@colostate.edu; sarah.austin@afacademy.af.edu). ALRA has no minimum required word count. Aligned with ALRA’s mission to encourage conversation among a broad range of stakeholders, we welcome shorter pieces, including briefs, on topics aligned with the journal’s mission and aims.

Issue 6: Labor during a Pandemic

We hope that you enjoyed Issue 4, guest edited by Lisa Melancon on the topic of Labor in Technical Communication. Shortly, Issue 5 will focus on discussions of intersectionality, social justice, and academic labor within the academy. This issue will extend important conversations about the labor of positionality, intersectionality, and identity (Tweedy, 2019; Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Balaji and Ramirez, 2019; Moore, Acosta, Perry, and Edwards, 2010; Patton, Shahjahan, and Osei-Kofi, 2010; Jones, 2010; Takacs, 2002), especially within TT and NTTF’s social justice efforts on campus, in administration, within the classroom, across departments, in research collaborations, the peer review process, annual evaluations, etc. Guest Editors are Genesea Carter and Rickie-Ann Legleitner. Expected publication is Fall 2020.

Here’s the link to our journal if you missed any of the issues: https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/alra/

Our sixth issue will focus on discussions of labor during the pandemic. Given the unprecedented context of COVID-19 and its impact on universities and colleges, we seek to extend the conversation on labor in this issue. Writers may be encouraged in their consideration of themes by the launch of the AAUP investigation into abuses of shared governance around the country, occurring as a result of the pandemic, and having broad implications for academic labor. The AAUP announcement of their investigation, the report of which is expected in early 2021, reads in part as follows:

The AAUP has authorized an investigation of the crisis in academic governance that has occurred in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on seven institutions: Canisius College (NY), Illinois Wesleyan University, Keuka College (NY), Marian University (WI), Medaille College (NY), National University (CA), and Wittenberg University (OH). Given the comprehensive nature of the undertaking, the investigating committee may decide to discuss relevant situations at additional institutions. The report, to be released in early 2021, will reach findings on whether there have been departures from AAUP-supported principles and standards of academic governance, as set forth in the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities and derivative AAUP policy documents, but it may explore other issues as well, such as the effects of unilaterally imposed mass layoffs on academic freedom and tenure, the enrollment and financial challenges facing many institutions, and the impact of these challenges on higher education, especially the humanities and liberal arts.

We also invite perspectives from the K-12 realm. Like college and university faculty, most K-12 teachers went to remote teaching in the spring of 2020 and subsequently have been thrust into new asynchronous online, synchronous online, hybrid, modified f2f, and so-called Hyflex modes of teaching delivery. We seek to address the dearth of theorization about the work implications of these requirements.

Our goal is to further a conversation that will help us all move forward but will also help us to understand and theorize the importance of the pandemic period in terms of the work of academic laborers across all parts of the labor spectrum. Possible directions for inquiry and discussion include:

What have been the components of work since the pandemic?
How have expectations for varied delivery modes of instruction changed faculty work?
How have the intellectual property concerns of faculty shifted over the period, particularly as a result of increased online instruction?
How has research and the tenure clock been affected by pandemic?
How has the notion of service over the period shifted? In fact, how have all parts of faculty effort shifted--research, teaching, and service?
How has the most risky work of the period fallen disproportionately on some faculty groups with associated implications of these differences in burden?
What have we learned about the vulnerability and responsibility of front-line workers, such as cafeteria workers and custodians, who must be physically present on campus?
To what extent has the voice of the academic worker been integrated into decision making through shared governance and other approaches?
How has the labor of pandemic responsiveness competed with the work of social justice at the expense of equity efforts?
How have voluntary retirements along with hiring freezes/frosts increased work among remaining employees?
How has “administrative opportunism” been demonstrated during the pandemic period?

Please do not consider this an exhaustive list of possibilities! Submit a piece of not more than 10,000 words (in length, including abstract, notes and citations) to http://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/alra/ by 1 March 2021 with publication of Issue 6 expected in the Fall of 2021.

Additionally, we at ALRA would like to engage in collaborative writing processes for this issue. To do so, we have launched a Google doc that enables interested scholars, practitioners and writers to co-author an ongoing narrative about their labor during the COVID-19 pandemic. We envision a real-time interaction of inventing, revising, collaborating, and discussing where we can support one another, commiserate, and learn about the day-to-day goings on as we navigate these strange times. Contributors will be granted permission to edit the document upon request. The journal editors reserve the right to do final editing of this document for readability and will signal when the posting period is over. The link to that document is https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NBJRQafwT7roXyUO9_4bFz0cEXS6Qe5H-UpcYCNDqIQ/edit?usp=sharing