CSAL periodically hosts webinars and records events. We also point to related media projects, such as ConJob, a film by Megan Fulwiler and Jennifer Marlow.
A Two-Part Webinar
In spring 2024, activists and teacher-scholars participated in a two-part discussion of the 2024 book Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History and its implications for transforming higher education. The discussions are available on YouTube. Each session included an opening panel followed by break-out room discussions, which enabled broad participation, and then report-backs to the group. These sessions were sponsored by Higher Education Labor United (HELU), the Center for the Study of Academic Labor (CSAL), and the Contingent & Community College Faculty and Independent Scholars Committee of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA).
Learn more about the event ...
Presentations by three contributors to the book (Gary Rhoades, Aimee Loiselle, and Anne McLeer), along with discussion about the causes, consequences, and strategies for challenging labor contingency in higher ed.
Responses to the book including in-depth participant and audience discussion about current campaigns and next steps in the fight for fair working conditions and reclaiming higher education’s public purpose. View the discussion guide.
Hosted by Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast, the guests in this podcast discusses the book Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History (University of Illinois Press, 2024), which is co-edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene. The guests are Claire Goldstene, who taught as contingent faculty at the University of Maryland, the University of North Florida, and American University and is coeditor of as the book, and Maria Maisto, who taught as a contingent faculty member for over fifteen years in Maryland and Ohio, cofounded in 2009 the New Faculty Majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity, and is a featured essayist in the book.
In 2020, Colorado State University hosted Adrianna Kezar to talk about the changing national landscape for non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) or faculty off the tenure track, assess CSU's own journey and provide ideas for the University's future work. Kezar, co-author of The Gig Academy and a national expert on changing faculty trends, met with CSU leadership, faculty and staff over two days in November.
Kezar is the Dean's Professor of Leadership and the Wilbur-Kieffer Endowed Professor of Higher Education at the University of Southern California, and director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education within the Rossier School of Education. Her visit was co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President, CSU Faculty Council and the Center for the Study of Academic Labor.
View a discussion about contingent faculty status and working conditions among Adriana Kezar, Maria Maisto, Sue Doe, and members of the CSU community. This webinar, held April 6, 2020, includes discussion of the book, The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University, which Kezar wrote with Daniel T. Scott and Tom DePaola.
Con Job: Stories of Adjunct and Contingent Labor describes and makes visible the pedagogical, economic, and ethical costs of higher education’s growing reliance on adjunct and contingent faculty. Armed with a borrowed video camera, Megan Fulwiler and Jennifer Marlow, two teachers of composition, set out to record the voices of faculty who are often invisible in and marginalized by the institutions where they teach.
Our film features interviews with contingent faculty from across the nation, as well as with labor activists and leading figures in the field of Composition and Rhetoric. Ultimately, the film calls on the field of Composition to use its collective rhetorical strength to challenge the current state of exploitative labor practices in writing instruction."