Publications

In a long-standing partnership with the WAC Clearinghouse, a leading open-access publisher, CSAL publishes the journal Academic Labor: Research and Artistry and the book series Precarity and Contingency.

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 and supported by the WAC Clearinghouse. ALRA seeks to motivate ongoing research on matters relating to tenure and contingency in the academy. In particular, it serves as a venue for scholars working in areas broadly defined as tenure studies and contingency studies. The editors of ALRA encourage 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. The journal's editors and reviewers include social scientists, artists, and theorists specializing in labor issues.

ALRA welcomes 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. It also welcomes 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 ALRA editors Sue Doe and Bruce Kovanen.

View the Journal Page.

The Precarity & Contingency book series publishes scholarship—broadly construed to include empirical (both quantitative and qualitative), historical, and critical/theoretical projects—that addresses precarious academic labor. While its focus is primarily on academic labor in higher education, it encourages projects that include other labor issues on campuses (including K-12) and/or precarity in labor sectors outside education. The series embraces new visions of and innovations in leadership in the academic environment that might more effectively address current labor crises. It also encourages projects that explore intersections of academic labor activism with other forms of activism, such as LGBTQ+, gender, race equality, ability/disability activism, and environmentalism, among others.

View the Series Page.