| Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing: Possibilities and Predicaments | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Session: D.22 on Mar 12, 2009 from 3:15 PM to 4:30 PM | Cluster: 107) Institutional and Professional | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Type: Concurrent Session (3 or more presenters) | Interest Emphasis: not applicable | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Level Emphasis: all | Focus: not applicable | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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As a field, Composition/Rhetoric attends carefully to academic labor issues, primarily regarding contingent faculty. This session highlights the limits of this focus and advocates for further action towards labor equity/justice in academia. Speakers articulate an array of labor problems, ranging from the importance of composition theory in staffing writing courses, to the abuse of immigrant labor on college campuses, and call for more aggressive, multi-layered (curricular, departmental, university-wide) labor organizing in response. Speaker 1 When Teaching Is Generic: Connecting Composition Theory to Staffing Practices Administrators devalue Composition theory in order to justify staffing practices. If knowledge of Composition theory is unnecessary, if teaching becomes a generic skill, then courses may be cheaply staffed with graduate students and temporary employees who may have little knowledge of Composition. Consequently, pedagogy is less likely grounded in strong theoretical rationale. I argue that one tactic in a larger strategy for altering labor practices and improving Composition teaching is reasserting the essential role of Composition theory to composition teaching. Speaker 2 "If I Don't Do It, Nobody Will": Writing Program Faculty Fulfilling Management Responsibilities Growing numbers of management and shrinking numbers of full-time faculty positions significantly impact Writing Program faculty and administrators in two ways: (1) the well-documented deflection of resources away from faculty; and despite growing numbers of managers, (2) Writing Program faculty/administrators doing more management work. This presentation analyzes the second point, contending that writing instruction and program administration suffer when faculty take on management responsibilities, and that academic unions need to take a stronger stand on enabling faculty to concentrate on faculty work. Speaker 3 Immigrant Labor and Universities While university communities are an imagined community of students and faculty engaged in the project of education, these communities increasingly include immigrant workers. Immigrant workers are constructed to be both inside and outside the university: inside insofar as they reproduce the conditions of education for the university community, and outside insofar as they are not imagined as part of the community. This paper argues that with contracting immigrant labor comes a contracting out of community responsibility, resigning service and immigrant employees to invisibility in educational communities. Speaker 4 Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures In the 1990s, labor conditions and labor organizing in higher education took center stage in rhetoric and composition. However, the field has not sought to deepen that project significantly through explicit rhetorical instruction in labor organizing and advocacy. Focusing on higher education labor organizing, this paper argues for a curricular project connecting explicit instruction in rhetorics of advocacy, new undergraduate majors in comp/rhet, and the field's investment in critical citizenship. Speaker 5 Contracting Competing Interests: Unionizing and the Preservation of Academic Freedom. More and more academic workers are looking to unions to preserve their professional integrity. Unionizing can pose problems because the guild ideology that justifies academic freedom runs counter to the egalitarianism that underwrites unionization. The risk is that we may unintentionally redefine the terms of work in a manner that undercuts academic freedom. I illustrate how unionizing can generate competing rights among classes of laborers and jeopardize faculty freedoms and suggest that compositionists are uniquely situated to help anticipate these pitfalls. |
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