Issue 8: A Special Issue guest edited by Bruce Kovanen and Andrew Bowman
Although tenured and tenure track faculty once made up 70 percent of academic workers, recent reports from the American Federation of Teachers (2020, 2022) now estimate that 75 percent of academic workers are non-tenure track, with 47 percent holding part-time positions. These changes have ushered in what Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel Scott (2019) refer to as the “gig academy,” which they define as “a university that has become fully dependent on a patchwork of loosely connected contingent workforces to service both its central missions and its day-to-day operations” (p. 36). These contingent workers labor in poor working conditions that include “subsistence wages; lack of benefits, retirement funds, and vacation time; no influence over conditions of work or structures of advancement; and constant anxiety over the possibility of arbitrary termination” (Kezar et al., 2019, p. 36-37).
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.
Kezar, DePaola, and Scott’s (2019) analysis points to the depth of these changes across academia—faculty, students, administrative staff, and building/food service workers—all feel the pinch of contingency, the pressure of just-in-time labor (Watkins, 2015), and the precarity of these neoliberal economic policies.
This poverty is an existential threat to the academy. In an age of devastating climate change, war, social injustice, refugee displacement, and economic inequity, poverty in academia has far-reaching consequences.
ALRA welcomes proposals for submissions on:
Please send proposals to special issue editors Bruce Kovanen and Andrew Bowman via the WAC Clearinghouse Submission Portal. On the submissions page, choose "Submit to a Journal" and then choose "Academic Labor: Special Issue on Poverty in Academia." For more information, please contact the special issue editors at kovanen2@illinois.edu and ajbowmn2@illinois.edu.
Schedule
February 19, 2024: Proposals due to the editors.
April 18, 2024: Completed articles due to the editors.
June 17, 2024: Peer review process completed and directions for revisions are sent to the authors.
August 19, 2024: Revised final draft articles due to the editors.
Academic Labor: Research and Artistry is published by the Center for the Study of Academic Labor at Colorado State University. Copyright © is held by the authors and editors of the publications in the journal. Works in the journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 United States License. ISSN 2380-2081.