Road's Scholars: On Contingent Labor and the Work of Contingency

• In Event: 16.027 - Educators Queering Academia: Critical Memoirs

Abstract

Purpose
This paper investigates the challenges of queering the academy, utilizing the work of “memoir.” A memoir is a collection of moments, moments that are collected by an author to tell a particular story about that author’s life. And a critical memoir is one that is critical of moments that one memoir-izes. This paper-memoir engages particular moments to address the promises and pitfalls of contingency. How does contingency come to define the new conditions of labor - the adjunctification of the academy - and in what ways does contingency assist in the work of queering such conditions?

Perspective
This paper provides insights into the new “Roads Scholar” that wanders the educational landscape in search of work juxtaposing recent research on academic labor (Newfield, 2008) with the labor of a contingent academic. Queering the academy becomes a contingent process and one that may very well challenge the ability to engage in critically queer scholarship, service, and activism. Drawing upon being a contingent laborer at numerous universities while working other jobs, particularly retail, I bring together the personal, everyday realities of contingent labor and the work of contingency.

Modes of Inquiry
This project utilizes a humanities-oriented approach to research. Relying on autobiographical, philosophical, and historical texts that have explored the multilayered realities of higher education, I contemplate the work of queering the academy - its conditions and material realities. The sources I rely on are those that have been instrumental in establishing and articulating the realities of higher education and how queer projects can inform and resist - contingently of course, such realities. In doing so, I “problematize unrecognized assumptions, implications, and consequences of various kinds of educational practice” centered on academic labor and queerness (AERA, 2009, p. 482).

Evidence
Queerness and queering pierce or seek to pierce norms both inside and outside institutional frameworks (Warner, 1999). Grounded in philosophy and autobiography, I draw upon emerging evidence of the changing conditions in higher education (Menard, 2010) with the material realities of a contingent laborer, committed to queer activism and theories. I ask, how does the personal illustrate the economic and sociological insights on higher education and queer lives, and how does such work assist in understanding the conditions under which a contingent laborer works?

Conclusions and Significance
Roderick Ferguson (2012) in The Reorder of Things argued
Now is the time to pause and interrogate the subtle and silent transformations that knowledge and the subjects of knowledge have undergone. Now is the time to scrutinize this will to institutionality if we are to create alternative forms of agency and subjectivity not beholden to the logics of state, capital, and academy. We are now in a moment in which institutionalization is the standard of the evolved and developed critical subject (226).
While queer work has contingently been taken up by the university and made to often speak for the institution to do “diversity work” (Ahmed, 2012), how, I continue to ponder do we maintain a critical project amidst this context?

Author

• Adam Joseph Greteman, School of the Art Institute of Chicago