Invisible Labor: Supporting Front-Line Education Workers as Equity Work in the Academy

• In Event: 31.043 - One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Professors' Struggle for Equity in the Academy

Abstract

Students come to our Equity Studies graduate program looking for a shared community of social justice educators. In our classes and gatherings, students express that they seek and value a home in our program and in the academy where they can share these experiences, deepen their knowledge about the systemic issues that produce the conditions they grapple with every day, and to do research to try to change those conditions.
Yet once they begin the program, in their education practice and in their studies, many of these students experience similar systemic barriers to those they seek to address. Many work in precarious front line education settings that are part time or involve shift work, that are emotionally difficult and where they may also experience intellectual and professional isolation. In such settings access to sick leave, counselling or unions to advocate for working conditions might be absent. Our students may also experience systemic racism, gender discrimination and the ongoing effects of colonization.
These precarious work and life conditions spill into students’ academic life (Archer, 2007), calling upon faculty in our equity studies program (as well as a few other spaces on campus set up to offer support), to respond by advocating for scarce and often inadequate financial, emotional, and academic supports. We see this work as at the heart of creating an inclusive education program; this is the work of equity. However, meeting these diverse needs is challenging in academic institutions bent toward hyper-individualization where such issues are seen as personal problems rather than systemic effects of inequality. In conjunction with our course responsibilities in this area, we also become the primary support system for students of color and the face of diversity for our institutions. These additional responsibilities make it difficult for scholars of Colour to accomplish the scholarship goals we set for ourselves. The paradox of all of the institutional push for scholars of Colour to be diversity experts is that in the arena where expertise really counts—research and scholarship—we often are told that this work is not particularly significant” (Ladson-Billings, 2005, p.66). The onus is on individual students and faculty members to relentlessly advocate for services and supports to make learning possible. Just as our students are expected to perform invisible and emotional labour in the context of their education practice, so too are faculty expected to support the academic, socio-emotional, and increasingly, the material needs of our students.
In this contribution to the symposium, we elaborate these issues through stories and examples from our practice. We share our theorizing as we grapple with problems that we believe are at the heart of equity projects in the academy: What are the physical and social costs of equity work within the university? How might we mobilize incremental, individualized, one-off successes and setbacks victories toward systemic change?

Author

• Suzanne Smythe, Simon Fraser University