4417 - Sociologists Unite: Collective Action for Academic Workers

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Description

ASA 2019 theme calls us to embrace a sociology that “challenges social injustices” and “sustains scholar activists,” and which uses our discipline’s “analytical tools and empirical data” to “support communities fighting against injustices in many realms”. Adjunctification and the long-standing neoliberal assault on tenure represent a devastating structural transformation, leading to deteriorating working conditions for academics and learning conditions for students, and making scholarship and activism increasingly untenable at many institutions. Yet, the escalating injustices and inequalities we face as academic workers are too often notably absent as a site for sociological inquiry and intervention.

In this workshop, we turn the critical tools of our discipline back onto the very institutions in which we conduct our sociological work. Drawing on sociological scholar activism, our goal is not just to provide an academic critique of higher education but to focus on how we can actively organize as workers within it. Participants will work collectively to apply critical sociological analysis and principles of collective organizing to their own working conditions. We will share tools drawn from across higher education workplaces, as well as from the recent K-12 teacher rebellions. Participants will get concrete ideas and strategies to help them collectively organize around key problems in their home institutions.

Given the increasingly stratified, two-tiered system shaping higher education, the workshop will explicitly attend to institutional location, including both public and private, research and teaching colleges, flagship and regional state and community colleges. The workshop is also designed for academics across ranks and will explicitly engage differing academic positions including graduate students, tenure track, teacher track and adjunct faculty.

Sub Unit

• Workshops / Professional Development Workshop

Session Organizer

• Michelle Dawn Corbin, Worcester State University

Co-Leaders

• Sofya Aptekar, University of Massachusetts Boston

• Barbara Madeloni, Labor Notes