Unjust precarity: contingent faculty and the introductory communication course

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on the communication studies’ introductory course – classes dominated by contingent labor – to explore contingency within our disciplinary “front porch” (Beebe, S. A. (2013). Message from the president: Our ‘front porch’. Spectra, 49(2), 3. Retrieved from https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1501&context=bcca). Because contingent labor emerges through multiple institutional power dynamics, I extend Yep’s [(2016). Demystifying normatives in communication education. Communication Education, 65(2), 232–235. doi:10.1080/03634523.2015.1098711] call for a pedagogy of transformation that focuses on awareness, insight, and action to intervene in structures that relegate faculty in precarious positions to undervalued teaching roles. To create actionable solutions through a pedagogy of transformation requires a constant interrogation of structural practices that devalue contingent labor, including hierarchical norms around merit that place precarious scholars in already precarious positions.

KEYWORDS:

• critical pedagogy
• contingent labor
• social justice
• feminism

Notes on contributor

Meggie Mapes (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) is the introductory course director at the University of Kansas. Her work emerges from intersections of critical pedagogy and feminist rhetoric.

Notes

1 See Fassett and Warren (2008) and Fassett (2016) for clear criticisms of using “basic course” to describe the introductory classes in communication.

2 Zheng's essay historically traces the origins of teaching as women's work through the 18th and 19th century. “Women” as a group, however, is described homogenously, and “women's work” is likely constructed through perceptions of white women.