Crossroads panel

Posted on | December 26, 2009 | 2 Comments

Proposals are due this week for Crossroads in Cultural Studies, to be held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong in June 2010.

As a member of the conference committee I’ve been busy organising a number of the spotlight sessions over the past few months, but have yet to organise my own paper and panel! Eek!

If anyone is thinking of going and would like to be part of a panel on labour politics and online work cultures, please get in touch ASAP… very keen to hear from people near and far for what promises to be an exciting and genuinely international conference with work and labour at the fore!

Category: Academia
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#IPF09 debrief

Posted on | December 23, 2009 | 8 Comments

Now one cannot demonstrate scientifically what the duty of an academic teacher is. One can only demand of the teacher that he have the intellectual integrity to see that it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous problems. If he asks further why he should not deal with both types of problems in the lecture-room, the answer is: because the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform. – Max Weber, ‘Science as Vocation’

The irony of the Internet as Playground and Factory conference was that it involved so much more labour than usual: physical (getting to NYC), mental (writing the paper), administrative (scheduling video shoots, uploading slides), promotional (coercive tweeting, list-serve participation, appearing in videos), emotional (patience with long-winded theory boys…). So I want to avoid writing a report of what I saw. The summary gesture of the conference blogpost is something I’m feeling less inclined to write over time, since so much effort goes in to making big events like these happen. Trebor’s drive and ambition are evident forces to behold :-)

A lot comes down to serendipity and the chemistry of participants. There was, and continues to be, amusing frisson between key stakeholders brought together by this event (epitomised in one complaint from the audience, after the very first panel, that the papers were too boring). I suppose my lingering questions are to do with whether the territory being claimed by the iDC project is for politics or scholarship, and whether this matters.

There are now at least four extensive takes on what happened. It’s a comprehensive overview, especially given that most presentations were archived in some digital form. This is the unequivocal advance IPF made: new media devices and crowd-sourcing can broaden the audience for conferences for those who are a) interested b) literate in digital platforms and c) able to access the massive broadband infrastructure that makes these technologies work. Of course, in combination, these three factors exclude significant numbers, even within the host nation of the event, so it is a specific kind of achievement to celebrate.

For me, the conference was less interesting for the amount of new research presented than for the overall climate of Theory that was taken to be the legitimate register of scholarly performance (and here I’m purposefully separating academic work from the contributions of artists and activists). Given the critical landscape I usually inhabit, this was a confronting, almost nostalgic experience, and one that seemed extremely revealing of the hierarchies within the present international division of academic labour.

At this conference I heard things said by professors from prestigious US and European knowledge institutions which I might applaud but correct in a promising undergraduate essay. In some cases this was a genuine and objective problem of disciplinary impasse and ignorance; in others it was an outrageous display of ex-nominated discursive privilege being traded like currency. It had nothing to do with the best political intentions of speakers, and the enthusiasm for new ideas shared by everyone I met. But passionate, overarching proclamations were unremarkable, even encouraged, via the metrics of Tweetability, and the rhetorical position adopted in pre-conference publicity.

In the lead-up to the conference, relevant disciplinary histories and alternative theoretical legacies were routinely discounted on the iDC list in preference for excruciatingly detailed debate about Marx’s writings. Anyone with the time to read these macho arguments – for pedagogical intent rather than sheer bewildered entertainment value – learned plenty about the consequences of theory fetishism, as well as the relative amounts of time different writers have at their disposal at the end of a working day.

In the absence of disciplinary focus then, the lack of self-reflexivity on the part of some participants was professionally unthinkable to those attending from interdisciplinary fields like cultural studies and gender studies (which precede the conference’s closest disciplinary neighbour, internet studies, and which trouble the possibility of any unified project for that field too). Once scholarly formations are abdicated, it’s almost inevitable that speakers become open to the charge of practicing politics from the security of a scholarly location. So while few academics today would agree with Weber’s distinction between science and politics quoted above, it is one instance of how this problem has been shown to occur throughout history. I don’t subscribe to easy distinctions between politics and scholarship either, as my next paragraph will show. But I want a more convincing rationale for why these lines are necessarily more blurred when it comes to studying the internet.

Much has been said about gender at the conference, whether publicly, privately, or in ‘counter-public’ online back-channels. The fact that organisers and delegates alike worried openly about ‘the problem’ during and after the event is certainly one way of appreciating the dynamics of the iDC list leading in. But perhaps what hasn’t been said is that in an academic context an awareness of gender politics is not advanced by quoting the number of women on the program and claiming superiority over conferences that are worse. It is certainly not illustrated in the actions of a prominent speaker who used part of his presentation to express relief that a female colleague was on his panel (to keep the boys in line?) and who was later feted for being the most ‘participatory’ of presenters.

We all share responsibility for creating the conditions for inclusiveness. But an awareness of gender politics in an academic context involves respecting epistemological difference. It means recognising there are stakes involved in the very act of defining what counts as intellectually valuable. In a scholarly setting, feminism is not a political insight that can be enacted simply through the incorporation of certain kinds of bodies. It is an actually existing intellectual field that speaks directly to the very tensions around labour value that this conference regularly claimed as novel.*

When disciplinary differences arise (eg. when the writings of a major postcolonial feminist scholar are openly dismissed on the iDC list by someone who has written perhaps three times the amount of posts of any other member) the performance of territorialisation reaches dizzying heights. A lack of distinction between scholarship and politics provides an avenue of ambiguity leading away from complex discussions. Such encounters between different intellectual lineages cannot be avoided if we are actually interested in improving our theoretical concepts. They are also necessary if we seek to promote a time-frame for critical thinking that can resist the manufactured urgency of new media studies generally (an urgency that clearly also relates to capitalist processes).

Given that my job is to write and teach about contemporary culture, some of the problems I’m most haunted by after the conference are those raised by the students in the final plenary (something that Trebor’s report also mentions). Their enthusiasm for the event and their anxiety about entering the conversation without credentials were matched only by their curiosity at the modes of intellectual performance inherited and perpetuated by delegates. I got the sense that the forms of interaction these students are familiar with online already offer a more accommodating environment for their passions and interests than the odd rituals of academic knowledge production. This may explain why they aren’t so bothered about whether Google or Facebook provides them this platform.

The challenge I took from the conference – and it is a significant one, in an international market for higher education – is to demonstrate and translate the value of scholarly work to present and future generations of digitally literate students. For they surely deserve to believe in a world that is more complex than the space between the monoliths of commerce and politics.

*I tried to sketch some of that history in my (short!) presentation.

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IPF09 delegates rearrange chairs to form a circle for the closing plenary and facilitate the Web 2.0 mantra: participation

Category: Academia, Politics, Travel
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Smart choices

Posted on | November 24, 2009 | 8 Comments

Thanks so much to New Matilda for publishing this piece just before the conference. I tried to crystallize some of the things mentioned here in recent days and months.

See you on Thursday, I hope!

Category: Academia, Publications, State of the Industry 2009, Work

Related reading #SOI09

Posted on | November 23, 2009 | 1 Comment

With thanks to Tammi and Jen…

The RED Report: The contribution of sessional teachers to higher education, Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2008

From the introduction, by Professor Rob Castle, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic and International), University of Wollongong:

To maintain for permanent staff the ideal of being teaching and research academics, we have had to rely on sessional staff. The analogy I’ve always made with sessional staff is to describe them as the proletariat of the academic profession, but that Victorian description of an industrial working class just doesn’t fit as well as that other part of Victorian life, the domestic servant.

In many ways the lifestyle of the traditional teaching research academic is totally dependent on the contribution of sessional staff, in the way that Victorian middle class lifestyles were dependent on the domestic servant. They slept in the attic, ate in the kitchen and you grumbled constantly that what they did was actually not quite what you wanted. But nonetheless, they were absolutely essential to your being and to your lifestyle. I think this applies equally to many sessional staff today.

From the opening summary:

The analysis of current policy and practice across the participating institutions found that

- Evidence of systemic sustainable policy and practice is rare;

- There is a general lack of formal policy and procedure in relation to the employment and administrative support of sessional teachers;

- While induction is considered important in all universities, the ongoing academic management of sessional teachers is not as well understood or articulated;

- Paid participation in compulsory professional development for sessional teachers is atypical; and

- Despite various national and institutional recognition and reward
initiatives, many sessional teachers continue to feel their contribution is undervalued.

Category: Academia, State of the Industry 2009, Teaching, Work
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10 things graduate students want

Posted on | November 21, 2009 | 4 Comments

Over the past few months panelists for the SOI conference have been meeting and sharing plans for what they will present in their allotted time at the beginning of each session. The conference format is not the traditional paper-giving mode, but rather an open discussion with the audience following a series of provocations from invited participants.

What follows are some notes compiled from one such meeting – the postgraduate students’ panel that is the final session on day 1. I wanted to post these before the conference so that anyone interested might get a sense of what we’ll be talking about; also because the group decided they will finish their session with a list of “10 things graduate students want.” This seemed like something that could benefit from some dialogue. So after reading their ideas, maybe some of you might like to leave your thoughts to add to the mix. We can then draw them in to the conversation on the day.

The panel comprises:

Tammi Jonas (University of Melbourne & CAPA)
Brady Robards (Griffith University)
Simon Sellars (Monash University)
Hannah Stark (University of Adelaide)

Their task is to respond to the day’s events and present their own perspectives on ‘the state of the industry’.

*Notes compiled by Alison Huber*

NB: These notes are designed to reflect some of the things we talked about on the day, not what the presentations will consist of themselves. Speakers will now prepare presentations that build on what we discussed. Also, while some of these topics will have been covered earlier in the day, the panel felt it would be useful to offer the postgraduate’s perspective on these matters. In no particular order, the four topics that will be addressed are:

1. Sessional teaching, inc. course coordination and tutoring

* Lack of adequate training and support; lack of work space in which to meet with students; what sort of impact does this have on the experience and quality of teaching?

* Disparity across institutions in relation to wages – some universities expect their tutors to attend lectures and meetings and mark essays all without payment of any kind, while other institutions pay for much more of what’s involved in tutoring; some institutions are no longer paying postgraduates for giving guest lectures, claiming that its real payment is the experience. At stake here is: what should be reasonably expected from a tutor in a time vs. wages analysis? With increasingly time-consuming models of assessment for markers (eg, monitoring blogging or other online tasks), and the increase in the numbers of email rather than face-to-face contact with students, old models of remuneration are becoming increasingly redundant.

* Payment in relation to experience – while tutors with PhDs are paid more than those who are still postgraduates, what about rewarding tutors for their years of tutoring experience? There are several issues that could result from this though – it could lead to disadvantage for those who do have experience (because they will be more expensive to hire); at the same time, it could also return tutoring to its original purpose, which was to give postgraduate students access to the experience of teaching undergraduates. Also noted in this conversation was the fact that some departments continue to give tutoring work to very experienced tutors, many of whom have long finished their PhDs, and so take the work away from those inexperienced postgrads who are then never given the chance of sessional tutoring. The question here seems to be, what is the status of ‘experience’ in sessional tutoring?

* Morale – to what extent do the conditions of sessional teaching contribute to a lack of morale, and to what extent might this impact on the learning experience for students? Under these conditions, is the standard of education being compromised?

2. Professional development and mentoring

* the obscure nature of the PhD candidature and its processes at many institutions – there were a variety of stories shared here about people needing to muddle their own ways through their candidature, with little guidance until reaching milestones. This is an issue partly to do with supervision, but also to do with the way that the postgrad is often left to his/her own devices in a ‘survival of the fittest’ model of candidature. Again, the disparity across different institutions became obvious here. Can there be a coordinated effort to ensure that students have equal access to professional development throughout their candidatue?

* since it seems clear that there are not enough jobs in universities for the volume of PhD graduates in Australia, to what extent might departments and institutions have a responsibility to help students think about work outside the university, and how the skills of the PhD transfer into the wider workplace? How can we avoid the pessimism that many students feel about their prospects when they are constantly told that there are ‘no jobs’?

* what about the end of the PhD, when students are often ‘cut loose’ from their scholarship, their office (if they had one), etc? is there a way that institutions can assist students in that post-PhD moment between submission and reports, to help them transition into (full-time) work? The NTEU has lobbied for an extension of scholarship to include this time, so that students can get on their feet following submission; this is a time of confusion and exhaustion for many students.

3. Collegial atmosphere/ growth of a departmental culture/ networking

* everyone talked here about the importance of feeling part of a research culture in a department that includes both the academic staff and the postgraduate students. A variety of examples emerged here about models that have been successful in producing a sense of community, as well as some about the lack of a supportive environment in which to study.

* in an ideal world, ‘supervision’ is not just a one-on-one hierarchical model, but actually a ‘peer’ model, where students have access to other academic staff in a collegial context (eg, seminar series), and where they work with each other; this is part of the way to avoid the sometimes lonely life of the solitary postgrad.

* the group noted the importance of physical spaces in developing this atmosphere: meeting rooms or tea rooms, as well as offices on campus that allow students to use their postgrad experience like a ‘real job’ where they go in daily, 9-5 (or similar), to an office where others are doing the same thing around them.

* the encouragement of networking outside the home institution – this can be an issue of funding (in terms of enabling students to attend conference etc), but how can universities further help their students form or access a network of scholars in their field? This is particularly important for students who find themselves isolated in their department because of a specialised PhD topic.

4. Post-PhD career path

* in a similar vein to Topic 2, the panel thought that many of the challenges/ decisions that a student faces post-PhD are not discussed openly, and again people are left to trial and error to find out ‘what happens next’. What are the options for post-PhD? How prepared should one be for this time during candidature itself? What is an academic job interview like, for example, and can institutions help to prepare for these sorts of experiences during candidature? If publications are so important to getting jobs and grants, why are they not made more of a feature/ requirement during candidature?

* increasingly, the experience of work in the immediate years post-PhD is one of piecemeal casual employment; what does this mean in a broader sense for universities, and how does it affect the purpose of the PhD? How long should one be prepared to pursue this sort of work in the years following a PhD qualification?

Other things we noted

We did discuss the idea of presenting a Utopian model for PhD experience; while some of the panel liked this idea, others thought that it was dangerous for giving the impression of this being a panel of ‘dreamy’ or naïve postgrads who don’t live in the reality of university budgets and policies (which is not the case). So we want to find a balance between outlining an ideal world, and finding a way that this ideal can operate within the current constraints of university politics.

It’s also important to find the balance between complaining about things that are inadequate/ wrong in the system, and offering suggestions for ways in which conditions could be improved.

We realise too that there is not really any new information here in what we discussed; rather we see this panel as being important in highlighting what we already know to be the deficiencies and strengths of the current postgraduate/ PhD experience in order to have an open discussion in such a forum. The group represents a range of positions/experiences, both positive and negative, and we want to highlight these differences in the panel.

Category: Academia, Research, State of the Industry 2009, Teaching
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A requiem for academic blogging

Posted on | November 21, 2009 | No Comments

I’m about to post an update in preparation for next week’s SOI conference, but it seemed fitting to mention separately that an article I wrote some time ago about labour politics and academic blogging has just been published in Convergence. Well, fitting in the sense that last week I was in NYC at a conference about digital labour where it seemed like almost everyone was talking in another language (or maybe in a time warp? Read the tweets, watch the videos and you tell me). Also because next week’s event will be the culmination of what feels like a long, and (this week at least) tiresome amount of work I have been doing in the past few years to advance an agenda around academic labour.

I wrote this paper while living in Brisbane, and it has had several initial airings – at AoIR 2006, in a fantastic panel with Jean Burgess among others, and Cultural Studies Now in London. That was the Sunday morning time slot that all long-haul flying Australians lament as their fate but it was acutely memorable for me… it was perhaps the only time I’ll share an academic platform with the remarkable Nadia Mizner and Kiley Gaffney: such amazing women doing incredible things.

A lot of HCT readers will see themselves in this piece in one way or another, so I wanted to thank those of you who were part of the moment it’s trying to capture. The more I see of graduate and junior faculty life the more I appreciate the generosity and significance of what can take place here and other precious online spaces. (If you don’t have access to the journal and would like a copy, let me know).

In the past year especially Facebook and Twitter have irreparably changed the sensibility and community described in the piece, and in many ways that is hardly a bad thing. But their more encompassing reach and their capacity to make familiar the broadcast impulse behind blogging hardly change my concerns about the split between virtual and actual labour politics. Both must be realised in combination to change the present conditions of academic life.

Category: Academia, Publications, Research, Web(log) Stuff
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Final stretch

Posted on | October 21, 2009 | 2 Comments

State-of-Industry-poster
It’s getting close… here is the official poster for next month’s State of the Industry conference (also available as a .pdf here). Thanks go to Clif for the design and imagery. We loved the idea of the fading glamour of the fun park and also the rollercoaster symbolising the highs and lows of the academic career.

It would be a big help if people could circulate this amongst colleagues in a range of fields – including research partners and media contacts who may be interested – also particularly to postgrads. The final line-up is here.

This is the last week before registrations close. I am starting to get a bit nervous, but luckily there are plenty of other things to do in the next few weeks that will keep me from fretting too much…

Category: Academia, Events, State of the Industry 2009
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Women in research

Posted on | October 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

A new report shows that women’s progress in science has stalled over the past 15 years. While this won’t sound like news to many, I was shocked to read the statistic on how many women are Federation Fellows (8.5%). When you add that to other recent news stories, particularly with regard to the ongoing pay gap, the picture is quite bleak.

Perhaps the only thing more upsetting than this is the explanation of yesterday’s research findings:

SHARON BELL: The metaphor that we use is that women’s career is like a labyrinth, and you need to actually be able to negotiate that complex labyrinth. There is a number of pressures that come to apply.

A labyrinth! Apparently this is the preferred term over the “glass ceiling” and “leaking pipeline” metaphors of previous studies. In any case, they are all attempts to explain this diagram, which will be familiar to many “mid-career” academics.

The report itself is fantastic, but many people may not bother to read it when it comes packaged in Management 101. This was the case on ABC’s PM last night:

DAVID MARK: What are the ramifications for the under-representation of women in science?

SHARON BELL: Well, I think the main ramifications are the fact that if we don’t have a diverse workforce, we’re not actually maximising our productivity through diversity and that will impact on innovation.

Sharon, how about this for your next presser:

“At least half the population faces implicit or explicit obstacles to following the so-called formal career path. This is the case in universities as well as other jobs. The singular career path is a fiction based on the experience of a minority. It is a premise that should be dispelled at every level of leadership and management if the word diversity means anything at all.”

Category: Academia, Gender, Work
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Consuming drugs, books, tele

Posted on | October 13, 2009 | No Comments

I’ve just uploaded our co-authored article, “Underbelly, true crime and the cultural economy of infamy” on the Other Writing page. We would welcome any feedback while it’s under peer review, especially since there will likely be more to this project than just one paper. Thanks to Tim Laurie for so much help with the background coverage.

Finishing the piece the other week, I had the great fortune to read Kane Race’s Pleasure Consuming Medicine, which will definitely be adding to our revised version. Kane’s fascinating and inspiring book is full of ideas, and I want to share just a couple of them here.

The clear resonance with the story of Underbelly, in its scripted and real life forms, is the centrality of drugs. In each case, to borrow Kane’s words, “drugs are fit for incorporation within an amoral consumer logic, as commodities par excellence” (11).

Kane suggests that “one way to grasp the responsibility of drugs” is to “consider them as necessarily re-creational. When all drugs are cast on the plane of re-creation, the agonistic nature of pharmaceutical production and consumption becomes explicit: we expose what is specific, partial, and consequential about our biochemical techniques of the self” (9).

Among Kane’s wider arguments is the claim that: “At the moment that consumption becomes the normative mode of social participation and citizenship, medical authority becomes available in these discourses to fulfil the role of the moral curb on the self-administering consumer. As a result, these discourses become especially prone to political and authoritarian investment—precisely because they produce the self as the moral locus of consumption” (15).

The book provides a series of case studies to show how this plays out, whether at the local level in Sydney or through transnational media texts and health disciplines.

Kane also highlights the experiences of queer communities touched by HIV/AIDS, and how this context continues to affect drug consumption in the present. One point of this is to trouble the legal distinctions and moralising judgements that adhere to some kinds of drug consumption, and therefore some populations, more than others. But an even more forceful dimension of this project is the way that it reveals drug consumption to be symptomatic of a culture that fails to recognise or advance enough models to express desire, intimacy, care and community (see especially the final chapter, “Exceptional Sex: How drugs have come to mediate sex in gay discourse”).

Of the many poetic and powerful passages, the section describing ‘the auratic value of queer dance parties’ is among my favourite. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Kane shows how ecstasy use and the mass dance party event, set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, produced a set of singular experiences that lost their poignant “aura” with the commercialisation of queer lifestyles, and – as our Underbelly paper describes – the mainstreaming of club culture and ecstasy consumption. Linking this to the fortunes of Sydney’s Mardi Gras, Kane notes that: “If the large-scale queer dance party is a form in decline, this is not simply because it bcame more commercial, but because one of the primary conditions within which it came to accrue meaning and value has altered – and thankfully so” (29).

This is the bit that stuck:

What if we were to understand the dance party not as the transparent radiation of community, but as a mediated event through which a sense of community was hallucinated? The massed bodies, decorations, lights, drugs, costumes, and music combined to produce a powerful and widely accessed perception of presence, belonging, shared circumstance, and vitality at a time when the image of the gay man, dying alone, ostracized from family, was the publicly proffered alternative. To describe this experince as hallucination is not to say that it was false or untrue, for this would be to imply, incorrectly, that there is some pure, unmediated reality which it is possible to access transparently. I want to take seriously the importance of pleasure, imagination, and fantasy in the construction of new materialities. This sense of community that was animated at dance parties was real with real effects. It was realized in the affirmative apprehension of thousands of bodies presumed affected in similar ways by the accidents of history and the exclusions of heterosexual society. It was worked out in the minutiae of caring practices, the forging of dependable relations outside the family form, the inventive expression of memory and grief, the commitment to a safe-sex ethic. It was tapped into by agencies seeking to advance the public rights of gay men, lesbians, and people with HIV/AIDS, as well as to deliver health programming and to conduct research. It helped sustain a collective sense of predicament, power, care, and commitment – a shared ethos enabling wide-ranging cooperation and transformative activity. (22)

The true power of any great work of queer theory is that its insights advance our understanding of the culture at large, not merely the agendas of those seeking respite from the categories of gender or sexual identity currently favoured. Kane’s work sits among that precious group of writers and thinkers who translate experience in such a way that our ideas and hopes for another world are energised to take shape sooner. I hope a lot of people read this book!

Category: Reading
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In unity

Posted on | October 7, 2009 | 2 Comments

**We urgently need billets for the State of the Industry conference. There has been an amazing response from young interstate scholars wanting to come, and we’ve funded airfares for everyone we could, but some people won’t attend if they can’t get accommodation. Please let me know if you can offer a bed or a couch.**

Taking account of the number of registrations already on hand, we’ve had to move the State of the Industry conference to a bigger venue. We’re basically at capacity before our main advertising campaign has started. If you haven’t checked the line up for a while, we now have four plenaries, Simon Marginson (Melb), Genevieve Kelly (NTEU NSW State Secretary), Margaret Shiel (ARC) and Genevieve Bell (Intel). On top of this, some of the biggest names in Australian cultural research will be speaking in a way that will be unfamiliar to many – no power point, no papers, just honest insights on things they’ve noticed working in academia. Open discussion is the main focus.

If you haven’t registered and plan to come, please help us out by going to the website and downloading the form (which goes to Alison Huber). This is really vital for planning. There is also a Facebook page if you are into that sort of thing. It has the draft of the promo poster we’ll be sending out soon. Let me know if you want one for your workplace.

The response to the event so far is really encouraging. I still regret coming up with the idea, in the sense that it has meant more work on top of everything else. Starting a new job this semester has been busy enough. But it has been fun (and unusual) to work collectively on a project that is bigger than the regular – read insular – academic concerns. It’s given me the chance to get in touch with a range of people working in various roles around the country, and to learn from different age groups how much has changed (or not) in academic employment.

To that end, I should probably report that when I met with Genevieve Kelly last month to outline the conference mandate, it was clear that the union has yet to really catch on to the problem of casualisation as a lived reality. In saying that, I certainly appreciate that the present bargaining campaigns are featuring limits on casualisation as a core objective, and that’s absolutely appropriate. My concern is that “casualisation” doesn’t begin to convey the difficulties that young scholars in particular are facing.

Casual teaching on contracts has happened for a long time. What seems genuinely new now is the amount of people doing this and other forms of work without much pretense of supervision. I’m talking about those who are employed across several campuses in a range of teaching and admin roles. These multiple jobs, and the forms of institutional negotiation involved in keeping them, don’t register on the radar of fellow staff, who are stressed out enough with their own workloads. They are given out as if they are a privilege to people who don’t even get a place to hang up their coat, let alone make a cup of tea or dock their laptop. Well, they can’t afford a laptop that works anyway.

Union membership presumes a steady relationship with a single employer. Genevieve mentioned her experience showing up to meetings on campuses where members were present but not on file. The idea that there could be several unis employing them simultaneously was foreign. But this happens regularly.

Then there’s the casual research assistant or postgrad who also doubles as general staff. Do they join the same union? Maybe not, if the NTEU can’t recognise their chameleon status. The industry as a whole fails to account for these workers who don’t fully occupy a coherent employee identity – as if this situation were only temporary, and not deeply structural.

There’s no one in particular to blame here: in fact, it’s the constant management and administrative flux internal to organisations that allows these tiny incidents of casualised labour to go missing. Who notices when casuals don’t come to work? Who cares if there are dozens of RAs working in the library rather than having offices? Surely postgrads should be able to pay for home broadband to mark 100 online assignments in a week? So what if a student has to miss class if their tutor falls ill?

I’m all for a Kafkaesque attitude to bureaucracy, but some of these things can be fixed. When a government promises an education revolution, it needs to provide a frontline. And in the shift to flexible work cultures, it is too convenient for organisations to pretend not to know, let alone take responsibility for what’s going on.

This is particularly in light of the number of PhD graduates whose challenge to pay the rent is the first priority that detracts from their ability to “plan” “careers”… starting in their mid-30s or older… by publishing articles, writing books or applying for grants that position them for ongoing employment. These “casual” workers cope with crap from both ends – they do the teaching that tenured staff don’t want to do, and in some places the co-ordinating too. As research support or “professional” staff they also get to implement the increasingly horrible corporate jargon and branding initiatives of management.

If they are trained in critical disciplines, that is, the humanities and many of the social sciences, this sort of experience can only feel like the worst kind of schizophrenia or hypocrisy.

Last week’s LH Martin Institute briefing concluded that without better efforts to create long term strategy, good people will simply leave the academic profession. Oh, but *so many* already have. If your experience had been routinely dismissed as passing by management cultures perpetuating a permanent state of exception, would you really wait around for Baby Boomers to retire, just to be invited to fix such ingrained indignities?

The sense of invisibility many young scholars know so well is precisely the structure of feeling unions are designed to address. What I’m hoping is that the State of the Industry conference can bring the NTEU’s work and cultural research into better dialogue, to reawaken a labourist project for a very different academic workplace. These are also some of the thoughts I’ll be taking with me to Canberra this month as an NTEU delegate to the HASS on the Hill meeting. I’d be happy to take more – and to hear others’ ideas both here and elsewhere…

Category: Academia, State of the Industry 2009, Work
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