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…

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…

Apart from highlighting the inadequacies of workload formulae across every level of academic life, it’s also one of the best reports I’ve read showing the impact of online technology on academic work.

The figures are stunning enough. Number of those surveyed who worked on weekends: 100%. UWS staff/student ratio: 1:23. And be sure to check out the pie chart comparing Level A appointments.

A sample of quotes:

- “It is now 5.15pm. I have been up since 4am marking assignments and I still haven’t finished”

- “I had to turn around 86 hours of marking in 10 days. 86 hours is what I actually get paid presuming I can mark 1,000 words every 20 minutes, which I can’t…”

- “In 2008 I have taught 7 different units none of which I have taught before”

- “This year I travelled to other campuses twice per week. I had a WLA for 7 return trips but had to undertake 13 return trips to see students and collect exams. $300 in tolls”

I came across this amazing research while trying to find out about the union’s recent campaigns – part of ongoing preparations for the State of the Industry conference happening in November. We may yet hear more about this, and hopefully one of the study’s research team will agree to speak on Day 1. But so far, in spite of numerous emails and phone calls, the NTEU President doesn’t seem available, or at least hasn’t told us one way or another over the past 3 months. I’m quite disappointed about this, since so much anecdotal evidence would suggest the NTEU’s profile could do with some boosting. I had thought the conference offered a timely opportunity for the industry’s peak representative body to prove its relevance to a significant part of its constituency.

Maybe I’ve just gone about asking the wrong way. If the report is any indication of the wider experience of contemporary worklife, our President is probably drowning in email and can’t imagine any way of handling the amount of communication requests she receives…

The State of the Industry:
The future for cultural research in the university

26th and 27th November 2009
The University of New South Wales, Kensington

The State of the Industry is a two day conference that will discuss the future for cultural research in the university, while marking the conclusion of a highly successful period of Australian Research Council funding for the Cultural Research Network. The event will showcase a range of innovative research collaborations and projects that the Cultural Research Network has generated, linking different disciplines, institutions and community groups working in the area of culture over the past 5 years. It will also discuss a number of issues fundamental to the practice of research, including:

- teaching conditions in the university
- peer to peer models for learning and mentoring
- collaborations between rural, regional and city campuses, and
- new models for professional development and training

Led by the next generation of researchers entering the academy, the conference will be a chance for the university and wider public to hear the ideas and needs of those seeking to work in the industry over the long term. All are welcome to attend and participate in a much needed discussion of the future direction of higher education in this country.

Registration for the conference is free, and members of the university sector, the media, and the general public are welcome.

Initial program

Day One – The next generation of university teachers and students

Plenary address: Professor Simon Marginson (University of Melbourne)

Sessions include:

* trends in academic employment
* teaching with social difference
* teaching beyond the capital city
* sessional teaching – pros and cons
* tenure – pros and cons
* supervision
* the status of teaching vs. research grant culture
* pastoral care
* curriculum design

Participants include: Catherine Driscoll (University of Sydney), John Frow (University of Melbourne), Chris Gibson (University of Wollongong), Melissa Gregg (University of Sydney), Chris Healy (University of Melbourne), Jason Jacobs (University of Queensland), Tammi Jonas (University of Melbourne), Meredith Jones (UTS), Olivia Khoo (Curtin), Susan Luckman (UniSA), Kane Race (University of Sydney), Cate Thill (Notre Dame), Graeme Turner (University of Queensland), Gordon Waitt (University of Wollongong), plus more to be announced.

Day Two – Research cultures and the practice of cultural research

Sessions include:

* trends in international research funding/strategy
* individual research, partnerships and teams
* research outside the university
* research cultures: gender and work/life balance
* a brief history of PhD outcomes
* who do you serve – what is required of cultural research?
* negotiating best practice in cooperative cultural research
* new technologies and literacies in cooperative cultural research
* showcase of CRN projects

Participants include: Kate Bowles (University of Wollongong), Jean Burgess (QUT), Kate Crawford (UNSW), Maryanne Dever (Monash), Tanja Dreher (UTS), Clifton Evers (UNSW), Gerard Goggin (UNSW), Alan Lawson (UQ), Miriam Lyons (Centre for Policy Development), Emily Potter (Deakin), Lisa Slater (RMIT), Jason Wilson (University of Wollongong), Amanda Wise (Macquarie), plus more to be announced.