Academic Labor: The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies

By Jonathan Sterne, Thomas A. Discenna, Toby Miller and 16 more

USC Annenberg Press has published The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies, edited by Jonathan Stere. This collection features the work of 21 authors who raise difficult questions about academic labor in the field of communication studies.

Twenty-one authors take on difficult questions around academic labor in communication studies: from defunding of universities to the real dilemmas facing administrators; from the changing politics of careers to the ways that gender and class play out for faculty and students; from the types of work that get published and promoted to the tyranny of PowerPoint; from the politics of fundraising, to the devolution of administration, to the role of unions in universities.

The authors provide plenty of proposals and programs for change, from small but meaningful gestures to activist programs for pedagogy and research, to massive proposals for organizing ourselves and transforming the ways our departments and fields do business. In the process, they raise even more provocative questions.

Contributors include Sarah Banet-Weiser, Fernando Delgado, Thomas Discenna, Michael Griffin, Jayson Harsin, Mark Hayward, Alex Juhasz, Kembrew McLeod, Kathleen F. McConnell, Toby Miller, Michael Z. Newman, Amy Pason, Victor Pickard, Michelle Rodino-Colocino, Joel Saxe, Carol Stabile, Ted Striphas, Ira Wagman and two chairs who elected to remain anonymous so they could tell their stories candidly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: USC Annenberg Press
• Release date: May 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781625171764

Jonathan Sterne

Jonathan Sterne is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Professor Sterne earned a B.A. summa cum laude in Humanities (1993) from the University of Minnesota, an A.M. in Speech Communication (1995) and a PhD in Communications (1999) from the University of Illinois.  In 2010-2011, he was the Annenberg Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

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