The Canadian Precariat: Part-Time Faculty and the Higher-Education System

By Ann Gagne

This collection includes reflections on the precariousness of academic employment for non-tenured professionals across Canada. It also offers suggestions on how to improve this damaging reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Universitas Press
• Release date: Oct 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781988963891

Book preview

9781988963303.jpg

The Canadian Precariat

The Canadian Precariat

Acknowledgements

This entire collection is about acknowledgements. It is about acknowledging where people have been and where they are going. It’s about acknowledging the conditions and the work that needs to be done in higher education in order for education to be the rewarding experience we all know it can be. There have been people who have supported me in my academic journey of precarity and who are still there as I still try to find a stable place in a space that I hold dear. Friends, colleagues, comrades. There are many to be thanked for their support and understanding of precarious issues in higher education and I will probably forget some but know you are there in spirit: Margrit Talpalaru, Fran Odette, Sylvia Morrison, Peggy McKenzie, and Anna Willats. Also, the students that I have had the privilege to get to know, all 2,348 of them since I started teaching sessionally a decade ago.

This book would not have come about if it wasn’t for Cristina Artenie, the Editor-in-Chief at Universitas Press who not only published the Female Precariat previously but also understood how important it was to have a book dedicated to Canadian experiences of precarity. I would also like to thank ACCUTE for the funding to attend NeMLA in 2019 and for the opportunity to serve as the Contract Academic Faculty Representative on the board. It has been a very rewarding experience and I value speaking to contract faculty who teach English and communications throughout Canada.

This collection is for you, all of you, who are teaching 5:5:5 loads every year to pay the bills. Who have hopes of a different life and a more equitable and accessible academe.

Ann Gagné

THE CANADIAN PRECARIAT

Introduction

Ann Gagné

It was my wish and my deep desire to make this collection as inclusive and representative of the journey of precarity for those in higher education in Canada. As such, this collection includes reflections and articles from those who have taught in post-secondary education from across Canada, as well as representation not just from those who teach but also those who have experienced the precarity of higher education from the position of union organizers, as well as students in the higher education system. The texts are both in the form of critical engagement with the academic discourse and research as well as reflective memoirs on experiences of educational precarity from numerous social locations.

Amber Riaz starts this collection with her piece, Manufactured Precarity, where she argues that changes to educational and institutional policies could mitigate the emotional, economic, and material impacts of precarity. She highlights how there are levels of precarity at every level of the academic hiring process, which is what I echo in my piece at the end of the collection. Riaz ends her piece with many effective strategies for alleviating precarious hiring practices in higher education in Canada, while simultaneously outlining the biased and inequitable practices in hiring.

The emotional work of precarity is continued as a theme in Michelle Majeed’s article, Life Happens, Have Compassion. Majeed highlights the trend in Canadian higher education of personal and health distress experienced by students and faculty and how that intersects with precarious employment. She references compassion fatigue as a framework to develop relationships between students and faculty that will benefit both. Her work provides strong statistics to support her analysis; numbers that both shock but are at the same time not surprising for those who have worked in the system.

In Tensions of Tenure and Allyship, Veronica Austen speaks from the position of someone who was once precariously employed for many years and has now secured a tenured position. She speaks of the guilt and the desire to be a strong advocate when she knows well what precarity in Canadian higher education looks like. She speaks as well from an administrative position, and is thus occupying a middle ground, and asking readers to explore the possibilities of what was and what could be for each of us.

This reality of occupying many spaces is echoed by Gayle McFadden, who speaks of precarity as witnessed both as a student and as a student representative. She provides her lived experience of precarity through these lenses to demonstrate the complex interrelation of issues and how systems reinforce and destabilize the students’ ability to continue an educational pathway.

Similarly, Pheobe Anderson’s piece outlines a journey from a life of precarity to an educational experience of precarity, written in a way to remind all of us that there are many voices to be heard in the experience of precarity in higher education in Canada today.

Cristina Artenie explores a forgotten precarious category, immigrant scholars with Canadian graduate credentials. What happens when they try to find employment in academe after graduation? Hers is an exploration of important intersections of immigration and education policy.

My piece ends the collection as more of a memoir of precarity that moves towards the suggestions that Amber Riaz provides. It is a timeline of career change, but also a look into the changing opportunities and supports available at colleges and universities over more than a dozen years. It ends with the possibility of hope and with the possibilities of what can be done together to encourage continued dialogue and a more equitable and accessible educational environment.

Manufactured Precarity:

Some Solutions to Help Mitigate the Impacts of Precarious Employment on Canadian Sessional Instructors

Amber Riaz

Amber Riaz is currently the Campus Education Manager at Sprott Shaw College’s Surrey campus in British Columbia, Canada. Since earning her doctorate in English Literature, she has worked as a sessional instructor at both universities and colleges in London, Ontario, and Vancouver, BC. She manages her own editing business, and works with independent business owners, authors, and academics. She has taught Academic Writing and literature courses in both public and private colleges as an instructor, and currently teaches General Education courses at the Surrey campus, in addition to offering student support services and administrative and pedagogical support to the instructors teaching various courses at Sprott Shaw. She has presented conference papers on the representation of mothers in film, interstitiality in contemporary South Asian literature and on stereotypes of Muslims in various film industries. She has also published essays on the Partition of India, on the representation of the burqa in Pakistani novels, and on the mohajir identity in Pakistani novels. Her research interests include Postcolonial studies, Feminist literary theory and South Asian Studies, as well as the intersections of diaspora, religion and migration in South Asian Literature in English.

Academic precarity

—the condition of instability in academic employment structures specifically for part-time instructors—is a condition built deliberately by structures of power imbalances in higher education institutions (both public and private); it is maintained and even encouraged in some cases by multiple stakeholders in the system. The fiction that is perpetuated (by hiring authorities) and internalized (by sessional instructors as well as tenured faculty) is that it is far too expensive to hire full-time, tenured, faculty members, or that sessional/adjunct teaching work will eventually lead to the highly sought-after tenure-track job. The reality, however, is that sessional work rarely leads to full-time employment, and that those who take the part-time jobs begin to believe that they are somehow not good enough for the tenure-track in the first place. I argue that the condition of academic precarity is deliberately cultivated to maintain structures of power, and specific policies and practices contribute to the systemic discrimination. However, a few simple changes to those policies can easily mitigate the emotional, economic, and material impacts of precarious employment, and while a massive systemic change may not be possible (or even desirable), the inherent discrimination of sessional employment can, and should, be challenged at every level of academic employment structures.

Discrimination, in fact, is embedded in every level of sessional academic work: it begins at the point of the job interview, where there is no clarity as to why one person’s CV supersedes another. Once hired, sessional faculty members are often given their course assignments a few days, sometimes even a few hours, before the course is scheduled to begin, with little to no guidance about curriculum guidelines and other policies necessary to ensure pedagogical quality in course setup and delivery. At the departmental level, sessional instructors often do not have access to desk copies of textbooks and other teaching materials, and may not have been assigned offices, even desks, in the relevant department. In addition, sessional instructors are often not given much in terms of orientation to the facilities available on campus (if there are any for part-time employees). This invariably sets up the instructors for