After nine years of being underemployed as an adjunct professor teaching at private liberal arts colleges, state universities, and community colleges, I began to write and speak about the emotional and material realities of living in economic precarity. This led to a job unionizing adjunct faculty with SEIU Local 1021 in Oakland, California. This blog is a living archive of adjunct faculty who are fighting against the neoliberal university to make sure education still matters and is an option for more than the wealthy white elite.
Every meeting brought in people whose understanding of what was going on ranged from people with an informed strategic vision and experience in making things happen to people whose primary reason for coming was some horrible personal disappointment they had experienced in their work as a teacher. Outrage ignited by moral injury is an essential motivator, but it has to be harnessed into constructive collective effort in order to get anything useful done. That was a lot of the work in those early days; it was basic labor education. … More Riding Down a River on a Wobbly Log
So I did what I knew how to do, find others experiencing a similar loss and fight back. I didn’t realize I was walking into a new movement that was going to become one of the stronger interventions to the neoliberal university under the gig economy. I also didn’t realize I was walking into one of the largest mobilizations within the labor movement in many years.
Cultural Capital Doesn't Pay the Rent 