Imponiendo la precariedad: maquinaciones burocráticas, complicidad y jerarquías de la Academia

Abstract

SUMMARYAdjunct is the term used in the United States to refer to the contingent instructors that work in higher education with poor pay, no benefits and short-term contracts. Adjuncts now make up the majority of the teaching professoriate at United States colleges and universities. Drawing on three years' experience working as an adjunct, the author offers an account of precarity in academia in the United States. While academic precarity is often assumed to affect all adjuncts equally, race, gender and class in fact lead to an uneven distribution, rendering certain bodies precarious even when they do not comprise adjuncts or contingent laborers. This makes it imperative to recognise that academic precarity encompasses a range of often incommensurable experiences. At the same time, discussions of precarity often overlook the complicity of full-time faculty staff and administrators who enforce precarity and reproduce hierarchies of academic lives by keeping adjuncts closed off from university resources and by asking them to work without compensation. How might a collective refusal of the reproduction of academic hierarchies be practiced without being depicted as evidence of not caring enough about our work? And how might such a refusal be a strategy for demanding better working conditions for all?

Disposiciones subjetivas a la precariedad en la academia en Chile: entusiasmo, mérito y asociatividad

“…Asimismo, la literatura ha identificado diversas formas de precariedad, según la etapa laboral o la jerarquía académica que se ocupe (Perez y Montoya, 2018;Steinþórsdóttir, 2019). Por ejemplo, Téllez (2018) denomina periodos de «aguante» a la etapa inicial, donde la meta de conseguir un contrato estable ya no se cumple con la obtención de credenciales curriculares, sino que demanda también una alta producción científica, generación de redes y amplias estrategias contingentes de disponibilidad y movilidad laboral (Touhouliotis, 2018). A medida que avanza la carrera académica, no obstante, la precariedad e inestabilidad laboral no desaparece, sino que se desplaza a otros ámbitos de la vida académica, pudiendo centrarse por ejemplo en la presión colectiva e individual por la adjudicación de fondos o en la obligación de publicar resultados en revistas específicas de alto impacto, condicionando las trayectorias científicas (Gill, 2009).…”