University as Secret Society: Becoming Faculty Through Discretion

O’Donnell, Jennifer Lee; Sadlier, Stephen T.

doi:10.1007/s12115-021-00585-9

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 25 publications

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“…In contemplating this question, we each came to impasses with the data we spent years in the field collecting among Mexican and Argentinean teacher activists. While our affective connections to our participants and sites remain, after years of personal, geographic and political change, we are pressured by the weight of efficiency—to analyze, report something, and move on to the next project—and revisiting data is a luxury we do not have (O'Donnell and Sadlier 2021). Having aged ourselves since our time in the field, at times, too, it feels our youthful romance with activism is gone and, as Gale et al (2013) describe the end of their relationship as writing collaborators, we are at the “dressing gown and slippers, watching the evening's repeat of Friends,” phase of our relationship with our data on social movements (422).…”

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Becoming with Education‐Based Social Movements through Diffractive Analysis

O’Donnell¹,

Sadlier

2022

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

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In this article, we provide an overview of diffraction theory, followed by an explanation of diffraction as an analytical methodology. We highlight how tools like the agential cut can be used to redraw the boundaries of ethnographic research so that data can be a continuous becoming with the researcher. We offer vignettes from our work on education‐based social movements that demonstrate how the agential cut opens a viewpoint for understanding our data in unforeseen ways.

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Becoming with Education‐Based Social Movements through Diffractive Analysis

O’Donnell¹,

Sadlier

2022

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

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The View from Below: How the Neoliberal Academy Is Shaping Contemporary Political Theory

McKeown

2022

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Contemporary political theory is a game. Individuals compete to publish in ‘top’ journals, to amass greater numbers of publications than their peers; then journal-ranking is combined with number of publications generating scores. The aim is to get the most points. Whoever gets the most points wins: they get the best jobs and the most prestige. This Hunger Games–like contest has serious consequences for people’s lives, determining who can make a living from academia, who will be relegated to the academic precariat or forced out of the profession. In this article, I argue that, aside from the chilling effect that job insecurity and the gamification of academia has on the precariat, these conditions are stifling intellectual creativity, diversity, and dissent in political theory/philosophy. I discuss how privatization and deregulation of universities has created unbearable working conditions, why academics are forced to publish in so-called top journals and why this is detrimental to our field, marginalizing people, topics, and methodologies these journals do not support (which usually align with already structurally marginalized peoples and modes of knowledge). I explain why we are engaging in this game and how it perpetuates itself. I conclude with some suggestions for breaking this vicious cycle, as well as a discussion of who is really benefitting from it, namely, the corporate elites who run many universities and most academic publishers.

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Gleaning the Fields of Higher Education: Exercises of an Adjunct Self and Instructional Precaritization

Sadlier¹

2021

Labor Studies Journal

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The use of adjunct faculty in higher education has become a widely discussed labor practice. The voices of adjuncts are largely absent in this inquiry and advocacy, an absence which wrongly suggests adjuncts a lack voice or of agency. In the first part of this piece, I argue that adjuncts should contribute to their field of inquiry to destabilize the notions of contingent instructional workers as mere classroom proctors, in need of others’ advocacy. In the second part, I relate episodes of adjuncts disregarded and embraced on their campuses. Stemming from years of teaching in higher education and adjunct organizing, this piece is written from an adjunct perspective, exploring the disregard and embrace adjuncts encounter in their institutional lives. Following Foucault's exercises of the self as part of a philosophical life, I call the academic productions of adjuncts “gleaning,” an exercise taken on by professors that enacts a philosophical project in the face of de-professionalization and precaritization. This critical and ethical intervention counterbalances managerial practices that dismiss adjunct labor and normalize the process of dismissal. Adjunct gleaning, I conclude, may never transform the two-tiered instructional system, though their cultural and intellectual production will hamper efforts to dismiss adjuncts’ presence and catalog them as agents of precarious survival.

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University as Secret Society: Becoming Faculty Through Discretion

Cited by 4 publications

References 25 publications

Becoming with Education‐Based Social Movements through Diffractive Analysis

Becoming with Education‐Based Social Movements through Diffractive Analysis

The View from Below: How the Neoliberal Academy Is Shaping Contemporary Political Theory

Gleaning the Fields of Higher Education: Exercises of an Adjunct Self and Instructional Precaritization

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