Editor’s note: ACCUTE presents another in its series of blog posts highlighting special sessions in ACCUTE’s program at Congress 2017. This year our conference includes two special panels addressing issues relating directly to professional issues and Contract Academic Faculty.  

Organizers: Ross Bullen (OCAD U) and Geordie Miller (Mount Allison)

For a growing majority of academic labourers, the possibility of achieving full professional status, i.e., tenure or permanent employment, has dramatically diminished. Over the past four decades, government underfunding and manufactured budget crises, which work in tandem to prioritize capital accumulation, have altered the employment structure of Canadian post-secondary institutions. By continuing to normalize exploitation and underemployment, these institutions have redefined the professional prerogatives of CAFs, graduate students, and “Independent Scholars.” This panel seeks to understand how the labour crisis that defines post-secondary institutions has affected the professional duties and priorities of contingent academic labourers who effectively lack a profession.

• Ruth Bradley-St-Cyr (Ottawa), “Scaling the Ivory Tower”
• Joshua Lambier (Western), “The Citizen Scholar: Reimagining the Place of Service in the Humanities”
• Lucia Lorenzi (Independent Scholar), “At What Cost?: On Being Professionally Precarious and Precariously Professional”
• Geordie Miller (Dalhousie), “Crooked Institution / Straight As”

This session will be on Monday, May 29th, 10:30 am – 12 noon, in Victoria 204