Precarity in Canadian Academia... A Working Bibliography

Unfortunately, precarity in academia has become a well-worn cliché... not least of all for those of us living in this state of ontological insecurity.

In Canada, most university labourers -- whether tenured faculty, adjuncts, teaching, lab, or research assistants, librarians, as well as service staff -- are often protected by a labour union, yet we still face the challenges of the neoliberal university. This year, many unions in Ontario, for instance, bargained to renew our contracts. York University is currently poised on the precipice of a strike as the university admin and the contract academic labourers responsible for approximately 60% of teaching struggle to agree to a fair deal by the end of this week.

It's therefore very timely that we share anthropologist, Dr. Deidre Rose's Working Bibliography on Precarious Academic Labour in Canada.

Writing from her position as a member of what is becoming known as the precariat -- here describing adjunct, sessional, and other temporary academic labourers -- Rose invites others to help add to her years of research "on the conditions of contingent faculty." 

This annotated bibliography adds to the growing research and reflection on precarity in academia, and in anthropology, and is an important resource for thinking and teaching about the current state of academic labour.

Do you have resources or publications to add to Rose's bibliography, or our post? Follow Rose's Research Gate link to connect with her project, or tweet (@anthrolens) or email (anthrolens@gmail.com) us to add to our links below!

Quick links and further reading:

Precarity in the Canadian context:

• Dr. Deidre Rose's Working Bibliography on Precarious Academic Labour in Canada.
• The Network for Precarious Anthropologists is a closed FaceBook group started by Canadian anthropologists "in recognition that there are a growing number of Canadian anthropologists who find themselves in precarious circumstances with limited or know employment security, [as] a network for precarious anthropologists in order to facilitate solidarity and communication, and opportunities to work through, together, the common (and uncommon) issues that we face."
• The Precarity issue of CASCA's Culture Newsletter (Spring 2015) - gives a good sense of some of the issues facing universities and anthropologists in the Canadian context

Precarity in American anthropology:

• Academic Precarity in American Anthropology: A Forum - a series of open-access articles from Cultural Anthropology.

Science, objectivity, race, gender

Have you heard of Space + Anthropology? This group blog through Medium.com brings together commentaries on the intersections between tech, culture, space, sci-fi, art, and anthropology. We already blogged in a past post of reading lists and syllabi about Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's fantastic Decolonising Science Reading List.

Other eye-catching pieces from Space + Anthropology include "Native Sci-fi Films and Trailers"
by William Lempert and Michael Oman-Reagan's "Anthropology in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”." But we want to highlight another piece by Prescod-Weinstein: "The Self-Construction of Black Women Physicists" based on a talk she gave at Yale’s Critical Histories, Activist Futures: “Decolonizing Science by Reconstructing Observers.”

Where the work of science is to continuously excavate the boundaries of what we do not know, it becomes clear that the relationship between the questions we ask and the axioms of scientist-construction has epistemic meaning for what we may come to know about physics.
To be Black means to have your capacity to have an insightful epistemic standpoint constantly questioned. ... This epistemic alienation serves a status quo where communities at the margins are excluded from discourse about what science is and whom it serves.

How might this piece by Prescod-Weinstein be useful in raising the complexities of and intersections between science, objectivity, race, and gender with our students? How do hegemonic cultural assumptions shape how knowledge is created, validated, and disseminated?

Quick links and further reading:

• Space + Anthropology blog
• Prescod-Weinstein's "The Self-Construction of Black Women Physicists"
• Prescod-Weinstein's Decolonising Science Reading List
• anthro everywhere's
• Reading Lists for Decolonizing Anthropology & Beyond (15 December 2016)
• How gender changes our jobs (24 October 2016)

How gender changes our jobs

One of the things I love about teaching anthropology is thinking about and showing how -- through everyday experiences -- broad processes shape local lives.

I think that these connections come out very clearly in this piece from The Atlantic, "What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender-Pay Gap" (2016). The hook of the piece is that computer programming, which is now a male-dominated field, actually began as a career considered particularly suited to women. So, what happened?

The answer comes down in a very real way to how our

Margaret Hamilton, Programmer for NASA (1969)

conceptions of “expertise” are inseparable from gender. As Judy Wajcman, a sociology professor at the London School of Economics, has argued, “The classification of women’s jobs as unskilled and men’s jobs as skilled frequently bears little relation to the actual amount of training or ability required for them. Skill definitions are saturated with gender bias.” Gender stereotypes pervade definitions of competence and status, contrasting work that requires brain or brawn; mathematical or verbal ability; individualism or cooperation. When an occupation undergoes a shift in gender composition, the description of the job often morphs to better align with the gender of the incoming hires—such as when programming went from being understood as clerical work suitable for women to a job that demands advanced mathematical facility. When women replaced men as typists, it went from a job that was seen as requiring physical stamina to one that needed a woman’s dexterity. In providing profiles not only the male-dominated field of programming, but the female-dominated field of teaching, this piece underscores how our perceptions of different careers, their power, prestige, and the paycheck that goes along with them is deeply coloured by our culturally-informed ideas of gender.

Dr. Christine Darden. Courtesy NASA

This piece is also interesting to use to think about how structure and actions based on socially constructed qualities associated (even unconsciously) with gender and race have helped to shape certain fields, and to keep individuals out of working in certain fields, e.g. women and people of colour in STEM.

Quick links & further reading:

• "What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender-Pay Gap" (The Atlantic, 2016)
• How does language shape our worldview? (17 October 2016) and other anthro everywhere! posts on language
• "Margaret Hamilton, the Engineer Who Took the Apollo to the Moon" (Medium, 2014)
• "Meet the Black Female Mathematicians Who Helped America Win the Space Race" (Observer, 2016)
• "What's Up with Chicks in Science?" Neil Degrasse Tyson responds to an old white dude about minorities (African-Americans and Women) in Science (YouTube, 3.30 minutes)
• "Alabama scientist, one of nation's few black female physicists, breaks ground in cancer research" (AL.com, 2016)

Advice for Grad Students

With the new academic year now underway, anthro everywhere! is happy to finally launch a page that we've been putting together for some time: Advice for Grad Students.

The idea for this page began with an eye to helping students start to think about important issues that may not already be covered in graduate program curricula. That's why we've chosen to focus here on:

• Job Market: Realities & Opportunities including acknowledging the realities of Precarity in the University Labour Market, Career Coaching & Advice, Networking & Interviewing for Jobs, and Writing Resumes and (versus) CVs
• Professional Development Strategies in the context of your studies and beyond/ alongside your studies
• Writing Tips for getting through the dissertation, but also advice on writing Peer Reviews and Comps
• and links for resources connected to Grad Student Wellness

Although this is by no means an exhaustive guide, we hope that current and potential grad students -- as well as faculty and grad program advisors -- will find the resources collected here helpful. Grad students and faculty may also be interested in perusing the collection of career trajectories that anthropologists have pursued in applied contexts: Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university.

Have a resource for grad students that would benefit this list? Contact us via email (anthrolens at gmail.com) or tweet us @anthrolens.

The emotional toll of masculinity

This personal essay published in the Washington Post's Parenting section, provides a lot of insight into the powerful norms and ideals of masculinity in (North) American society. In "The part I was not prepared for as a Stay at Home Dad" (June 2016), Billy Doidge Kilgore frankly discusses the emotional toll of his choice to become a stay-at-home dad while his wife took on the role of breadwinner for their household.

The emotional toll Kilgore refers to isn't the drain of taking care of a newborn child, but dealing with "the larger, often more subtle, cultural forces. These forces, gender roles, define a man’s worth not by their efforts within their families but by their productivity outside the home."

Instructors may find Kilgore's essay useful for classroom discussions of gender as something learned, and the power of cultural constructions in our everyday lives. He writes:

Despite the fact I am prioritizing my family’s needs and enduring the grueling work of childcare, this is not enough. In my mental fog, my notions of identity turn on their head. I am confused by the strange reality of performing demanding and difficult work, work I love, yet feeling inferior and unproductive. I find myself full of gnawing doubt and fear and insecurity.
No one confronted me directly about my decision to leave my job and care for my son, but they did not have to because the subtle contempt woven into questions, comments, assumptions, and body language did most of the work to undermine my self worth. I feel naive for thinking it possible to move against the rigid gender roles still entrenched in modern America.

The piece drives home how gender is such a powerful construct as he describes his internal, affective struggle to reconcile his choice to become the primary caregiver in his family with idea(l)s of what it means to be a man that he has internalized throughout his life -- even as he disagrees with these rigid norms on an intellectual level.

Further reading:

• For connections to toxic masculinity see our post on Mass Violence and Teachable Moments (13 June 2016)
• For additional posts on transgressing traditional Western gender norms see our posts: Third Gender - 'Two Spirit' (26 February 2016), Feb 29th: Catching a Husband (29 February 2016), An anthropologist walks into... a gym (5 July 2016)

One person's trash...

One person's trash is another's treasure... or data, if you are an archaeologist or anthropologist working in a landfill.

Places where trash builds up can provide archaeologists important clues into past lives. For instance, in Toronto, Canada, when the Major League Baseball stadium was first built, archaeologists surveying the site found many interesting artifacts from what was then the lake shore in the early city. Most items had either been lost in the lake, or were part of the landfill extending the reaches of the city into the lake.

Archaeological teams have also dug into our more recent past. For instance William Rathje's Garbage Project, which "explores modern waste disposal, consumption, and recycling patterns" across North America. Or, the recent dig for Atari in a New Mexico landfill, which became a much publicized spectacle that "provided the necessary means to directly access the contemporary past for purposes of archaeological and historical research."

But, sociocultural anthropologists -- like Joshua Reno -- are also beginning to turn their attention to landfills and the people that work in this "secret world of activity that [is] utterly necessary to all of us, but completely hidden from most of us." In this interview, Reno digs into our social relationship with garbage.

What does trash, as material culture, tell us about our social worlds?

Quick links:

• "8 things they found when they dug under the Rogers Centre" (2015, Toronto Star)
• "Seeking the Truth in Refuse" (1992, New York Times)
• "Museums: The Truth is in Our Trash" (2002, Archaeology)
• "The Garbage Project & "The Archaeology of Us"" (by William Rathje, 1996, Symmetrical Archaeology)
• "Why We Dug Atari" (2014, The Atlantic)
• "The Anthropologist in the Landfill" (2016, the Atlantic)

Ghettos

Ghettos. We commonly associate the term today with places like "effective social or ethnic ghettos, from the favelas of Brazil to the mostly black urban neighbourhoods of the United States and the predominantly north African banlieues of Paris."

But this term, as we learn in "Inventing the Ghetto" (2016, 1843 Magazine - The Economist), has its own specific history that dates back 500 years to the establishment of the Jewish ghetto in Venice on March 29th 1516.

I like this piece for the ways in which it connects the history of this ghetto in Venice, with the treatment of its Jewish inhabitants, and the growth of the city, but also with contemporary issues of social inequality and issues of space and place. Instructors might like this piece as background for a lecture on social inequality, space and place, or gentrification. I can also see it being an interesting think piece for upper year students to think about how social contemporary issues have connections to broader historical, political, and economic processes and precedents.

Local food, global labour

The globalized movement of things, money, ideas, images and people has become more frequent and normal than any time in history. This is especially the case for those of us in North America, where what we eat has travelled to our grocery stores from across the world. This concern for where our food comes from has prompted many people to "eat local" and champion the idea of farm-to-table meals.

But, something that we usually don't consider about our "100-mile diets" is the labour of growing and harvesting these local foods. The reality often is that the people who work on the farms and in factories where our food is processed are migrant labourers. And, as we have seen in the Canadian case, even though many of these workers arrive through legal channels, they often lack the kinds of labour and human rights we expect in Canada.

In this piece from CBC Radio, you can hear a discussion about the problems with Canadian labour programs like the temporary and seasonal farm worker programs. In this discussion, social justice activist Chris Ramsaroop (Justice for Migrant Workers) discusses how these programs are actually part of broader processes of systemic racism, and global economic inequalities between the Global North and Global South.

Quick links and further reading:

• Local food lovers, pay attention to migrant worker rights (CBC Radio, 2016) - running time: 11.08 minutes.
• Desmond Cole writes about The shame of our disposable workers (Toronto Star, 2016), with reference to Jamaican farm worker Sheldon McKenzie who died in September 2015 due to a workplace injury after participating in circular labour migration for the past 13 years.
• The Metcalf Foundation's report Made in Canada: How the Law Constructs Migrant Workers’ Insecurity (2012) provides a comprehensive overview of migrant labour in Canada

How 'Maintainers,' Not 'Innovators,' Make the World Turn

I have been hearing a lot about 'disrupters' and 'innovators' in tech and marketing industries lately, and something about that language has always irked me.

Lee Vinsel (an assistant professor of science and technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology), and the diverse group of scholars, artists, activists and engineers who attended "The Maintainers" (an interdisciplinary conference that took place April 7-9, 2016) point to some of the reasons why. Presenters "discuss how the human-built world is maintained and sustained—so often by unnamed, unseen, and underpaid labor." Papers explore these issues through a wide range of perspectives, including city infrastructure, the internet, gendered labour, and popular culture -- for example, Vinsel's paper on Mary Poppins as "caregiving hero" in mainstream cinema (available for download).

Quick links:

• How 'Maintainers,' Not 'Innovators,' Make the World Turn (2016, City Lab)
• The Maintainers conference program - with many papers available for download!