[Usually around
this time I’d be sharing Fall Semester Preview posts. I’m on sabbatical, so no
teaching for me this Fall; instead I thought I’d connect Labor Day to issues of
academic labor this week. Leading up to
a special weekend tribute post!]
On how a smaller
and a larger scholarly organization can each take part in crucial conversations
over academic labor.
As I’ve
highlighted in numerous
posts across this
blog’s nearly 9 (!) years of existence, two of the most consistent elements
of my professional career for the last decade have been two regional scholarly
organizations: the New England American
Studies Association (NEASA) and the Northeast Modern Language Association
(NeMLA). As scholarly organizations, both NEASA and NeMLA function first and
foremost as communities through which academics can share their work and voices—both of them in
their annual scholarly
conferences; and NeMLA through other avenues such as its own academic
journal, Modern Language Studies (MLS;
currently edited by my colleague and friend Laurence Roth).
Yet just as every individual academic is implicated in and affected by issues
of academic labor (including but not limited to this week’s central focus,
adjunctification), so too is every scholarly organization likewise linked to
all those issues. And both NEASA and NeMLA offer, in distinct but complementary
ways, examples of how scholarly organizations can engage with and help advance
those conversations and efforts over labor issues.
NEASA is a
smaller organization—the largest annual conference, mine
at Plimoth Plantation in 2011, featured about 120 participants; the number of
active members at any given time is somewhere in that range as well—and so not
one that can necessarily make any kind of national splash when it comes to
issues of academic labor (or any others). But when NEASA can do, and indeed I
would argue a more vital role for any academic organization than even the
sharing of scholarship that I mentioned, is offer community, solidarity, and
support for any and all scholars (defined as broadly as possible) who are able
to be part of it. The way that NEASA has done so most consistently is through
our second annual event, the Colloquium. I created
the first Colloquium back in Spring 2011, but at that point it simply
offered a more informal space in which folks could share their work; in the
years since (and through the efforts of many other folks) it has evolved
instead into an opportunity to discuss issues of the profession, of academic
labor, of the humanities, and so on. The next one, upcoming at Roxbury Community College on Saturday
September 21st, offers us a chance to enlarge that communal
conversation to include CC faculty and students even more fully.
NeMLA is a much
bigger organization, which partly means that the annual conference becomes even
more of a focus (our conferences average something like 1500 participants across
four full days, and take a great deal of planning throughout the year from both
the NeMLA staff
and the
Board) but also means that the organization has a more substantial platform
through which to advocate for issues like those concerning academic labor. Take
for example our Executive
Board letter (scroll down to the May 23, 2017 news item) in response to
Stony Brook University’s proposed closing of a number of academic programs, an
example of the institutional retrenchment that has become all-too common and
that demands collective response and engagement from all organizations. But
precisely because NeMLA’s annual conference is so sizeable, the conference too
can become an important platform for engaging and advocating for these kinds of
issues—I was proud that at my
presidential conference, in Hartford in 2016, we were able to feature a
series of panels on adjunctification and academic labor, and the thread has
been carried on throughout our subsequent conferences. Organizations can’t
change these frustrating realities, no more than any one of us can; but they
can offer both solidarity for all academics and spaces to voice these responses
and advocacies, and I’m proud that both NEASA and NeMLA have done so and
continue doing so.
Next Labor week
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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