May 2, 2025. Friday morning. My kitchen table at home.
The notification sound chimed while I was grading papers, the familiar tone I had conditioned myself to respond to instantly after seventeen years of contract teaching. I reached for my phone expecting routine correspondence, perhaps a student question or a committee meeting notice. Instead, the subject line read: “Employment Status Update.”
My contract position for the fall of 2025 and 2026 was uncertain.
The email was brief, professional, and efficient. It explained enrolment shifts, budget realities, and difficult decisions. It thanked me for my service. It wished me well in future endeavours. It arrived without conversation, without the relational check-in that twenty-five years at Thompson Rivers University might have warranted. It arrived as data, a notification, a conclusion reached somewhere in a spreadsheet I would never see.
I sat at my kitchen table, the same surface scarred by coffee rings from decades of grading student papers, and stared at the screen. Seventeen years as contract faculty. Twenty-five years total at the institution. Course materials I had developed, teaching awards I had won, students I had mentored, committees I had served. Excellence that had earned institutional recognition but never security, never permanence, never the guarantee that May would arrive without this particular notification.
The plaques were arranged on my shelf, forming a timeline of institutional validation: the TRU Student Empowerment Award (2021), the TRU Interculturalisation Award (2023), and the Faculty Council Service Award (2024). Each one represented students who had written nomination letters, colleagues who had advocated, and committees who had deliberated. Each one testified to work that the institution deemed exemplary. Yet on May 2, 2025, none of that mattered against the budget’s arithmetic.
Thirty days later, another notification arrived. This time, the subject line read: “Congratulations.” I had won the Faculty Council Teaching Award for 2025. The irony possessed a weight that was almost architectural. The institution that had deemed me expendable simultaneously declared I was exemplary. The same system that processed my termination processed my commendation. Two documents, two logics, two entirely separate bureaucratic pathways that never spoke to each other.
I understood something sitting at that kitchen table, something I had been circling around for years without language to name it: I had forgotten how to simply be. I could perform brilliantly. I could show up on time, deliver lectures, grade papers, serve on committees, support colleagues, and mentor students. I could produce evidence of my value constantly, compulsively, because survival demanded it. But when the institution finally severed that demand, when performance could no longer protect me, I discovered I had no idea who I was underneath all that doing.
The months between May and December 2025 felt like slow-motion drowning. I woke at 3 AM with panic attacks, my heart racing, convinced I had forgotten something critical, only to remember I had nothing to forget because I had no employment requiring vigilance.
I checked my email compulsively, even though I had no employer to email. I filled every hour with tasks, projects, obligations, anything to avoid the emptiness that waited when I stopped moving. The relief I expected from no longer needing to perform never arrived. Instead, what came was a vast, disorienting blankness, an inability to rest even when rest was finally possible.
Thompson Rivers University – Faculty Teaching Award 2026
Photo Credit: Jesal Thakkar, 2025
Author: amytucker
Weytk.
I am Amy Tucker, an educator whose life has been shaped by questions of belonging, precarity, and the institutions that hold us or let us fall.
I was the first person in my family to attend university. By the time I was twenty-five, I was a single mother of three, working at a donut shop, taking courses part-time when I could afford them, learning what it means to calculate whether you can afford both groceries and textbooks. Those years taught me things about resilience and systemic exclusion that no textbook could convey. They also taught me that the academy is simultaneously a site of possibility and a space where people like me were never quite expected to arrive.
For twenty-five years, I have worked in education, including eighteen years at Thompson Rivers University on the unceded territory of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwépemcúl'ecw. Seventeen of those years have been as a contract faculty member, teaching organisational behaviour, business ethics, strategic leadership, teamwork, creativity and innovation, and human resources. I also serve as Prior Learning Assessment Advisor, guiding learners to recognise and document the knowledge they carry from lived experience. My pedagogy draws from trauma-informed education, Indigenous methodologies, and humanities theory, approaching each subject as a human question shaped by power, meaning, and the knowledge systems we choose to honour.
I am currently completing my Doctor of Social Sciences at Royal Roads University, with defence expected in early Winter 2026. My dissertation, Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Belonging, Precarity, and Possibility with International Students in Higher Education, employs participatory visual methodology to document how international business students experience and theorise the gap between institutional inclusion rhetoric and lived belonging. The research integrates sociology, leadership, communication, ethics, and higher education studies, grounded in what I call asymmetrical precarity: a recognition that precarities can rhyme without being identical, enabling solidarity without appropriation.
I serve as Chair of the Non-Regular Faculty Committee for the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC, advocating for sessional and contract educators whose resilience too often subsidises institutional failures they never created. This work is inseparable from my scholarship: both are forms of witnessing, naming, and refusing to accept conditions that diminish human dignity.
My research interests include academic precarity, equity and inclusion in post-secondary institutions, labour in higher education, community-based and participatory methodologies, trauma-informed pedagogy, AI ethics, and leadership in crisis. I seek an interdisciplinary postdoctoral position, doctoral fellowship, or qualitative research project to continue this work.
Beyond academia, I am a monthly columnist for The Kamloops Chronicle and a regular book reviewer for The British Columbia Review. I represent Team Canada in age-group triathlon and am a long-distance open-water swimmer, finding in endurance sport the same lessons I find in scholarship: that meaningful work requires patience, that discomfort is often the pathway to transformation, and that we are capable of more than we imagine when we refuse to quit.
I carry within me threads of French ancestry reaching back to Acadian territory, a distant Mi'kmaq connection I hold with curiosity and respect rather than claim, and an Austrian grandfather who crossed an ocean knowing that belonging must be made rather than assumed. These inheritances shape how I understand identity, territory, and the ethics of conducting research and teaching on Indigenous lands.
I believe the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy. I believe research should serve transformation. And I believe that belonging, when it comes, is made rather than given.
Kukwstsétsemc.
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