Title: Many Bodies, Same Ground
On the limits of any one account, and the invitation that follows from those limits.
The precariat I document in this project is shaped by my specific location: white, settler, Canadian, English-speaking, working within a particular institutional culture at a particular historical moment. I know that. I want to say it plainly here, in a post of its own, because it matters to the meaning of everything else.
Title: Fractured Ground
Precarious academic labour looks different across national contexts, languages, gender, race, and the institutional cultures of different countries and systems. A contract instructor in Mexico navigates different structures, different protections or their absence, different relationships between labour, identity, and institutional belonging, than a contract instructor in Canada. A sessional lecturer in the United Kingdom faces different union landscapes, different visa conditions, different histories of what the university is and who it serves. A contingent faculty member in the United States works within a different legal framework, a different geography of precarity, than someone in a Brazilian federal university or a South African college under austerity. The structural conditions are related, but they are far from identical, and collapsing them into a single story would do harm to each one.
Title: What Endures
What is shared across these contexts is real and significant: the insecurity, the chronic self-monitoring, the way worth becomes tied to the next contract, the exhaustion of performing enthusiasm for an institution that holds you at arm’s length, the particular loneliness of caring deeply about work that the system treats as interchangeable. These are patterns that cross borders. This project names them from one body, in one country, in one language.
Your account is the one this one cannot give. I hope you write it.
What is different across these contexts is equally real and equally significant. I offer this project as one situated, documented, theorized account, grounded in the specificity of where I stood and what I carried. It is the beginning of an argument, and beginnings require continuation. The next study needs more voices, more bodies, more contexts, in other languages and other institutional landscapes, with methodologies capable of holding that breadth without flattening it.
If you are reading this and you recognize something here, I am glad the account reached you. If you are reading this and thinking: but it was different for me, my country, my language, my body, then I want you to know that difference is exactly what this project is calling for. Your account is the one this one cannot give. I hope you write it.
Title: Carried Here
Title: Still Standing
The stones hold each other. That is enough to begin.
Does your experience of precarity look different from this account: a different country, language, body, or institution? I’d welcome your response in the comments below.
