I am writing from the other side of everything you are in the middle of right now, from the place you cannot quite see yet because you are still in the thick of the becoming, still in the part of the story that feels more like enduring than arriving,
and I want to tell you what is here.
I want to tell you what is waiting.
First, the practical things, because I know you, I know you need to know the practical things before you can let yourself feel the rest of it.
You are okay.
Financially, professionally, in all the ways that kept you awake at two in the morning doing the mathematics of whether you would make it through another April,
you are okay.
More than okay.
You found the room that was shaped like you. I know you have been looking for it for a very long time. I know there were years you stopped believing it existed,
but it exists.
It exists, and you are in it, and it feels exactly the way you imagined it would feel on the nights you let yourself imagine.
It feels like breathing. It feels like a morning that belongs to you. It feels like walking into a room and the room saying, “There you are. We have been waiting. Come in, come in, stay as long as you like.“
The doctorate is done.
I want to tell you that because I know how it weighs on you, the unfinished thing, the work that is so important and so yours.
It is done.
And it is extraordinary.
Not because a committee said so, though they did, but because it is true. Because you wrote it in your own voice, the voice that took years to trust, the voice that is scholarly and embodied and refuses to pretend that knowing happens outside of a body, outside of a life, outside of nineteen years of labour and love and parking lot mornings.
You wrote the truest thing.
Alonetude is in the world now. People are reading it. The ones who work in the in-between spaces, the ones on the contracts, the ones performing well in the parking lots of institutions that need their labour and withhold their belonging,
they are reading your words, and they are feeling less alone, and that is the work, that is the real work, that is what nineteen years was always building toward, even when it felt like it was building toward nothing.
Now let me tell you about the things that are not practical.
Let me tell you about a Tuesday morning.
An ordinary Tuesday. Not a milestone Tuesday. Not an achievement Tuesday.
Just a Tuesday when you woke up and lay still for a moment, the way you learned to do in Loreto,
and the first thing you felt was not the tightening.
The first thing you felt was yourself.
Present. Whole. Quietly, ordinarily, unremarkably glad to be alive on a Tuesday morning with the light coming through the window and nowhere to be for another hour and a cup of something warm in your future and the work you love waiting for you like a friend rather than a demand.
You lay in it, and you thought oh. So this is what they meant.
This is what rest was building toward. This is what the shore was practicing you for. This is the life on the other side of the performance of a life.
It is quieter than you expected. It is more ordinary than you expected.
It is so much better than anything you expected.
I want to tell you about your body.
Your shoulders come down.
I know that sounds like such a small thing. It is not a small thing. Your shoulders coming down is physical evidence that a woman is no longer waiting to find out whether she is still employed.
Your shoulders coming down is what safety feels like in the body.
You are safe. I need you to hear that all the way down.
You are safe.
The students found you.
The ones who needed you specifically. The ones who were on the contracts. The ones performing fine in the parking lots. The ones who read alonetude and recognized themselves in it and needed someone who had mapped the territory and come back to say I know this place, I know how to navigate this, here is what helped, here is how you find the shore inside yourself when there is no Loreto within reach.
You became that person.
I want to tell you about the writing.
You became a poet.
And you did not even know it.
I know that surprises you. But the line between scholar and poet turned out to be much thinner than you thought, and one morning you stopped trying to categorize yourself and just wrote what the truth required,
and what the truth required, Amy, was both.
It was always both. You were always both.
Tom knows.
I want to say that because I know you worry about whether the people who love you really see the whole of it.
Tom knows.
Not because you performed it less but because you finally let yourself be known the way you always knew how to know others, fully, carefully, without looking away.
And he stayed. Of course, he stayed. He has always been staying.
You are loved. You are chosen. You are someone’s permanent.
I want to tell you what I know now that I wish you knew then, in the middle of it, in the parking lot mornings, in the two a.m. turnings:
None of it was wasted.
Not one morning. Not one contract. Not one raised bar. Not one carefully worded rejection in professional language with warmth in the room.
None of it was wasted because it all became the work.
I want to leave you with something small.
A Tuesday morning. A cup of something warm. Your shoulders are coming down. The work you love is waiting like a friend.
A smooth stone in your pocket.
The knowledge, finally unshakeable, lived in the body, permanent as the shore,
that you were always good enough.
Come forward.
I am here. I am you. I am waiting for Tuesday morning, the open window, and the work that finally looks like what you always knew it was.
Come forward.
You have already done the hardest part.
All that is left now is the living of it.
And the living of it, Amy, the living of it is so very, very beautiful.
De tu yo futuro, que te ha estado esperando con los brazos abiertos y el corazón lleno. Ya casi llegas. Sigue caminando.
From your future self, who has been waiting for you with open arms and a full heart. You are almost here. Keep walking.
Future Amy Writer. Scholar. Poet. Whole. Keeper of smooth stones. Woman who came through. Still here. Still kind. Still luminous. Aquí estoy.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this letter were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
Reading Time: 3minutesThe precariat I document in this project is shaped by my specific location. I offer this as one situated, theorized account, with the explicit hope that it invites other accounts, from other bodies, in other contexts.
Reading Time: 3minutes
Title: Many Bodies, Same Ground
On the limits of any one account, and the invitation that follows from those limits.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
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
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
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
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
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
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Title: Still Standing
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
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.
The you that walked in the first time, folder tucked under your arm, lesson plan you had revised three times the night before because you wanted it to be right, because right mattered to you in that particular, cellular, uncompromising way it has always mattered to you,
the you that stood at the front of that room for the first time and felt the gravity of it, the privilege of it, the enormous ordinary miracle of a room full of people who had arrived willing to think differently than they had thought before.
I have been thinking about her. About you. About what I want to say now that I know what you did not know then.
You were so ready.
That is the first thing I want to tell you.
You were so ready and you did not know it. From the student’s side of the room, from the side that would later write you letters, send you emails years later that began with I have been thinking about something you said in class and I wanted you to know,
you were luminous.
I want to warn you about some things.
The bar will move.
I want you to know this from the beginning, before the first time it moves, before you exhaust yourself reaching for it and find it has shifted just beyond your hands.
The bar is not a measure of you. The bar is a mechanism. It is the system’s way of keeping you reaching, hungry, slightly off-balance, slightly too invested in the next thing to stop and ask why the last thing was not enough.
Reach for the bar because the reaching makes you better. Reach for the bar for yourself.
Do not reach for the bar for them.
Know the difference between a place that is developing you and a place that is extracting you.
The students are real.
This I want you to hold as the true north of the whole nineteen years, the thing that does not shift, the thing the system cannot touch or take or use without your permission.
When everything else feels uncertain, go back to the students.
You are going to be so tired.
I want to say this without softening it because you deserve honesty more than comfort.
You are going to be tired in a way that goes all the way down, tired in the bone, tired in the place that decides whether to keep going,
and you are going to keep going because you do not know how not to.
But I am going to tell you this:
Give so much. Give everything. And also, in the small moments, in the shore of yourself that belongs to no one else,
give something to you.
Give yourself the belief you give so freely to others. Give yourself the patience you give the struggling student.
You deserve your own generosity. You deserved it from the beginning.
You are going to find out that you did not belong there.
Not because of anything that was wrong with you. Because of everything that was right with you, and the particular cruelty of a room that needed you but was not built for you.
This is going to hurt in a way you are not prepared for.
You are going to spend years thinking the problem is you, turning yourself over looking for the missing piece.
There is no missing piece.
You were always the right shape. The room was the wrong shape.
When you finally understand this, it is going to feel like grief and also like freedom, grief and freedom arriving together the way they always do when something true finally breaks the surface.
I want to tell you about the shore.
You are going to go to a shore. Far from the institution.
You are going to sit with the sea which will ask nothing of you,
and you are going to cry the way you needed to cry for years, the real kind, the kind without an audience,
and when you are empty you are going to find underneath the empty the most important thing you have found in nineteen years.
Yourself.
Still there. Still whole. Still luminous under all the exhaustion and the performance and the careful management of being a person the institution kept evaluating.
I want to tell you about the poems.
You are going to write poems.
Not as scholarship, not as methodology, but because you are going to discover in the long quiet aftermath of all that noise,
that you are a writer.
That you always were.
I love you.
I love the woman who revised the lesson plan three times. I love the woman who could not walk past the struggling student. I love the woman who agonised at two in the morning over whether she had said exactly the right thing in exactly the right way to the person who most needed to hear it.
I love the woman who kept the actual record, who knew in her deepest self that she was good, that the work was good, that what happened in those rooms was extraordinary even when no one was calling it that.
I love the woman who is standing now on the other side of knowing, worn smooth by it, clarified by it, more herself for it than she has ever been,
still kind, still ethical, still in love with the work and the students and the lantern she carries into every room,
and finally, finally, in love with herself.
You made it through.
I wanted you to know from the beginning that you make it through.
Para la mujer que era antes de saber. Te vi siempre. Eras suficiente desde el principio. Con todo mi amor, desde el otro lado.
For the woman I was before I knew. I always saw you. You were enough from the beginning. With all my love, from the other side.
Still Here, Worn to Its Truest Shape Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Artist Statement: I photographed this piece of wood because of what had happened to it. Water, time, winter, something had stripped away everything that wasn’t essential, and what was left was the grain, the core, the particular shape that was always there. I thought: that is the woman who is still walking into those rooms. Not diminished. Clarified. This photograph belongs with this letter because both of them are addressed to the woman before the smoothing began, and both of them tell her: what comes through it is worth it.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
Not the version in the handbook. Not the version in the mission statement with its careful language about community and excellence and the transformative power of education.
The actual version. The one that runs underneath like a current you cannot see from the surface but that pulls at your legs if you stand in it long enough.
Here is how it works.
They find someone brilliant. Someone who loves the work with the particular love that makes a person do more than is required, give more than is contracted, stay later than anyone is watching,
and they hire her temporarily.
Not because the work is temporary. The work is permanent. The courses run every semester. The students keep arriving. The curriculum does not pause to acknowledge that the person delivering it is not sure if she will be delivering it next year.
They hire her temporarily because temporary is cheaper. Because temporary does not require the benefits, the security, the institutional commitment that permanent requires.
Because temporary keeps her grateful.
And a grateful worker is a compliant one.
This is not a conspiracy.
I want to say that clearly because the moment you name the structure someone will say you sound paranoid, you sound bitter, no one sat in a room and decided to do this to you.
They are right. No one sat in a room.
That is precisely the point. That is what makes it structural rather than personal. The harm does not require intention. The harm requires only a system that has decided certain kinds of labour are infinitely extractable from certain kinds of people who can be kept just insecure enough to keep extracting from.
The system does not hate her. The system does not see her.
That is not comfort. That is the definition of the problem.
She was called lucky.
She was told she was lucky to have the work, lucky to teach the courses she loved, lucky to be in the room, lucky that the institution kept finding a way to bring her back.
Lucky.
As though her nineteen years of expertise were a gift the institution was generously receiving rather than a resource it was systematically mining.
She felt the gratitude. She performed it beautifully. She understood, without anyone telling her, that the gratitude was part of the contract, the unwritten part, the part that kept the system functioning smoothly, that kept her from asking the questions the system could not comfortably answer.
Questions like: If I am not qualified enough to hire permanently, why am I qualified enough to carry the curriculum?
Questions like: At what point does temporary become a word that means we will take everything you have and give you nothing you can build a life on?
She did not ask these questions out loud.
She asked them in the parking lot. She asked them at two in the morning. She asked them in the shower where the sound covered the asking.
They called it flexibility.
Her flexibility meant: no pension contributions she could count on. No sick leave that did not cost her the income she could not afford to lose. No ability to take a mortgage on a contract that expired in April.
The institution called this flexibility.
She called it something else.
She called it the transfer of institutional risk onto the bodies of the people least able to carry it.
And here is the part that makes the grief complicated:
She loved it.
She genuinely, helplessly, permanently loved the work.
Her love was the subsidy.
Her love and the love of every brilliant, committed, devoted person working on a contract in every institution that has learned that passion is a resource you do not have to compensate fairly because it will show up anyway.
I am not bitter.
I want to say that and I want it to be true and mostly it is.
I am clear.
There is a difference between bitterness and clarity.
Bitterness is personal. Clarity is structural. Clarity names the system. Clarity holds the institution accountable without requiring a villain.
I want the structure changed.
I want a world where the next woman, as brilliant and devoted and careful as she has been, does not spend nineteen years as temporary.
She is still in the system.
But she is in it differently now.
She is in it with her eyes open. She is in it with the clear naming of what is happening and why and whose interests it serves.
She is in it with this poem, which is not bitterness but testimony.
Not grievance but record.
They used my labour and called it privilege.
They used my love and called it flexibility.
They used my devotion and called it inspiring.
They used my silence and called it professionalism.
I am no longer silent.
Not because I am angry, though I have earned the anger.
Because silence was the last thing they needed from me that I was still giving freely.
And I am done giving freely to a system that calculated the price of everything I offered and decided it did not have to pay it.
Aquí estoy. Con los ojos abiertos. Ya no en silencio.
Here I am. With open eyes. No longer silent.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
They gave me a contract the way you give someone an umbrella after the rain has already started,
a document, a date, a number of months carefully chosen to end just before anything could be called permanent.
I signed it.
Of course, I signed it. I signed it the first time with something close to joy, the particular joy of a person who has worked very hard and been seen working very hard and is finally, finally being let in.
I did not read the expiry date as a warning. I read it as a beginning.
That is the thing about the first contract. It feels like a door opening. It takes years to understand that it was never a door. It was a revolving one, and you were always going to end up back outside.
The second contract came and I signed it with slightly less joy and slightly more relief, which is a different thing, relief being what joy becomes when it has learned to be grateful just to still be here.
I was still here. That felt like something. I made it mean something.
Here is what no one tells you about living in one-year increments.
You cannot plan a garden.
That sounds small. It is not small.
A garden requires the belief that you will be there for the harvest, that the thing you put in the ground today will be yours to tend through all its seasons, that the roots go down into soil that belongs to you long enough to matter.
I could not plan a garden.
I could not plan the way people plan when they know they are staying.
I planned the way people plan when they are guests. Carefully. Lightly. Always aware of where the door was.
Every spring it came.
The email, or the meeting, or sometimes just the silence that lasted a beat too long before someone said we are planning to have you back.
Planning to.
Two words doing the quiet work of keeping a person just uncertain enough to be manageable.
Do you know what it does to a body, the annual uncertainty?
It does not break you all at once. That would almost be easier. A clean break, a clear moment, a before and after you could point to.
It is slower than that.
It is the way the shoulders never quite come down. The way sleep becomes a negotiation in the months before renewal. The way you cannot fully celebrate the good semester because somewhere in the back of every good thing is the question of whether there will be a next one.
And the cruelest part, the part that I am still sitting with,
is that they needed me.
Not abstractly. Not in the way institutions need warm bodies to fill rooms.
They needed me specifically. My expertise. My courses. My relationships with the students. My willingness to sit on the committees, cover the gaps, do the invisible work that kept things running while they searched, endlessly searched, for the person they actually wanted in the position I was already doing.
They used my labour to hold the place for someone else’s permanence.
I was the placeholder. For nineteen years, I was the placeholder.
And they were kind about it. That is the part that makes it complicated. They were genuinely kind. They appreciated me. They said so. They meant it.
Appreciation and belonging are not the same thing. I know that now.
I am tearing up the contract now.
Not in anger. In grief. In the quiet grief of a woman who finally understands what she was signing all those years,
and who is ready, for the first time, to sign something different.
Something that says I belong to my own future.
Something that says my labour is not available for indefinite borrowing.
Something that says I am not a placeholder. I am not pending. I am not provisional.
Something that has no expiry date because it is written in the only ink that does not fade:
the knowledge of her own worth, which was never, not for a single year of all those years, in question.
Aquí estoy. Ya no esperando renovación. Soy permanente en mí misma.
Here I am. No longer waiting for renewal. I am permanent within myself.
Woven into Something Not of Your Own Choosing Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Artist Statement: I found this plant in a greenhouse, a living thing that had been trained, woven, braided into a shape someone else chose for it. Still growing. Still green. Still entirely itself beneath the pattern that had been imposed upon it. I photographed it because the contract works the same way: take something living and weave it into increments, into one-year shapes, into a form that serves the institution’s aesthetics while the root keeps reaching down regardless. The braid is not the plant. The contract is not the person. Both are still alive underneath.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
I stood in the corridor of the Foundation Year Program at the University of King’s College in Halifax and read a door. Two posters were taped to its panels, framing the nameplate of Dr. Maria Euchner, Senior Fellow in the Humanities and Associate Director, FYP (Academic). The poster on the left said, in heavy black type: First-Year Fellows Don’t Make a Living Wage. The poster on the right said: Overworked. Underpaid. Disposable. Above the word “Overworked,” a hand had written “STILL” in blue marker, underlined twice.
I have spent years thinking about precarity in higher education. I have written about it as my doctoral committee at Royal Roads University helped me sharpen my argument. I have lived it as a contract academic at Thompson Rivers University for nearly two decades. I thought I understood the architecture. Standing in front of that door, I felt the weight of the word Still. That single adverb, written by hand, did more theoretical work than most of the literature I have cited.
Title: Still, Dr. Euchner’s Door, Foundation Year Program, University of King’s College, Halifax
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
What the Door Said
The posters were produced by the University of King’s College Teaching Association (UKCTA), the union representing Faculty Fellows and Senior Fellows in the Foundation Year Program. Faculty Fellows are appointed to three-year non-renewable contracts. Senior Fellows are appointed to two-year non-renewable contracts. According to a position posting for the role, the starting salary for a Faculty Fellow in the Humanities was $52,343 to $56,627 as of July 1, 2022, with future scales tied to bargaining (University of King’s College, 2026). The duties listed include four to eight hours of tutorials per week, eight hours of lecture attendance, weekly office hours, bi-weekly essay grading, and an average reading load of sixty pages per day, four days per week.
Set this beside the most recent calculation from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) Nova Scotia office. Saulnier and Williams (2024) calculated the 2024 living wage for Halifax at $28.30 per hour, the highest rate in Atlantic Canada. The CCPA methodology assumes a household with two adults, each working thirty-five hours per week to support two children, which translates into roughly $51,506 in annual earnings per adult before taxes. The arithmetic is uncomfortable. A first-year Faculty Fellow at the 2022 salary floor of $52,343, working a load that almost certainly exceeds thirty-five hours per week once preparation, marking, reading, and committee work are honestly counted, is hovering at the line. The poster is correct. When the actual hours are accounted for, the line is behind them.
A tentative agreement was reached and ratified in early April 2026, after conciliation talks broke down and a strike appeared imminent (Chiasson, 2026; Taylor, 2026). The strike was averted. The structural questions on that door remain.
The Word That Did the Work
The word “Still” was what stopped me. The literature on contingent and contract academic labour returns again and again to the same pattern: a campaign, a report, a brief moment of public attention, and then quiet. The poster on the right side of Dr. Euchner’s door was familiar; this poster had been up before. The handwritten Still in blue marker suggested that the same poster, or one very much like it, had been put up before. The fight had been waged. The conditions had shifted too little for the poster to come down.
Time itself becomes a feature of precarity. In my dissertation at Royal Roads, Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Interconnected Precarity, Belonging, and Possibility in Higher Education, I argue that contract faculty and international students are bound together by parallel vulnerabilities. I call this interconnected precarity. The institutional logic that recruits international students for tuition revenue and discards them at graduation is the same logic that hires Faculty Fellows for teaching capacity and discards them at the end of the contract. The pattern is rhythmic. The bodies rotate through. The titles remain. The students change, the Fellows change, and yet the work and the conditions of the work persist. Still.
The Titles and the Trap
I have been developing a concept in a separate manuscript, recently advanced to conditional acceptance at Group and Organization Management, that I call malperformative inclusion. It names a particular institutional move: an organization performs the gestures of inclusion through titles, ceremonies, publicity, and acknowledgement programs, while the underlying structures continue to exclude. The performance is inclusion in form only. It is inclusion that performs the function of exclusion under another name (Tucker, in press).
The phrase Faculty Fellow is a prestigious one. It carries the resonance of Oxford and Cambridge collegiate traditions, of community, of belonging. It signals scholarly seriousness. It tells parents, applicants, and donors that the people teaching the foundational program are valued members of an intellectual community. The reality, laid out in plain language on paper taped to a door, is that the Fellowship is a non-renewable contract, that the salary in the first year falls at or below the regional living wage, and that the position will end on a fixed date with no path to continuation. The title performs inclusion. The contract performs disposability. This is what I mean by malperformative inclusion. The door named it more economically than my chapter does.
A Door Is a Photograph Is a Method
I look at this door, and I see a photovoice frame. Photovoice is a participatory research methodology developed by Wang and Burris (1997) in which participants use photographs to document conditions of life that conventional reporting cannot reach. The image becomes a means of testimony. It carries information that paragraphs cannot, because the image asserts: this is here, this is now, this is real.
The Faculty Fellows had no need of a researcher to come and document their conditions. They produced their own photovoice frame. They printed the words. They taped them to a door at the height of an adult reader. They wrote Still by hand. The hand-lettered word is the methodological signature. It says: a person did this. A person stood in this hallway and amended the original poster because, despite its accuracy, it was no longer accurate enough. Conditions remained unchanged. The poster required updating. Still.
The Faculty Fellows at King’s are doing the same work with paper and tape. The door is the camera. The corridor is the gallery. The asterisk citing Living Wage Canada is the methodological footnote. I find this beautiful and devastating in equal measure.
What I Take With Me
I take three things from this door into my own work and into my dissertation defence in the coming weeks.
The first is that precarity is rarely solved by a single agreement. The strike was averted at King’s College. I am genuinely glad. I also know, from my work with the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of British Columbia (FPSE) and from my role as Chair of the Non-Regular Faculty Committee, that aversion is a pause, and resolution requires more. Three-year and two-year non-renewable contracts will continue to shape the working lives of the people who teach the foundational humanities program at one of Canada’s oldest universities. The poster will need to be taken down by the institution; the workers alone cannot remove it.
The second is that scholarly personal narrative is appropriate and, at times, necessary for this kind of moment. I write in this voice because the door is in the first person. The hand that wrote Still is a worker’s hand, personal and deliberate, distinct from any institution’s. Theory should answer in kind.
The third is that the Foundation Year Program’s foundation rests on the labour of people paid at or below the living wage of the city in which they live. The undergraduate students who arrive for their first year of university, often on student loans and family sacrifice, are taught by scholars whose own household economies are governed by precarity. Interconnected precarity is concrete, immediate, and present. It is the floor and the ceiling of the same building.
I left the corridor. I carried a photograph of a door. I carry it still.
References
Chiasson, N. (2026, April 8). Strike looming for some staff at Kings College in Halifax. Country 103.5 / Acadia Broadcasting. https://hotcountry1035.ca/2026/04/08/strike-set-for-some-staff-at-kings-college-in-halifax/
Saulnier, C., & Williams, R. (2024). 2024 living wages for Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Nova Scotia. https://www.policyalternatives.ca
Taylor, E. (2026, April 9). Strike avoided at University of King’s College after deal reached. Country 103.5 / Acadia Broadcasting. https://hotcountry1035.ca/2026/04/09/strike-avoided-at-university-of-kings-college-after-deal-reached/
Tucker, A. (in press). Malperformative inclusion as institutional practice [Commentary]. Group and Organization Management.
Tucker, A. (in progress). Through our eyes: A photovoice study of interconnected precarity, belonging, and possibility in higher education [Doctoral dissertation, Royal Roads University].
University of King’s College. (2026). Faculty fellowship in the humanities [Position posting]. https://ukings.ca/campus-community/employment/faculty-fellowship/
University of King’s College Teaching Association. (2026, April 9). Statement on tentative agreement. UKCTA.
Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education and Behaviour, 24(3), 369-387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309
The thing about grief is that it arrives wearing unexpected clothes.
Sometimes it shows up in the middle of a Tuesday, in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a life that looks, from the outside, like it is still standing.
Mine showed up somewhere between the third rejection and the moment I realized I had been caring for people and institutions that were carefully, professionally, without reciprocating that care.
And here is what makes it so hard to say out loud, what makes it sit so deep inside, in the part of the chest that is not quite the heart but lives next door to it:
I am kind.
I know that about myself the way I know my own handwriting. I have always been kind. Not as a strategy, not as a performance, not as the careful warmth institutions train you to project, but the real kind, the kind that costs something, the kind that sits with people in the difficult places without looking for the exit.
I would do anything for anyone.
That is simply a fact about me That is a fact about me that I have lived out in a thousand quiet ways no one ever put in a file, no one ever counted, no one ever thought to mention in the meeting where they decided I was not quite enough.
And my ethics.
I need to talk about my ethics because they are not a section on a curriculum vitae, they are not a course I took and then put away. They are the architecture of me. They are the reason I have never once let a student fall without trying to catch them, never once used my power carelessly, never once walked out of a classroom without asking myself if I had done right by the people in it.
The thought of causing pain, even accidentally, even at a distance, even to someone who might never know,
it undoes me.
It lives in me for days. It wakes me in the night. It sends me back to the moment of it, turning it over, looking for the place where I could have been better, softer, more careful with the fragile thing.
That is who I am.
That is the person who sat in those rooms and was found not quite right, not quite fit, not quite the shape they were looking for.
And the grief of that, the specific grief of that, is not just about the job, is not just about the title or the permanence or the office with my name on the door.
The grief is this:
I know my own heart. I have always known my own heart. And my heart is good.
Not perfect. Not without error. But good in the deep way, good in the way that has cost me things, that has kept me up at night, that has made me choose integrity in the moments when choosing otherwise would have been so much easier.
And they looked at that heart and said not qualified.
That is the wound that does not close cleanly.
That is the grief that does not have a tidy ending, that does not resolve into wisdom on a schedule, that sits in the deep inside and asks the question I am most afraid of:
If this is not enough, what was any of it for?
An answer has yet to arrive.
I have only the question and the ache of it and the knowledge, stubborn and unshakeable, that my kindness was real, my ethics were real, my care was real,
even when the system looked straight at all of it and looked away.
Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
I learned the word enough the way you learn a language no one speaks in your house.
From the outside. By watching. By getting it wrong and being corrected with a look.
I thought enough was a place. A destination with coordinates. If I worked this hard, if I published this much, if I sat on enough committees, answered enough emails at midnight, held enough office hours, wrote enough letters of reference for people who would never write one back,
I would arrive.
I would finally stand somewhere solid and someone would say, yes, this. You. Here.
They never said it.
There was always one more thing. One more credential. One more specialisation. One more revision. One more year of proving what I had already proven the year before, and the year before that, in the same rooms, to the same people, who kept forgetting they had already seen me.
Or perhaps they never forgot. Perhaps that was the point.
I reached the bar.
I want you to understand that. I reached it. I put both hands on it, pulled myself up, stood on top of it, and looked them in the eye.
And they raised it.
Quietly. Professionally. With a smile that said we only want what is best for the department.
So I climbed again.
I got the specialisation they mentioned. I built the expertise they suggested. I redesigned the courses, updated the research, learned the new framework, attended the conference, wrote the paper, revised the paper, revised the revision, and brought it back.
And they raised it again.
One more thing. There was always one more thing, and I believed each time that this would be the last thing, that this would be the thing that finally made me legible to them, finally translated me into a language they were willing to read.
I gave you everything.
I need to say that plainly, without apology, without softening it for your comfort.
I gave you my mornings before my children were awake. I gave you my evenings after my body had already given out. I gave you my health, my rest, my capacity for joy, the slow years of my life that I will not get back, offered up like evidence, like if I just bled enough in the right places you would finally call it qualified.
I gave you my expertise and you used it while deciding someone else deserved to own it.
I gave you my loyalty and you gave me contract renewal pending.
I gave you my belief that the system worked, that merit was real, that the path was honest, that if I followed every instruction the door would open.
And you raised the bar one final time and called it a national search.
Never enough.
It sounds like a personal failing. It sounds like something that lives in the one who is lacking.
But I have seen enough now to know the shape of it, the architecture of a system that needs you insufficient, that requires your hunger to function, that would lose its power the moment you believed you were already whole.
Never enough was never about me.
It was a door with no handle on the inside.
It was a game with rules that changed when I learned them.
It was a bar on a pulley held by hands that were never going to let it rest.
I am done climbing.
I am done bringing more to people who have decided that more will never be the right amount.
I am enough in the way a river is enough, in the way the morning is enough, in the way nineteen years of changed lives is enough,
whether they counted it or not.
They never counted it.
But I do.
Aquí estoy. Siempre he sido suficiente. I have always been enough.
Spanish translations assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com)
What the Tide Has Always Known Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Artist Statement: I took this photograph at the edge where the water returns, where the sea neither tries nor explains itself, but arrives. I was thinking about the word enough. How the tide does not credential itself before reaching shore. How the water does not revise itself to please the sand. I photographed it from above, looking down, trying to learn something I had been taught to forget: that arriving is not the same as being permitted. That the shore receives the tide because the tide is the tide, not because the tide proved it deserved to be.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
They said it with such clean mouths, such pressed collars, such careful grammar,
as if the words were a gift and I should be grateful for the clarity.
You are not quite what we are looking for.
I went home and looked in the mirror for the missing thing,
the gap between my face and the face they had already chosen
before I walked through the door.
I counted my degrees like rosary beads. I counted my years.
I counted the papers, the classrooms, the students who wept at the end of term
and said, you changed something in me.
None of it was currency here.
They smiled while they did it. That is the part that stays,
the smile, the warmth in the room while I was being measured
against a ruler I was never meant to hold.
I rewrote my letter. I softened my edges. I learned their language
the way an immigrant learns to laugh at jokes that are about her.
I applied again.
We had many strong candidates this year.
I bought a new suit. I straightened what was already straight.
I arrived early, stayed late, published in their journals,
cited their names like prayers, sat on the committees no one wanted,
carried the invisible work in both arms like groceries up four flights of stairs,
and smiled, because you must always smile.
We felt someone else was a better fit.
Better fit.
A sock drawer. A parking space. A peg in the right-shaped hole.
I have an education. I have nineteen years.
I have read every book they told me would be enough,
and then the next book, and the next,
following the breadcrumb trail they kept moving just ahead of my hand.
I taught the exact same courses.
I stood in the exact same rooms, at the exact same hour,
holding the exact same ideas they would later decide
required someone else's mouth.
And when they said no, I punished myself with more work,
more late nights, more hours offered up like proof,
like penance, like if I just gave enough of myself
there would finally be nothing left to reject.
The cruelest part is that I believed them.
For so long, I believed the problem lived in me,
in the particular shape of my ambition,
the particular sound of my voice,
the particular way I took up space,
which was always either too much
or so little I became furniture.
I have sat in rooms where the air itself said this was never designed for you,
and smiled, and contributed, and been thanked in the minutes no one reads.
I have been told I am inspiring.
Inspiring is what they call you when they have decided you are a visitor.
You are not qualified.
Say it again. Say it clean.
Let it mean what it has always meant,
underneath the careful grammar,
underneath the pressed collars,
underneath the warmth in the room while the door was already closing.
I am still here.
I am still here, which is its own kind of answer,
though I am so tired of the question being me.
Aquí estoy.
—
*Spanish translations assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com)*
The One Who Stayed Anyway Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Artist Statement: I photographed this pigeon through the glass of a window I was not sure I was allowed to stand at. The bird did not know it was being watched, or did not care. It had chosen the ledge. It was facing the sun. This photograph belongs beside this poem because the bird did not ask permission to remain, and it remained. The light behind it is almost too bright to look at. That felt right.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
Somatic Labour, Structural Harm, and the Body as Evidence: An Extended Literature Review Section
Why I Needed More Than I Already Had
I want to be honest about why this section exists. When I finished the foundational literature review, the one tracing Nash (2004), Brown (2010, 2012), van der Kolk (2014), Haraway (1988), and the others who gave VPAS its bones, I felt something unresolved in my chest. The intellectual genealogy was there. The methodology was grounded. But there was a dimension of what I had lived through in nineteen years of contract academic faculty work at Thompson Rivers University that none of those frameworks, taken alone, could fully name. What I had experienced was something more specific: the invisible, uncompensated, daily work of managing my body’s responses to a chronically threatening institutional environment while performing enthusiasm, care, and collegial warmth as conditions of continued employment. I needed language for that. I found it in the scholarship this section reviews.
This section is, in itself, an act of SPN methodology: I am telling you what I needed, why I needed it, and what I found. The theoretical content is real and rigorously sourced, but the path to it was personal before it was scholarly. That is the VPAS order: V before P, embodied experience before structural analysis. I am following that order here even in the literature review itself, because the literature review is also a research document, and its shape should model the methodology it describes. All sources have been verified for publication year, author, title, and publisher accuracy as of March 2026. References follow standard scholarly citation format throughout.
Somatic Labour: Finding a Name for What My Body Had Been Doing
The term I have come to use for what I experienced across nineteen contract years is somatic labour. I define it as the invisible, uncompensated, and structurally produced work of managing the body’s physiological responses to chronically threatening institutional environments. It is labour in the full economic sense: it consumes time, energy, and physical capacity; it is performed in the service of institutional functioning; and it is extracted without acknowledgement or compensation from the workers who perform it. I arrived at this term by triangulating three bodies of scholarship that each named part of what I had been carrying.
The first was Hochschild (1983). In The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Hochschild named what she called emotional labour: the work of managing one’s emotional expressions in the service of organizational goals. Her research focused on flight attendants and bill collectors, and she identified two strategies workers use: surface acting, changing one’s outward expression without altering one’s inner state, and deep acting, attempting to genuinely induce the required emotional state from the inside. I read Hochschild and felt the precise architecture of what I had been doing for two decades. Every email to a department chair I disagreed with, every performance of enthusiasm at a professional development day designed for tenure-track faculty, every moment of visible warmth in a hallway conversation with a colleague who had no idea my contract expired in three months: surface acting and deep acting, repeated thousands of times, in service of an institution that kept no record of that labour and carried none of its cost. Hochschild’s framework gave me the first piece of the language I needed, and it is directly formative of the P component of VPAS, which requires the structural analysis that moves personal experience from “I am exhausted” to “this exhaustion was extracted.”
The second tradition was the affective labour scholarship developed by Hardt and Negri (2000) in Empire and extended in Multitude (2004). Hardt and Negri define affective labour as labour that produces or modifies social relationships, affects, and subjectivities rather than discrete material commodities. Reading this, I understood something I had been unable to name before: the specific thing I produced in every classroom, every office hour, every email written with care, was a relational and affective environment. Students felt seen. They felt intellectually challenged and personally supported. That relational environment was the output of my labour, and it accrued entirely to the institution. The institutional reputation for strong teaching in the humanities, the student retention that followed from feeling genuinely taught rather than processed: those benefits were institutional. The costs, the fraying of my own relational capacity, the erosion of the energy I might have directed toward my own scholarship, were mine alone. Lazzarato (1996) names this economy of immaterial labour with precision that I find both clarifying and enraging, which is exactly the response the P component is designed to produce: structural analysis that refuses to allow the personal cost to remain individualized and invisible.
The third tradition was Levine (1997). In Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, Levine argued before van der Kolk’s work reached wide public circulation that traumatic experience produces specific physiological responses that persist in the body as chronic holding patterns: muscular tension, altered breathing, disrupted digestive function, nervous system dysregulation. Levine added something I found crucial: the body’s responses to threat are adaptive. Their persistence reflects the body’s accuracy as a recording instrument. The body that tightened every September when the new contract had arrived late, and that learned to brace for the institutional silence that sometimes stretched weeks past the teaching start date, was functioning exactly correctly. It was recording the conditions it inhabited. The A component of VPAS is built on this premise: what the body does is evidence, and the scholar’s obligation is to document that evidence rather than dismiss it as merely personal or merely emotional.
How This Scholarship Shapes What VPAS Does
I want to be specific about how the scholarship in this section changed the framework I was building, because the contribution is concrete rather than general.
Hochschild (1983) and Hardt and Negri (2004) gave the P component its structural precision. Before I had read them carefully, I knew the P component needed to connect personal experience to structural conditions. But “structural conditions” was doing too much work as a phrase: it was simultaneously too broad and too abstract. What Hochschild and Hardt and Negri gave me was specificity. The structural condition I was naming was the institutional appropriation of affective and relational labour without acknowledgement, compensation, or reciprocity. That is a precise claim, and it is the kind of precise claim the P component requires if it is to function as structural analysis rather than as frustrated complaint. I owe these theorists the difference between those two things.
Levine (1997), alongside van der Kolk (2014) and Porges (2011), gave the A component its epistemological confidence. I had always included the A component in VPAS because I believed bodily action was evidence, but I had a nagging awareness that this belief required defence. What if a doctoral committee member, trained in positivist methodology, asked me to justify treating my own body’s actions as research data? Levine, van der Kolk, and Porges together constitute that justification. Levine establishes that physiological responses to structural conditions are adaptive and accurate. Van der Kolk establishes that they are measurable and lasting. Porges establishes that they are theorisable within a map of nervous system states that any scholar can read. My body’s actions during thirty days at the Sea of Cortez, including the compulsive productivity of the first week, the insomnia of Days 8 through 11, the first afternoon I sat still without checking my phone on Day 16, and the reach for colour on Day 27, are the argument. This section of the literature review is what makes that claim defensible in a doctoral context.
The critical wellness scholarship reviewed below, particularly Lorey (2015), Cvetkovich (2012), and Han (2015), gave the P component something I had been circling without quite catching: a framework for critiquing institutional wellness discourse that manages the symptoms of structural harm while making the structural conditions that produced it more stable and less visible. I had been calling this malperformative care in my thinking, and finding the scholarly language for it in Austin’s (1962) performativity theory and Butler’s (1993) extensions changed the quality of the structural analysis I was capable of. The P component can now name precisely why an Employee Assistance Programme that offers contract faculty counselling for occupational distress is structurally insufficient: it performs care without producing the structural change that genuine care would require. That is a theoretical claim grounded in verified scholarship, and VPAS required it.
Finally, the phenomenology of attention scholarship, Kaplan and Kaplan (1989), Zajonc (2009), and Hart (2004), gave me the theoretical language for something that was happening in the A component that I had been describing only photographically. When I stopped photographing in black and white on Day 27 and reached, without conscious decision, for colour, I knew something had shifted. I knew it was evidence. What I lacked was the scholarly vocabulary to explain what kind of knowing that was, and why the absence of conscious decision was the most significant part. Zajonc’s (2009) concept of delicate empiricism, knowing that remains present to the phenomenon before rushing to categorize or interpret, names exactly the epistemological quality of that moment. The A component is, at its best, an act of delicate empiricism: documenting what the body did before the analytical mind has processed what it means. This section grounds that claim in a verifiable scholarly tradition.
Ahmed and the Feeling of Being Out of Step
I came to Ahmed (2004) through recognition rather than through affect theory. Reading The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I encountered her concept of the “affect alien”: the person whose feelings fail to align with the dominant affective scripts of their environment. Ahmed argues that happiness is socially directed, oriented toward institutionally approved objects, and that those who feel grief, rage, or exhaustion where they are expected to feel gratitude or enthusiasm are treated as misaligned, difficult, or ungrateful. I had felt misaligned, difficult, and ungrateful for years without having a theoretical frame for why those labels were structural rather than personal. Ahmed gave me that frame. The contract faculty member who cannot sustain performed enthusiasm for an institutional culture that has never acknowledged her labour is an affect alien in Ahmed’s sense. The V component of VPAS creates the scholarly space in which the affect alien can document her experience with rigour and without apology, and the P component establishes that her misalignment is a structural effect rather than a personal failure.
Ahmed (2012), in On Being Included, extended this analysis into institutional diversity discourse, examining the affective demands placed on racialized and marginalized scholars by institutions that claim commitment to inclusion while maintaining the structural conditions that produce exclusion. I hold this extension with care, because my own positionality as a white settler academic means that the intersectional dimensions of what Ahmed describes in this text exceed my own experience. I include it here because the VPAS Framework must be legible and usable beyond my own positionality, and Ahmed’s (2012) analysis identifies dimensions of structural harm that the P component must be capable of naming even where they diverge from my own.
Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism arrived in my reading life at the right moment. Berlant defines it as the condition in which something one desires is also an obstacle to one’s flourishing. I had spent years attached to the possibility of a permanent position at an institution that was structurally committed to the contingency of my employment. That attachment was real, and it was instrumentalized: it kept me available, compliant, and willing to absorb costs that a worker without that attachment would have refused. The P component of VPAS requires the scholar to identify the structural conditions that produced their experience, and Berlant insists that those conditions include the internal attachments that the institution cultivates and exploits. I find this the most uncomfortable theoretical claim in the framework, because it requires me to analyse my own hope as a site of structural vulnerability. I include it because the scholarship that makes us uncomfortable with our own collusions is often the scholarship that matters most.
Naming Malperformative Care
There is a thing that happens in institutions that I have been trying to name accurately for years. It looks like care. It has the structural features of care: employee assistance programmes, counselling referrals, mental health days, wellness committees, mindfulness workshops offered in the late afternoon when contract faculty have already taught three sections and answered sixty emails. It has the language of care: resilience, self-care, boundary-setting, work-life balance. What it does, functionally, is manage the symptoms of structural harm in ways that make the structural conditions that produce those symptoms more stable and less visible. I call this malperformative care, and finding the scholarly vocabulary to ground that term changed the quality of the P component’s structural analysis.
The term draws on Austin’s (1962) concept of performative speech acts and Butler’s (1993) extension of performativity in Bodies That Matter. A malperformative act is one that goes through the formal motions of a practice while systematically failing to produce the substantive outcomes that practice is designed to achieve. Lorey’s (2015) analysis of governmental precarisation provided the political economy framing: Lorey argues that wellness discourse functions as a technology of precarisation by individualizing the response to structural harm, making the structural conditions that produce the harm more stable and less contestable. Reading Lorey alongside Austin and Butler gave me the theoretical architecture for a claim I had been making experientially for years.
Cvetkovich (2012), in Depression: A Public Feeling, offered something unexpected: permission to understand the Third Shore blog as a depression archive. Cvetkovich develops this concept to name collections of cultural and personal documents that testify to the structural conditions that produce collective emotional suffering. She insists that depression in academic and activist contexts is a political condition with political causes, and that treating it as individual pathology requiring individual treatment is itself a political act. The Third Shore project is a depression archive in Cvetkovich’s sense: it is a structured scholarly record of what structural harm costs the body that inhabits it, and what recovery requires. The VPAS Framework is the structure that makes that record rigorous rather than merely confessional.
Han (2015), in The Burnout Society, named something I recognized in my own first week at Loreto. Han argues that contemporary neoliberal societies produce burnout through the imperative of achievement: the worker internalizes productivity norms so thoroughly that exploitation becomes self-exploitation. I arrived at the Sea of Cortez with a research plan, a content calendar, and a daily writing quota. I was on unpaid leave, sitting on a beach in Baja California, and I was performing productivity for an audience of one. Han’s analysis explains why: the achievement imperative persists even when the institutional context disappears, because it has been internalized as self. The VPAS Framework’s A component documents this: the first entries from Loreto are characterized by a quality of strained industry that the later entries have moved past, and that difference is evidence. Han gives me the theoretical language for what that evidence means.
Metzl and Hansen (2014), in their Social Science and Medicine article, introduced structural competency: the capacity to recognize that health outcomes are produced by structural conditions rather than individual behaviour or biology alone. Their argument is that structural competency requires practitioners to shift analysis from lifestyle choices to structural determinants. I have found this framework clarifying for the P component in a specific way: structural competency is the epistemological orientation the P component enacts. Every time a VPAS entry moves from “I was exhausted” to “I was exhausted because the institution extracted nineteen years of affective and somatic labour without acknowledgement or compensation,” it is performing structural competency. This is a clinical and policy framework I am applying to scholarly self-analysis, and the translation is legitimate because the structural conditions that produce harm in health contexts and the structural conditions that produce harm in academic labour contexts are, in many cases, the same conditions.
Attention, Restoration, and What the Sea Was Actually Doing
I spent a long time in the early entries from Loreto trying to be productive. I photographed on schedule. I wrote on schedule. I held to the research plan with a rigidity that, reading those entries now, I recognize as a nervous system still operating in threat-activation. What I was unable to do, for nearly two weeks, was simply be present to the environment without converting presence into output. The shift, when it came, was a change in the quality of my attention that preceded any conscious choice.
Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) developed Attention Restoration Theory in The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective, and reading it I found the theoretical framework for what the Sea of Cortez was doing to my nervous system across thirty days. Their theory identifies four properties of restorative environments: being away, a change of context that interrupts habitual attentional demands; extent, an environment rich enough to occupy the mind without effort; fascination, stimuli that capture attention involuntarily; and compatibility, an environment that matches one’s current needs and inclinations. The Sea of Cortez offered all four, and Kaplan and Kaplan’s research provides the evidence that these properties are reliably associated with the recovery of directed attentional capacity. The A component documents this recovery: the entries from Days 14 through 30 have a different quality of attention in them, a slower rhythm, a longer gaze, a willingness to describe rather than immediately analyse. That difference is data. Kaplan and Kaplan’s framework is what allows me to claim it as such.
Zajonc (2009), in Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love, gave me the phrase I have returned to most often in thinking about what the A component is actually doing at its best: delicate empiricism. He draws the concept from Goethe’s scientific method, which required the scientist to remain present to the phenomenon without rushing to categorize, explain, or reduce it. This is precisely what the A component asks the scholar to do: document what the body did before the analytical mind has processed what it means. The reach for the colour photograph on Day 27 was delicate empiricism before I had words for it. My body knew something my analytical mind had yet to organize into an argument. The A component is the methodological instrument that preserves that prior knowing as evidence, and Zajonc is the theoretical source that establishes why that preservation is epistemologically significant rather than merely charming.
Hart (2004), in “Opening the Contemplative Mind in the Classroom,” published in the Journal of Transformative Education, documents what he calls contemplative knowing: a mode of knowing that integrates intuition, imagination, and felt sense alongside analytical reasoning, and that produces forms of insight that analytic knowing alone is unable to generate. Hart was writing about pedagogy, but the implications for VPAS are direct. The framework’s sequence, V before A before P before S, is a contemplative sequence: it begins in felt experience, documents embodied action, and only then moves to structural analysis and theoretical engagement. The S component grounds the V and A components in a scholarly conversation that extends their reach, without displacing them. Hart’s work confirms that this sequence is epistemologically coherent.
The Blog as Counter-Archive
There is something I want to say directly about why the Third Shore blog exists as a public document rather than as a private research journal. I want to say it in the language this section of the literature review has been building, because I think the theoretical framing changes what the claim means.
Thompson Rivers University maintains an official archive of institutional life. That archive contains enrolment numbers, completion rates, course evaluation scores, budget allocations, and strategic plan documents. It contains no record of what it cost the bodies of contract faculty members to produce those numbers across decades of structural insecurity. It contains no record of the somatic labour, the emotional and affective extraction, the physiological holding patterns that nineteen years of precarious employment produced in the people who delivered the institution’s teaching. That record is absent from the official archive, because its presence would require the institution to acknowledge costs it has invested in making invisible.
Stoler (2002), in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, theorized the colonial archive as a technology of governance that structures what can be known, who can know it, and whose experience is rendered legible as evidence. I am working at a much smaller institutional scale than Stoler, but her framework applies: the institutional archive is a technology of governance, and what it excludes is a political choice. The Third Shore blog, and the VPAS Framework that structures it, produces a counter-archive: a record of the experience that the official archive omits. The V component archives somatic and emotional evidence. The P component archives structural analysis that connects that evidence to systemic conditions. The A component archives embodied action as primary research data. The S component archives theoretical engagement that makes the record scholarly rather than merely testimonial. Every VPAS entry is an archival act, and the archive it is building is the one the institution has chosen to leave unmade.
Derrida (1996), in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, argues that the drive to archive is always also a drive to destroy competing records: the official archive actively forecloses other records as much as it preserves; forms of preservation. Reading this in the context of my own institutional experience, I understood something about the specific form of harm that precarious academic labour inflicts: it is designed to be forgotten. Contract faculty leave. Their labour disappears into the institution’s outcomes without a paper trail that connects the outcome to the worker who produced it. The Third Shore project is my refusal of that forgetting. The VPAS Framework is the methodological structure that makes that refusal scholarly rather than merely sentimental, rigorous rather than merely angry.
Table 6: The Scholarship This Section Adds to VPAS
The following table maps the additional scholarly sources reviewed in this section to the VPAS components they most directly inform. It follows the format established in the foundational literature review and is numbered Table 6 accordingly.
Scholar(s)
Key Work
VPAS Component(s)
What It Gave the Framework
Hochschild (1983)
The Managed Heart
P, V
Named emotional labour as structural extraction; gave P the precision to distinguish personal exhaustion from institutional appropriation
Hardt and Negri (2004)
Multitude
P
Affective labour theory; relational outputs of teaching accrue to institutions; costs borne exclusively by workers
Levine (1997)
Waking the Tiger
A
Body’s responses are adaptive and accurate; somatic holding patterns are reliable evidence; grounds A component’s epistemological confidence
Ahmed (2004)
The Cultural Politics of Emotion
V, P
Affect aliens; V creates space for misaligned feeling; P names misalignment as structural effect rather than personal failure
Ahmed (2012)
On Being Included
P
Compound affective demands on marginalized scholars; intersectional dimensions the P component must name
Berlant (2011)
Cruel Optimism
P
Internal attachments as sites of structural exploitation; P must analyse hope as well as harm
Cvetkovich (2012)
Depression: A Public Feeling
V, P
Third Shore as depression archive; V and P as archival functions producing a structured scholarly record
Han (2015)
The Burnout Society
P, A
Achievement imperative; self-exploitation; A documents its costs across Loreto entries; P names its structural source
Metzl and Hansen (2014)
Structural Competency
P
P as structural competency in practice; shift from “I was exhausted” to naming the institutional extraction that produced it
Kaplan and Kaplan (1989)
The Experience of Nature
A
Attention Restoration Theory; A documents attentional recovery across 30 days; Sea of Cortez as restorative environment with all four ART properties
Zajonc (2009)
Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry
A, V
Delicate empiricism; A preserves the body’s prior knowing before analytical processing; Day 27 colour shift as primary evidence
Hart (2004)
Opening the Contemplative Mind
A, S
VPAS sequence as epistemologically coherent contemplative structure; contemplative knowing as legitimate scholarly mode
Stoler (2002)
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power
All
Counter-archive theory; each VPAS entry as a record the official institutional archive has chosen to leave unmade
Derrida (1996)
Archive Fever
All
Official archives foreclose competing records; Third Shore as methodological refusal of institutional forgetting
Table 6. Additional Scholarly Sources and Their Contributions to the VPAS Framework. Sources verified for publication year, author, title, and publisher accuracy as of March 2026. All references follow standard scholarly citation format. Tucker (2026) refers to the current author’s doctoral research at Royal Roads University.
Three Gaps I Cannot Yet Fill
I want to close this section by naming three places where the scholarship runs out before the questions do, because an honest literature review acknowledges the limits of what the literature can currently provide.
The first is the intersection of somatic labour and disability. The scholarship on emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) and affective labour (Hardt & Negri, 2004) has been substantially developed within feminist, labour, and cultural studies, but its intersection with disability studies and the specific somatic experiences of disabled academic workers remains underdeveloped. Price (2011), in Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, provides one entry point, documenting how academic institutional norms are built around assumptions of neurotypical and able-bodied functioning that systematically exclude and harm disabled scholars. The VPAS Framework’s A component, with its emphasis on what the body actually did, requires future development that is accountable to the diversity of bodily experience across disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence. This is a gap I hold with seriousness rather than with reassuring gestures toward future work.
The second gap is methodological: the relationship between the daily A component documentation the VPAS Framework produces and the longer-term patterns of somatic evidence it accumulates is underspecified. Van der Kolk (2014) and Levine (1997) both address the long-term patterning of somatic responses, but the protocols for connecting individual daily entries to longitudinal somatic analysis have yet to be developed for a framework like VPAS. The thirty sequential days of the Third Shore project may offer a starting point for that development, but the work remains ahead.
The third gap is about reach. Ahmed (2004), Berlant (2011), and Han (2015) have all found readers well beyond their academic disciplines, because the experiences they theorize are widespread and the language they offer is clarifying rather than merely specialized. The application of these frameworks to Canadian post-secondary labour conditions has so far been largely confined to academic audiences. The VPAS Framework’s blog form is an attempt to close that gap: to produce scholarship that travels between the doctoral committee and the contract faculty member reading on their phone between classes, and that is legible and useful to both. Whether that attempt succeeds is an empirical question I am still living inside.
Additional References
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. Duke University Press.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” Routledge.
Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression: A public feeling. Duke University Press.
Derrida, J. (1996). Archive fever: A Freudian impression (E. Prenowitz, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1995)
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2010)
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Harvard University Press.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. Penguin Press.
Hart, T. (2004). Opening the contemplative mind in the classroom. Journal of Transformative Education, 2(1), 28-46. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541344603259311
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labour. In P. Virno & M. Hardt (Eds.), Radical thought in Italy: A potential politics (pp. 133-147). University of Minnesota Press.
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.
Maslach, C. (1982). Burnout: The cost of caring. Prentice-Hall.
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Duke University Press.
Metzl, J. M., & Hansen, H. (2014). Structural competency: Theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality. Social Science and Medicine, 103, 126-133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.06.032
Price, M. (2011). Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. University of Michigan Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Duke University Press.
Stoler, A. L. (2002). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. University of California Press.
Zajonc, A. (2009). Meditation as contemplative inquiry: When knowing becomes love. Lindisfarne Books.
