Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

Lessons Learned in the Rutgers University Strike

2024-01-19T10:19:04-08:00

In mid-April 2023, thousands of full-time faculty, adjunct faculty and graduate student workers at Rutgers University staged an historic five-day strike at campuses across New Jersey. It was the first strike among academic workers in the school’s 257-year history, and three locals of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) stood together on the picket line and in negotiations to achieve significantly improved contracts for Rutgers academic workers overall. One year later, Rutgers rank-and-file members and union leaders identify six lessons learned from their experiences preparing for, and engaging in, the 2023 Rutgers academic worker strike.

The Faculty aren’t Alright

2022-11-01T12:23:55-07:00

Higher education faculty stress was already high before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, that stress was exacerbated during the first year of the acute health crisis. The early phase of the pandemic also impacted the budgets of higher education institutions, causing leadership to release messages to their faculty and staff indicating significant budget cuts. This quantitative study examines the perceived stress and concerns among full-time and part-time faculty members during this period. Results indicate that perceived stress increased throughout the first twelve months of the pandemic while their concerns related to their personal and professional lives decreased. Higher education executive leadership would be wise to address these concerns and adjust their approach to addressing an acute health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic in the future.

COVID-19 Epidemic Challenges

2022-11-25T06:31:43-08:00

This paper discusses the experience of working under the current COVID-19 conditions from my personal experience as a teaching stream faculty. The paper begins with a contextualization and description of the challenges of teaching stream workload prior to, and during, COVID-19. It is argued that universities should consider how gendered work intensification during COVID-19, combined with the challenges of working from home, may be impacting faculty health and mental wellbeing, particularly for women faculty. Some considerations for policy and practice are presented.

Academic Labor in the Third Space

2023-05-03T08:34:13-07:00

This special issue suggests the traditional, binary way of conceptualizing academic labor is as naive as it is limiting, and it must be reimagined. The issue attempts to expand the theoretical, conceptual, and organizational resources supporting Third Space professionals: a category of academic laborers, invisible in the dominant discourses of higher education, who exist between and disrupt the false distinction between to so-called “academic” and “non-academic.”

Rehabilitating Third Space Professionals in Contemporary Higher Education Institutions

2023-08-22T09:46:25-07:00

This paper updates earlier work by the author (Whitchurch 2008, 2013, 2018) to consider ways in which better recognition might be achieved for people working in third space environments, suggesting that an acceptance of Mode 3 knowledge in higher education, alongside disciplinary and professional knowledge, could provide a way forward in promoting their work. It considers how such knowledge is co-created between individuals and groups, often as a result of activity across the informal institutional economy, and how this might be used by institutions to re-evaluate third space activity within the formal institutional economy. This process is illustrated via a case study of a wildlife garden, which acts as a boundary object linking disciplinary teaching in ecology to engagement with local communities, the development of woodland management skills for students, and a social environment for both. Finally, the paper develops ideas about how organisational processes and structures, representing the formal institutional economy, might be adapted to reflect third space activity in parallel with disciplines and professional specialisms, including specific initiatives relating to promotion, progression, and career development. By contextualising third space activity in Mode 3 knowledge theory, therefore, it makes practical suggestions as to how individuals might be better recognised within institutional systems, thereby increasing the perceived value of their work.

Utilizing Off-Campus Spaces to Engage Third-Space Labor Across the Disciplines to Build Community Partnerships

2023-08-11T09:01:10-07:00

This article examines the opportunities and challenges within academic labor of operating an off-campus space using the STEAM Factory as a case study. The STEAM Factory supports research collaborations across all disciplines and engages in community outreach that shares research outcomes and seeks to understand impact in a local context. Third-space labor makes the STEAM Factory model possible and drives collaboration, especially with community partners. The STEAM Factory has a membership made up of faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and staff supported by a program director, a faculty director, and a member-elected board of directors. As an organization, STEAM has been a detailed archiver of its own history providing a public report annually. To better understand the perspective of STEAM Factory members, and the nature of mentorship and workplace collaborations, the membership was surveyed on three different occasions: January 2018, January 2020, and January 2021. Surveys were followed up with structured interviews that addressed the rationale for collaboration among faculty. During the interviews, we found that for those conducting community research, the space and staff support has been integral to not only their ability to engage in community research but also their enthusiasm for community engagement. Through a discussion of the organizational history of the STEAM Factory, in combination with insights from membership feedback, this paper recognizes the role of third space labor, workers whose labor blends academic and support roles, in support of third places, places to gather that are not-home and not-work.

Pushing Boundaries and Making Meaning in the Third Space

2023-07-21T15:39:50-07:00

Using a Scholarly Personal Narrative approach, the authors examine their own lived experiences negotiating and navigating the third space as student support professionals. They highlight the feminization of student support roles and the gendered metaphors that permeate discussion of academic labor. Through sharing and responding to each other’s personal narratives that include explorations of their upbringings and professional journeys, they offer a definition of academic labor, examine the idea of expertise and the relationship between them. Drawing on their individual institutional contexts and literature on academic work, they argue that collaboration and community can help individuals navigate the third space as educators working in staff positions at small, liberal arts colleges. They call for faculty and staff to push their institutions to rethink who participates in the practices of teaching and shared governance, going beyond current boundaries to find new meaning in shared work.

CAUSing a Commotion: Reflections on Third Space Academic Labor

2023-07-21T15:33:53-07:00

In this paper, we reflect on a collective set of challenges, critiques, and questions occupying our academic and professional experiences as community-engaged scholar-practitioners learning and working at various United States (U.S.) higher education institutions. Specifically, we engage questions that emerged through our reading group—the Critical/Abolitionist University Studies Edification (CAUSE) Group—where we sought to learn from others’ experiences to create new practices for our own work at our respective institutions. We reflect on the nature of CAUSE (itself a third space), our professional experiences, and the questions that arose from our collective grappling with community-engaged scholarship and/in the current model of higher education. We combine first-person reflections that synthesize the various ideas we have encountered in our readings on and engagement with critical and abolitionist university studies under three topic areas: 1) the ambiguity of third space labor; 2) community-engaged scholarship as a third space; and 3) the institutionalization and professionalization of third space labor.

Widening the margins

2023-07-21T15:14:20-07:00

This article capitalizes on the experience of composition to examine where Third Space labor is currently positioned and uses frameworks from higher education and labor studies to look toward the possibility of a more equitable future. Third Space professionals both exemplify and challenge the class structure within the managed university, wherein academic freedom is exercised as a marker of class hierarchy. Affordances associated with the academic profession have become commodified, and physical and metaphorical constraints continue to grow in response to the erosion of academic freedom and financial support. The continued unbundling of traditional faculty roles means that the job of educating an increasingly diverse student population for a labor market that values interdisciplinarity, flexibility, and multiple literacies often falls to Third Spaces. In their attempts to maintain enrollment, universities exalt these support services even as they marginalize the professionals who staff them. Composition scholars and practitioners are no strangers to the margins; indeed, they’ve built homes and careers there, developing effective pedagogies and programs whose longevity and impact support both students and faculty. Third Space professionals’ most effective moves are inclusive rather than exclusive and are attuned to core discursive and rhetorical principles from feminist studies. Such work, when it is effective, performs a gate-opening rather than gate-keeping function that is imperative to the Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that have come to define the sustainability goals of the US university system.

Claiming Space for Honest Work

2023-07-21T15:20:40-07:00

Academic integrity (AI) work is widely recognized as fundamental to all college and university endeavors. Outside of its own scholarly and professional niche, however, less is known about people who carry out this work. Our chapter, which reports on a document-based interview study conducted with nine AI professionals across nine different institutions, seeks to fill this gap by providing embedded, on-the-ground perspectives on how these professionals go about building intellectual capital and credibility. Our study also addresses how AI professionals fit with their respective campuses and colleagues, with participants throughout illustrating affordances and limitations of Third Space as a conceptual frame to describe AI work. By bringing Third Space and AI into more deliberate conversation, we invite professionals across both areas to critically reflect on discrepancies between work members of their communities think they do versus work they actually do. We foreground how AI professionals make sense of their own labor, drawing implications for how such calculations have affected (and may continue to affect) institutional belonging as well as the personal, emotional, and professional sustainability of AI and other Third Space work.

“In it, but not of it”

2023-08-08T16:45:50-07:00

The Third Space in higher education encompasses both identities and labor. This paper begins with a discussion of work-based and professional identities within higher education and the growth of the Third Space. Moten and Harney’s (2004) Undercommons is used to further explain the Third Space. We discuss how social capital and communities of practice are central to creating solidarity end with a discussion of recommendations to better support Third Space professionals.

Third Space/Fourth Genre

2023-07-21T15:58:04-07:00

This essay begins with a question: how can we understand composition teachers as third space workers—occupying what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the “nonspace,” the “undercommons” fugitive from the dominant cultures of the university—the “third spaces” that slip the major organizing power structures of higher education? This essay argues that composition teachers, working on and around the fracture between “critical” thinking and professional assimilation—a false opposition, but nonetheless one from which tensions and contradictory impulses emerge—also work in and on a space that can both acknowledge and evade these organizing mandates. We find this space in the form of the essay, at once the ubiquitous, compulsory pedagogical form for writing instructors, and also the inspiration for some of the most radical arts collectives of the twentieth century. These experimental film collectives, I argue, show us that the essay is not only a Trojan horse for professional-managerial training and ersatz “critical” practice; it can also be a collective space, an energetic space for creative organization and resistance. Own fraught object of instruction and study is also a liberatory, communal third space. This essay be, and has been, a space for collective sense-making, a “pariah space” where ideas, values, voices, and aesthetic forms come into contact in order to tell things differently, to resist. On the one hand, the essay can open up a “site of enunciation” that isn’t just the analogue of Homi K. Bhabha’s third space but is in fact a version of that space. On the other hand, the writing center and the composition classroom, the spaces of writing instruction, can or should also—at their best—capture moments of essay-writing as moments of fugitive collaboration and potential: third space thinking and collectivizing.