Graduate students at work : exploited scholars of neoliberal higher ed / edited by Tessa Brown.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Brown, Tessa, editor.

Series:

Rethinking careers, rethinking academia.

Rethinking careers, rethinking academia

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Graduate teaching assistants.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (322 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Lawrence, Kansas : University Press of Kansas, [2023]

Summary:

Graduate Students at Work highlights the expertise and experiences of graduate students to demonstrate what graduate study entails, what it makes possible, and what it constrains in the context of corporatizing higher education. This collection of full-length research articles and short personal essays illustrates graduate students' experiences, organizing tactics, and strategies for staying in or moving out of the academy. Speaking from personal experience as well as reporting research findings, the contributors of Graduate Students at Work illustrate the significant expertise that graduate students are asked to enact in their time-intensive jobs as teachers, researchers, and administrators, even as they are kept in poverty wages for the decade or so it takes to move through a master's and doctoral program into the promised land of a tenure-track job. While these students are the leaders of the academic labor movement, they have yet to receive as much attention as adjunct instructors and other laborers in the university system. Though they experience harassment, discrimination, and exploitation, graduate students rarely have access to labor protections because they are often misclassified as students, not employees-a key rhetorical strategy universities use to fight graduate student organizing. These essays and articles also draw insightful connections between the labor conditions of graduate student workers and other workers navigating poverty wages, labor migration, limited benefits, and harassment and discrimination around lines of race, gender, ability, and citizenship-the most important connection perhaps being the possibility for organization and unionization to fight for better working conditions for all.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Introduction: Graduate Students Are Hyper-Exploited

Part I: Labor at the Margins

Interlude 1: "Levels to This Sh*t": Layers of Graduate Student Labor

1. "I Have to Go Wherever There's an Opportunity": Graduate Students' Experiences of Placelessness and Writing

Interlude 2: Invisible Marginaliztion in Academia

Interlude 3: Invisible Labors and Entangled Emergence

2. "Like I'm 'The Man'": Graduate Student Administrators' Experiences

Interlude 4: The Ethics of Progressive Internships

3. "It's Dangerous to Go Alone": Explorations of Unbalanced Labor and Mentorship in a Blended Learning Doctoral Program

Part II: The Labor of Teaching and Research

4. Will This Take Me Anywhere? Investing Time in Graduate Student Teaching

Interlude 5: Establishing Ethos for a Translingual GTA-The Unwritten Labor

5. Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn

Interlude 6: Mothering and Laboring as a Graduate Student and Teacher

Interlude 7: Parenting while Researching? It Takes Support, Kid-Friendly Systems, and a Lot of Luck

Part III: The Labor of "Professionalization

Interlude 8: The Professoriate Is a Job

6. Scholar-Selves in the Managerial University: The Hidden Labor of Disciplinary Identity Formation in the Doctoral Journey

Interlude 9: Ethically Honoring Graduate Student Expertise through Joy Projects

7. Chinese Doctoral Students' Perceptions of Employability in the United States: Cultivating Preparedness for a Challenging World

Part IV: Organizing Labor

Interlude 10: Paying to Teach: A Profile of California State University System English Department Graduate Teaching Associate Programs

8. "Fees Are Wage Theft": Graduate Labor Unions Confronting the Neoliberal University.

Interlude 11: A How-To Guide for Combating the Invisibility of Graduate Student Parents

9. "We'll Be Taking This with Us": Relationality and Idealism in Three Graduate Union Locals

Afterword: Striking for a Safer Campus Community

About the Contributors

Index

Back Cover.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780700634088

0700634088