Abstract
This chapter engages with narratives emerging within three modalities of response developed by feminist academics in response to the transformations undergone by US higher education in general and the field of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) in particular: 1. collective organizing against contingency; 2. critical evaluations of the challenges faced by WGS departments and programs in regard to contingent faculty employment; 3. individual alternatives of addressing work precarity beyond the realm of academe. The chapter focuses primarily on the latter through the analysis of four interviews and the following four themes that reoccurred throughout them: the timing of the decision to look for a feminist professional future outside academia; the search for a work ethos that bypasses competitiveness, surpassing the isolation of academic knowledge work; dealing with feelings of failure; and finally, reimagining graduate training in women’s and gender studies. In doing so, the chapter discusses the emotional-affective forces that sustain or emerge from these interventions in order to evaluate their feminist transformative potential as well as their position in relation to discursive frameworks of success, failure, fantasy, or pragmatic response.
This has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska Curie Grant Agreement No. 658870.
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Notes
- 1.
The course was developed by Professor Mary Hawkesworth and Dr. Fatimah Williams Castro and was offered to PhD students in WGSS departments associated with the Consortium for Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the academic arm of the “Big 10,” a group of Research I institutions originally in the midwest of the United States. Rutgers and the University of Maryland joined the Big 10 in 2015. The online course was sponsored by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers in 2016, but enrollment was open to any graduate student in the CIC. My thanks go to Professor Hawkesworth and Dr. Williams Castro for sharing with me their syllabus and course materials as well as for pointing me in the direction of the interviews conducted by Dr. Nafisa Tanjeem, who at the time was a PhD candidate and graduate assistant in the WGS department at Rutgers.
- 2.
The entire series of interview are available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCgv7fNhb6TQF3BbpsONFKWzAP2WXe9aj
- 3.
There are approximately 20 US universities that offer doctoral programs in the interdisciplinary fields of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Graduate funding can come in the form of fellowships, graduate assistantships, and tuition remission; however, not all programs fund all admitted PhD students. As this chapter will show, the benefits of being a funded student run deeper than the financial level. Internal funding through teaching, research, and graduate assistantships creates social capital through varied mentoring and professional development opportunities. Most often, unfunded students seek university employment on their own in the form of part-time lectureships and hourly paid research or administrative work. Seeking employment outside the university is perceived as potentially distracting students from their graduate studies, thus it is usually discouraged. Whereas the following list may not be exhaustive, it attests to the presence of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in both private and state higher education institutions and gives a sense of the geographical distribution of these PhD programs: Arizona State University (PhD in Gender Studies), Emory University (PhD in Women’s Studies), Indiana University, Bloomington (PhD in Gender Studies), Ohio State University (PhD in Women’s Studies), Oregon State University (PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies), Rutgers University, New Brunswick (PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies), Stony Brook University (PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies), Texas Woman’s University (PhD in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies), University of Arizona (PhD in Women’s Studies), University of California, Los Angeles (PhD in Women’s Studies), University of California, Santa Barbara (PhD in Feminist Studies), University of California, Santa Cruz (PhD in Feminist Studies), University of Kansas, Lawrence (PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), University of Kentucky, Lexington (PhD in Women’s Studies), University of Iowa, Iowa City (PhD in Women’s Studies), University of Maryland, College Park (PhD in Women’s Studies), University of Michigan (joint programs in Women’s Studies and English, History, Psychology, or Sociology), University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (PhD in Women’s Studies), and University of Washington, Seattle (PhD in Women’s Studies).
- 4.
The H-1B is a nonimmigrant visa in the United States, which allows US employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations.
References
Interviews
Tangeem, Nafisa. (2016). Interview with Dr. Danica Tisdale Fisher (Ph.D., Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies, Emory), Assistant Director and Dean of Admission, Phillips Academy. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVRjePn9GZQ&list=PLCgv7fNhb6TQF3BbpsONFKWzAP2WXe9aj&index=11
Tanjeem, Nafisa. (2016a). Interview: Dr. Abigail Parsons (Ph.D., Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies, Emory), Director of LGBTQIA Resource Center, Georgia Tech University. Retrived from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S26Z69ad-GA&index=13&list=PLCgv7fNhb6TQF3BbpsONFKWzAP2WXe9aj
Tanjeem, Nafisa. (2016b). Interview: Dr. Kelly Coogan Gehr (Ph.D., Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers), Educator, National Nurses United (through fall 2015); Director of the Washington State Labor Education and Research Center, South Seattle College. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNnNgkjKX9U&list=PLCgv7fNhb6TQF3BbpsONFKWzAP2WXe9aj&index=10
Tanjeem, Nafisa. (2016c). Interview: Dr. Ryan Shanahan (Ph.D., Women’s Studies University of Maryland), Research Director, Center on Youth Justice, Vera Institute of Justice, New York. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KdbPpqKXyk&list=PLCgv7fNhb6TQF3BbpsONFKWzAP2WXe9aj&index=9
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Lovin, C.L. (2018). Feelings of Change: Alternative Feminist Professional Trajectories. In: Taylor, Y., Lahad, K. (eds) Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University. Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64224-6_7
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