Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Adjunct Culture

Marc Bousquet, in his book How the University Works, uses the phrase “adjunct culture.” Over the past couple weeks, I have been contemplating just what “adjunct culture” means.  Well, at least what adjunct culture means to me.

Here are some early results.  If you have your own opinions or ideas, please let me know or post them to your blog (and let me know as well so I can link the discussions!).

Adjunct Culture means physical community.
Community in the department.
Community in the division.
Community in the college.
Community in the region.

All of these places—or senses of place—offer adjuncts a means or excuse to be in touch with and identify with one another.  These are factors that can be used to leverage or generate solidarity.

Adjunct Culture means electronic community.
Creating community through online list-serves.
Creating community through blogs and networks of blogs.
Creating community by writing, posting, and responding to online texts.
Creating community by organizing and unionizing online.
Creating community by blowing off steam and/or seeking advice online.

Adjunct Culture means creating cultural artifacts.
Creating films about adjuncts and their lives.
Creating poems and plays about contingent academic laborers and their conditions and issues.
Documenting or fictionalizing the lives of adjuncts to give voice to our experience.
Creating and speaking in adjuncts’ voices for ourselves rather than have others speak for us.

Adjunct Culture means realizing our diversity and variety.
There is just no way that any single dynamic or descriptor can identify who we are.

The most important aspect of the idea, of the reality, of “Adjunct Culture” is that it is culture created by and for adjuncts who are active in their lives and communities—that it is not some paternalistic pap handed down from people who think they know or “remember” what it was like to be an Adjunct.  Sorry.  Adjunct Culture should be created by and meant for Adjuncts.

This notion, this naming of “Adjunct Culture” is a powerful and important act.  Perhaps it has happened many times already, or perhaps it will be forgotten next week.  Regardless, as adjuncts, it is vital to our sense of community, identity, and organizing that we become more prolific and productive in our generation of cultural artifacts and happenings.  Rather than act or behave as if we are wanna-be-tenureds, we ought to act and behave as what we are: contingent academic laborers.  Forget the delusion; nobody likes a poseur: we should act, teach, and create based upon who and what we really are.

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