Volume 3, Issue 1

This review details the fall 2017 exhibition of Natalie Selden Barnes's installation, Honor the Precariat, which took place in the Directions Gallery in the Department of Art and Art History at Colorado State University. By combining data with plexiglass figures in an immersive artwork, Selden Barnes compels the viewer to engage with the complex reality of the majority of university educators, those who are adjunct instructors. hen discussing the position of adjunct faculty (a position that she and I share) in the university, Natalie Selden Barnes relates the precarious nature of our professional identity--feeling compelled to teach as one’s life’s calling yet existing in a liminal space of the institution--to the marginalia found in medieval art. From the subsidiary figures embroidered along the edge of the Bayeaux Tapestry to the often raucous scenes of debauchery in the margins of illuminated prayer books and psalters (imagery that would make even many 21st-century viewers blush), these motifs confound any rational, ordered understanding of medieval history. So too do the non-tenure track faculty who teach the majority of courses at most colleges and universities upend the conventional view of the academy, one in which educators are afforded a comfortable life of the mind. Annah Krieg earned her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh. She is an instructor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Colorado State University. Just as scholars like Michael Camille and others have shown us that medieval marginalia is often where the subversive power lies to transform the center without completely undermining it, so too does Selden Barnes’s W 18 Academic Labor: Research and Artistry, Vol. 3 [2019], Art. 1 https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/alra/vol3/iss1/1 Academic Labor: Research and Artistry 3.1 (2019) 15 installation Honor the Precariat confront the viewer with a nuanced, complex reality of university teaching. Ultimately, her work demands that we all, regardless of rank, take meaningful action to make our institutions of higher learning more just and equitable places. Unlike a figurative sculpture placed on a pedestal, or a painting, print, or photograph framed neatly on the white wall of a gallery, Selden Barnes’s work functions as all installation art does: invading the lived space of the gallery visitor and breaking down the artificial barriers between art and life. This choice of multi-media installation to tackle a topic that tends to be overlooked and repressed in public discourse is particularly powerful. It leaves us no space to avoid the painful truth: nontenure track faculty are the invisible and underpaid yet crucial and valuable members of the teaching core of most university departments and schools. Furthermore, in the relatively small, low-ceilinged space of the Directions Gallery, with its single entrance, we immediately enter into the immersive space of the installation. It exists above and beyond us, in front of us, and behind us. Selden Barnes uses all surfaces to present a potent combination of data and imagery to rally her cry. Plexiglass silhouettes suspended from the ceiling and mounted on the walls comprise the bulk of the installation. Representing the silent majority of the precariat itself, these figures express their marginalized position by their very transparency and unsecure dangling. There is an impersonal nature to these figures, as there is not enough individual detail for the viewer to forge an emotional connection--as is often a possibility with photographs or paintings. I found myself feeling lost in a sea of dense plexiglass refracting the light and making it impossible to see visitors on the other side of the gallery. The transparency of the material does not withstand this critical mass, perhaps suggesting to us that the illusion of transparency in our institutions belies the lived reality of the most vulnerable and neglected members. I have one of those plexiglass figures hanging from my desk in the office I share with six other non-tenure track faculty members. I don’t mind sharing the space, and I enjoy working with students in those cramped quarters, fine-tuning a research topic, discussing test strategies, or just connecting and hearing about their lives. Sometimes, after those meetings, I think about my students, all majors in art and art history, and how they will soon enter this brave new world of the gig economy, continued wage gaps, and increasing socio-economic stratification. These are the critical labor issues of our time. However, like most of the faculty precariat, I know I am meant to be a teacher. Like the figures on the margins, I navigate the contradictions and complexities of my profession and strive for the transformational, institutional change that Honor the Precariat reveals as a moral imperative. 19 : Volume 3, Issue 1 Published by Digital Commons @ Humboldt State University, 2019 Academic Labor: Research and Artistry 3.1 (2019) 16 ‘Care Work’ and University Scapegoating: Making Social Reproduction Visible in the Teaching of Writing Rachel O’Donnell University of Rochester t the end of the spring semester this year, another faculty member stopped by my office and asked if I would be willing to take a break. We got up from our grading, walked around our blooming campus in early spring with cups of coffee as students lounged on green spaces with open laptops. We discussed the difficulty of getting into tenure-track jobs, moving around the country because of the lack of these jobs, former miscarriages, current child care responsibilities, and how all of these things intertwine. Indeed, it seems like ‘everyone’ goes through multiple events like these, and yet, somehow, the narrative is that our contingent positions and heavy teaching loads are the fault of no one but ourselves. It certainly feels like we are carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders sometimes: in this one conversation, as we walked around our pristine university campus with old brick buildings and sweeping lawns, we mentioned anxiety, lack of sleep, lack of publications, and wondering if we at all fit in. The strange thing, or perhaps not unexpected thing, is that I have had many conversations like this with colleagues, especially other female faculty, especially other mothers, and especially other contingent faculty. Rachel O’Donnell is an Assistant Professor (non-tenure) in the Writing, Speaking, and Argument Program at the University of Rochester. She holds a B.A. in English and Political Science from Moravian College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from York University. She also holds a Graduate Diploma in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Her research is on the history and political economy of bioprospecting in the Americas, and she has also written about the revolutionary forces during the Guatemalan civil war, as well as the legacy of the Central American civil wars on development and policy in the region. She previously served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala and worked as a researcher with the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) in Toronto. A 20 Academic Labor: Research and Artistry, Vol. 3 [2019], Art. 1 https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/alra/vol3/iss1/1 Academic Labor: Research and Artistry 3.1 (2019) 17 In the literature on these topics, and the burden we take on as academic laborers, we often use the words ‘care work’ or ‘emotional labor’ to demonstrate the ways in which much of our work is outside the classroom or outside the intellectual piece of our jobs, the many ways in which we care for students. A more useful concept for explaining this work is social reproduction theory (SRT) which “interrogates the complex network of social processes and human relations that produces the conditions of existence for that entity,” (Bhattacharya 2) meaning that as academic workers are constantly produced and reproduced in society, more particularly in universities, we can find certain aspects of their social reproduction highlighted precisely at the university itself and noted in ‘skills-based’ programs, such as writing programs. Social reproduction theory often recognizes the importance of public facilities that create the possibility of a worker who can come to work: from Marxian thinkers, this means a more specific reading of the word ‘economy’ that recognizes that capitalism is not just made up of workers and owners, but also generational reproductive labor that occurs in households, schools, and hospitals, which, according to Marx, in turn sustains the drive for accumulation (qtd. in Bhattacharya 2). A feminist perspective that highlights social reproduction is able to explain the contradictions ingrained in the systemic reproduction of capitalism; it serves to expand the understanding of labor, especially relevant to academic labor where we frequently overlook its application through talk of ‘fulfilling our passions’ or the privilege of intellectual labor. Social reproduction as a concept can remind us that some forms of labor cannot exist without others, that capitalism exists precisely because of these forms of reproductive labor, and that laborers reproduce labor in specific embodied ways. This social reproductive feminism has been useful to understanding the raising of children and forms of work outside of a traditional laboring body. Certainly, many readers will likely identify with those two faculty members walking around a beautiful campus and yet feeling outside of it. We may think “oh, I do that ‘care work’ too” or “the emotional labor of my interactions with students and colleagues and service work goes unrecognized.” And that is certainly true. But the concept of ‘care work’ implies that it is natural for women to take on a variety of forms of (mostly) unpaid labor, while social reproduction recognizes the importance of the ways in which this work