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Special Issues of Workplace

Workplace is generally based on Special Issues and Calls for Papers focusing on a theme. About 12 months before a new issue, Guest Editors develop a plan forsoliciting (by open CFP or direct requests) about 5-6 articles, together with a concept for shorter essays. The Guest Editor/s and the Collective review the plan and sometimes make suggestions. The issue is then in the Guest Editors' hands until about six weeks prior to the launch date.

Call for Papers

• In/stability, In/security, In/visibility: Tensions at Work for Tenured & Tenure Stream Faculty in the Neoliberal Academy
• Academic Mobbing
• Graduate Studies and the Academic Labour Market
• Academic Labor and the Law (Guest Editor Jennifer Wingard)
• Place your Special Issue Theme Here...

CFP: In/stability, In/security & In/visibility:
Tensions at Work for Tenured & Tenure Stream Faculty in the Neoliberal Academy

Special Issue of Workplace 2012
Guest Editors: Kaela Jubas & Colleen Kawalilak

For this special issue of Workplace, we invite submissions from individuals working in tenured or tenure stream positions.  The question at the core is how neoliberalism is apparent, experienced, and felt in the context of that work.  For senior faculty, how has the scope and practice of work evolved, to what effect, and to what detriment?  For junior faculty, how are aspirations and expectations for academic work being (un)met?  For faculty at the intermediate stage of their academic careers, how is work being seen and practiced differently?  For all faculty members, how are changes at work relating to life and identity more broadly?  Empirical research, analysis of policy, programmatic and curricular changes, personal reflections, and critical and exploratory essays on points of tensions within this shifting landscape will be featured.

The social, cultural, and individual repercussions of neoliberal policies and practices have been well explored and documented.  In this journal alone, recent volumes have focused on the shift from tenure stream faculty to contingent and part-time faculty, the creep of commercial and philanthropic bodies into so-called public education, and the turn away from individual and social development toward commercial viability to legitimate teaching and scholarship.  Less frequently explored is how neoliberalism is affecting members of the academy who, until recently, have had the benefits of stability, security, and voice – faculty members in tenured or tenure stream positions.  Although these academics continue to enjoy relative privilege in the neoliberal academy and in society-at-large, they too share in experiencing the drawbacks of neoliberalism in their work and personal lives.  Expectations that staff will “do more with less,” forego salary increases that keep pace with inflation, secure outside funding for research, and adopt a hyper-competitive mindset, all while exposing themselves to new forms of surveillance to check compliance, are as present in the academy as they are in any other workplace.

Abstracts can be forwarded by e-mail in Word or similar format to Kaela Jubas (kjubas@ucalgary.ca), and are due by January 15, 2012.  Authors will be notified about their submissions by February 15, 2012.  Full articles should be 4000-6000 words in length and conform to APA 6^th edition, and will be due by May 15, 2012.

CFP: Academic Mobbing
Special Issue of Workplace 2012
Editors: Stephen Petrina & Wayne Ross

Editors of Workplace are accepting manuscripts for a theme issue on Academic Mobbing.  Academic mobbing is defined by the Chronicle of Higher Education (11 June 2009) as: “a form of bullying in which members of a department gang up to isolate or humiliate a colleague.”  The Chronicle continues:

If rumors are circulating about the target’s supposed misdeeds, if the target is excluded from meetings or not named to committees, or if people are saying the target needs to be punished formally “to be taught a lesson,” it’s likely that mobbing is under way.

As Joan Friedenberg eloquently notes in The Anatomy of an Academic Mobbing, the toll taken is excessive.  Building on a long history of both analysis and neglect in academia, Workplace is interested in a range of scholarship on this practice, including theoretical frameworks, legal analyses, resistance narratives, reports from the trenches, and labor policy reviews.  We invite manuscripts that address, among other foci:

• Effects of academic mobbing
• History of academic mobbing
• Sociology and ethnography of the practices of an academic mob
• Social psychology of the academic mob leader or boss
• Academic mobbing factions (facts & fictions) or short stories
• Legal defense for academic mob victims and threats (e.g., Protectable political affiliation, race, religion)
• Gender norms of an academic mob
• Neo-McCarthyism and academic mobbing
• Your story…

Contributions for Workplace should be 4000-6000 words in length and should conform to APA or MLA style.

CFP: Graduate Studies and the Academic Labour Market
Special Issue of Workplace 2012
Guest Editor: ?

Workplace invites potential guest editors and authors for a special issue on Graduate Studies and the Academic Labour Market. What are the futures of the academic labour market for graduate students? Or more to the point, is there a future in academic labour for graduate students?  Even a casual glance in Canada at the CAUT Bulletin and University Affairs suggests a shrinking job market for PhDs.  In some disciplines, academic careers have all but disappeared.  Post-PhDs are increasingly tracked or streamed into adjunct and sessional appointments, most of which are dead-end and even on full time bases amount to less than $25,000 per year.  This "income" is nowadays typically annulled by student loan payments; indeed, the income to debt ratio for post-PhDs adds to a heavy burden of anxiety.  We readily romanticize the life of the intellectual, but per se this life does not put food on the table.  Food banks are becoming more and more common on university grounds and the lines are not limited to students.

• What is the nature of this phenomenon in higher education?
• How might graduate students reclaim their futures in the professoriate?
• What is left for the scholar activist?
• What are the questions we should be asking?

CFP: Academic Labor and Law
Special Issue of Workplace 2012
Guest Editor: Jennifer Wingard
Syracuse University

The historical connections between legislation, the courts, and the academy have been complex and multi-layered. This has been evident from early federal economic policies, such as the Morell Act and the GI Bill, through national and state legislation that protected student and faculty rights, such as the First Amendment and affirmative action clauses. These connections continue into our current moment of state and national efforts to define the work of the university, such as the Academic Bill of Rights and court cases regarding distance learning. The question, then, becomes whether and to what extent the impact of legislation and litigation reveals or masks the shifting mission of the academy. Have these shifts been primarily economic, with scarcities of funding leading many to want to legislate what is considered a university education, how it should be financed, and who should benefit from it? Are the shifts primarily ideological, with political interests working to change access, funding, and the intellectual project of higher education? Or are the shifts a combination of both political and economic influences? One thing does become clear from these discussions: at their core, the legal battles surrounding higher education are about the changing nature of the university—the use of managerial/corporate language; the desire to professionalize students rather than liberally educate them; the need to create transparent structures of evaluation for both students and faculty; and the attempt to define the types of knowledge produced and disseminated in the classroom. These are changes for which faculty, students, administrators, as well as citizens who feel they have a stake in higher education, seek legal redress. This special section of Workplace aims to explore the ways in which legislation and court cases impact the work of students, professors, contingent faculty, and graduate students in the university. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Academic Freedom for students and/or faculty
  • Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights
  • Missouri’s Emily Booker Intellectual Diversity Act
  • First Amendment court cases concerning faculty and student’s rights to freely express themselves in the classroom and on campuses
  • Facebook/Myspace/Blog court cases
• Affirmative Action
  • The implementation of state and university diversity initiatives in the 1970s
  • The current repeal of affirmative action law across the country
• Benefits, including Health Benefits, Domestic Partner Benefits
  • How universities in states with same-sex marriage bans deal with domestic partner benefits
• Collective Bargaining
  • The recent rulings at NYU and Brown about the status of graduate students as employees
  • State anti-unionization measures and how they impact contingent faculty
• Copyright/Intellectual Property
  • In Distance Learning
  • In corporate sponsored science research
  • In government sponsored research
• Disability Rights and Higher Education
  • How the ADA impacts the university
• Sexual Harassment and Consensual Relationships
  • How diversity laws and sexual harassment policies impact the university
• Tenure
  • The Bennington Case
  • Post 9/11 court cases

Contributions for Workplace should be 4000-6000 words in length and should conform to APA or MLA style. If interested, please send an abstract via word attachment to Jennifer Wingard (jlwingar@syr.edu). Completed essays will be due via email by June 15, 2010.