“Looking for a Light in the Dark: On Mental Health in Humanistic Pedagogy”

This session seeks papers that offer effective strategies for confronting mental health issues amongst educators. Potential topics may include (but not necessarily exclude): the rise in depression amongst graduate students and faculty; the prevalence of mental health iss…[Read more]

The Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession is planning a roundtable for the 2017 MLA convention in Philadelphia tentatively entitled: “Could this get me fired? Employment rights and risks for just-in-time faculty.”

We’re particularly interested in ensuring that our least job-secure colleagues are  represented on the roundtable, so I’d l…[Read more]

The Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession will be hosting a coffee hour on Saturday, January 9 between our two panel sessions. We invite you to join us from 11:30-1:30 in 502-503 of the JW Marriott to share ideas and initiatives. Additional information is available here: https://contingent.mla.hcommons.org/.

Many thanks to all for your…[Read more]

I’d like to invite any members of this forum attending the 2016 convention to participate in the first ever Commons literary trivia quiz, which will take place next Thursday night at the JW Marriott. It’s free, promises to be unabashedly nerdy, but should be fun too! A cash bar and prizes will be available.

Space is limited, so please reserve y…[Read more]

At MLA2016:

Join for coffee and a discussion of postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities, both best practices for positions and programs and pressing questions about the role of the postdoc position in humanities research initiatives, the casualization of the academic workforce, and the larger profession.

Members of this group may be inter…[Read more]

Part-time faculty and other contingent faculty are eligible for travel grants to attend the convention in Austin.

Here’s the link:
https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/MLA-Honors-and-Awards/MLA-Financial-Assistance/Non-Tenure-Track-Faculty-Members-and-Unemployed-Members-Traveling-to-the-Convention

Freeway Fliers can be found here. It contains very interesting observations, including a point about the tenure process now being very much complicit in the de-radicalization of the professoriate!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hsMUuEpxO0

As the 2016 MLA Convention turns to consider “Literature and its Publics” the third annual meeting of the MLA Subconference challenges participants to propose sessions somewhere “Between the Public and its Privates”.

Today it seems almost impossible to point to the public without uncovering its uncanny twin–the private. Consider Google’s Han…[Read more]

CFP: In/Security

Special issue of English Language Notes, Fall/Winter 2016 (Vol. 54, No. 2)

 This issue of ELN takes for its focus the topic of security and its necessary correlate, insecurity. As Itty Abraham notes, the term “security” is a “traveling signifier” that has “attached itself to every scale of human activity, from the individual…[Read more]

I invite members of this group who might be interested in exploring careers beyond university teaching to explore our new site for the Connected Academics initiative. Content—interviews, advice, resources—will updated regularly, but please let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see up there.

connect.mla.hcommons.org

I hope members of his discussion group can utilize the MLA site for registering one’s support for contingent faculty both within the MLA and in one’s department, union, and institution.  Here’s the…[Read more]

Hi all,

I posted a storify of tweets posted around Rosemary Feal’s #precariat conversation with Andrew Ross, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Jennie Shanker at the Shanker Institute on January 15. (Margaret Hanzimanolis features!) You can view the storify on this group’s blog.

Cheers,

Nicky