Class Shock: the feeling of inadequacy and anger that arises when one’s class aspirations have been trampled underfoot.
I’m very pleased to announce that my first piece for the new online journal, Contrivers’ Review, titled “Class Shock: Affect, Mobility, and the Adjunct Crisis,” is just out. Excerpts are below. Many thanks to Pete Sinnott and Luke Mergner for their excellent editorial suggestions.
Excerpts:
Overall, reports and testimonies relating to adjuncts focus on such easily understood narratives of what amounts to what I call Class Shock: the feeling of inadequacy and anger that arises when one’s class aspirations have been trampled underfoot…
We, adjuncts and allies, need to stop apologising for the value of intellectual production and we need to stop rendering its value in terms of the class mobility and the raced and gendered privilege it can confer upon us. We might seize this opportunity to reconfigure the terms of academic success to signify a system that allows everyone opportunities to do the work they desire, without holding ourselves up to mythical standards of class empowerment. Yet, over and over, the most persistent narratives about adjuncts draw upon class nostalgia.
You can read the entire piece here. Contact me if you need a pdf.