A Career of Precarious Subservience and Silencing Within the Academy Across Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The notion of contract professors – variously called adjuncts, sessionals, visiting professors – has become such a common fixture in the academic landscape that they are given little notice. Students do not see the stark differences between someone “on the track” of tenure or fighting to survive contract to contract, mixed in with other short -term work in between teaching gigs. Living and working on the social edge, however, gives the author a clearer vantage from which to view how precarious professors get constructed by the tenure track and managerial centre of the modern, neoliberal post-secondary sector. The author has found himself moving across the country, from Vancouver Island to Halifax chasing contracts. To support this exploration, the author draws upon the tenets of critical theory and queer theory. This chapter contains a critical autoethnographical study of the author's time as a contract academic across four Canadian provinces in colleges and universities from 2005 to the present (20 years). Recommendations are provided that would further support the precariat.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.053 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".