So I thought that Tuesday's discussion wandered down some really interesting (and unexpected) avenues. Most interesting perhaps, based on Brianna's recent post, was the thinly-veiled panic attack that we seemed to collectively experience with regard to our professional futures.
breath in....and release....breathe in.....and release....
In reading a few articles that in part confront the academy as a bureaucracy within ever-larger and ever-expanding bureaucracies, it's hard not to feel ant-like, but, in the immortal words of Pink Floyd, "welcome, my son (or daughter or transgendered or non-gender-identified loved one), welcooooome to the machine." To continue with this "machine" theme, there is a quote from Gallagher that I wanted to bring up in class (but forgot) with regard to why, perhaps, we are feeling these kinds of anxieties (or at least, maybe part of why we feel them). Late in his argument Gallagher states, "As much as we may hate to admit it, professors (including compositionists) are workers who experience intensification, deskilling, and alienation from their labor" (88). I found this passing remark to be really compelling and wished that Gallagher had expanded on this idea to show what this "intensification, deskilling, and alienation" might look like in the academic professional. The terms are familiar and useful in standard critiques of capitalist production and emerging trends in the labor-market, but as a vocabulary that mainly stems from product-based (industrial) processes, I'm wondering what it would mean for a professor/instructor to experience "alienation from their labor" or to experience "deskilling" (the phenomenon of capitalist modes of production reducing the cost of labour by breaking down complex work processes into smaller, simpler, and unskilled tasks). We can perhaps see this on the macro-level when University's end up having a larger percentage of their courses taught by part-time, adjunct, and graduate assistant faculty than full-time, tenured professors (as I believe Sarah mentioned with WVU...though I could be wrong about that). But can we really call this a "deskilling" process if it applies to teaching? Say we have an adjunct instructor teaching freshman composition (as the only available position) whose research interests lie outside the realm of freshman composition (or outside composition altogether). Can we call this an instance of deskilling or is it much more complicated than that? Is the alienation that this adjunct feels from their labor the same as the alienation that other workers (in a more typical venue of capitalist production) feel from theirs? I believe that Gallagher acknowledges this complexity when he mentions that academic labor systems do not conform to traditional labor categories. This is all to say that because of this our anxieties with regard to our labor are unique and complicated.
Kind of a tangent to the conversation, but one I wish I had brought up (and one that I hope people might care to discuss here)
Thanks for all the sharing Tues.
J
This blog is the shared writing space for ENG 592A, Rhetorical Theories and the Teaching of Writing, a graduate seminar in English at Ohio University.
Here's an idea: deskilling occurs with the systematic training of new TA's upon arrival at OU's English department. New TA's are alienated from the actual processes of curriculum production (reseach, theory, praxis, collaboration)and are instead, trained in the implementation of this curriculum.
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