Editor’s note: This is the twenty-eighth entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Mary Klann (@mcklann on Twitter/X) believes adjuncts are valuable and historical. Here’s how she does history.
What is your current position and where are you working?
I’m an adjunct and a freelance historian and writer. Most of my income comes from my job as an adjunct lecturer at UC San Diego. This year I am teaching courses for the departments of History and Ethnic Studies. I teach Native American history, women’s history, and digital history, among other classes. I also do writing and consultancy work on a steady basis for Ancestry.com, for whom I am a subject matter expert. With my friend and fellow historian, Kristina Poznan, I am in the process of co-writing an updated administrative history of White Sands National Park in New Mexico.1 This year I am an editorial assistant for Women and Social Movements, an e-journal and database, for an upcoming special issue on Indigenous women which I am also co-editing along with Brianna Theobald.
What’s a typical work day or work week look like for you?
I don’t really have a typical work day. Right now I’m teaching three courses at UCSD, two for History and one for Ethnic Studies. On the days I’m teaching, I drive to campus, teach three classes (pretty much back-to-back with an hour break in between the first and second), and then drive back home to pick up my kids from school. My classes are scheduled for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but I make my Friday class sessions asynchronous. Students in each class and I will collaboratively annotate a reading (I love Hypothesis for this). It frees up some time that I would usually spend in my car and allows me to engage with students in a different modality. I find it a really helpful way for me to get to know students who aren’t as willing to speak up in a larger group setting, but who are comfortable adding their thoughts to a reading.
On the days when I’m not traveling to campus, I’m usually able to devote smaller chunks of time to whatever freelance project I’m working on at the time. I like to break up my days in half-hour blocks (I used the Pomodoro method religiously when writing my dissertation and it still is the most efficient and clear way for me to organize my day). I rarely have a “full” workday’s worth of time because I’m the primary caregiver to my two daughters, who are both in elementary school. Their dad and I split duties in terms of pick up/drop off from school and appointments and activities as best we can, but since he works as a manager at a grocery store and his schedule is much more fixed than mine, I am the primary in terms of shuttling kids around. So a lot of my work day looks like trying to keep kids occupied while I’m also setting up modules on Canvas, replying to emails, or prepping for class.
On days when I am not scheduled to teach on campus and my co-parent picks up the kids I have more time to add in progress on the freelance projects, which often take a backseat to the course prep when I’m in the middle of a term. In other words, I am constantly behind. A feeling I think many working parents share.
The last day of winter quarter 2023 with some of the students from Mary’s digital history class at UCSD. All photos provided by the profile.
What’s the University of California, San Diego like? Tell us what it’s like to work there.
I’ve been at UCSD for over a decade. I got my PhD in U.S. History at UCSD in 2017 and started teaching there as an adjunct in 2018. I love the campus and credit my students (and the folks who work at the library and archives) for this. When I was a graduate student I was rarely clued in to what was happening on campus. I gave birth to my eldest daughter right in the middle of grad school, so I would come and go quickly. But, I also thought of my time at UCSD as “temporary.” I have family in San Diego so I knew I was going to be connected to the city for a long time, but I imagined myself moving away pretty much right after grad school and I applied all over the country for jobs.
In 2021 (in the midst of the pandemic), I started teaching a special topics course on digital history. Students utilized the digitized collections of UCSD student newspapers as sources. I think this class really changed my understanding of the campus. I learned so much about the history of student activism on campus and a ton about how undergraduates in the 21st century understood themselves as members of a campus community. I went from feeling quite alienated from the campus, feeling like I was only there “temporarily” (whether in reality or in perception), to feeling a sense of kinship with my students but also with students from the past. I’ve taught that class twice more since then. This year will be my fourth year (and fourth cohort of students) to explore the digital archives and we are working towards creating a stand-alone digital resource for past, current, and future students.2
I’ve taken to integrating UCSD history into every class I teach—in my women’s history course we search the archives for sources that reveal how UCSD is a site of women’s history, in my Native history classes we talk about Kumeyaay history and the relations that Kumeyaay people have with the campus. I just finished teaching a session in my women’s history class which I called “Our Histories, Ourselves,” where I asked students to think about where they saw themselves in the university. I wish someone had done that for me when I first arrived on campus. Instead I was always looking for the next step, the place where I’d finally find my institutional “home.” As an adjunct it is very, very hard to find that, unless you make it yourself.
You taught at several places before arriving at UCSD. Where else has teaching taken you? And what’s your favorite class to teach or do you have a favorite?
I’ve taught at four institutions in San Diego including UCSD. When I started as an adjunct I taught at Miramar College and Mesa College, two community colleges in the San Diego Community College District. I’ve also taught at Cuyamaca College (although I’ve never been on that campus, I taught there online during COVID). At Miramar and Mesa I taught the US history survey and at Cuyamaca I taught women’s history. I’ve taught all sorts of students, including high school students in a dual enrollment community college class. Miramar has a large population of military and veteran students and I’ve seen many come through my classes.
Last year (2022-2023) was the first academic year I only taught at one institution. In the fall of 2022 I wasn’t offered classes at any of the community colleges (something that happens quite frequently for adjuncts, especially those of us without “seniority”) and ended up just teaching at UCSD, where I had a one-year contract (one class per quarter, about $21,000 for the year) and cultivating my freelance gigs. In the spring of 2023 I decided not to apply again to teach at the community colleges. I was trying out freelancing, doing a lot of the childcare in my household, and probably most critically, my dissatisfaction with the way adjuncts are treated was really crystallizing. This year I have almost a “full-time” load at UCSD across two departments, but that might not be the case next year.
I absolutely loved teaching students in the community colleges where I was an adjunct. I also found some wonderful colleagues through those institutions who were constantly working to improve their pedagogy. At Miramar, where I was an adjunct the longest, I participated in several faculty “communities of inquiry” on “ungrading” and Native issues and worked with faculty and staff on drafting a land acknowledgment.3 I’m grateful to the online educators I met through the community colleges, they taught me how to teach online.
I love teaching all the classes I teach. At UCSD I’ve offered several special topics courses on my research specialty, Native American history—I’ve taught Native women’s history, Native Americans and American Politics, and a course I’m co-teaching right now on sovereignty and federal Indian law. I love women’s history with all my heart and always will. My digital history class is probably my favorite, because it has grown so collaboratively with students and I started it from scratch.
What is your earliest memory of a historical event?
I remember the Y2K panic, Clay Aiken finishing second on American Idol, downloading music illegally on Napster and LimeWire, the advent of America Online, and my AIM screen name. All of these are historical, but why does Clay Aiken’s American Idol season still maintain space in my brain? (Kidding, I know, because he’s got a beautiful voice.)
Maybe the earliest event that I internalized and personalized was watching the coverage of Kerri Strug vault with an ankle injury at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. My sisters and I used to reenact that vault over our couch, complete with a performance of a limp and ankle pain.
Was there a particular moment that made you want to study history/become a historian?
I went to Willamette University, a small liberal arts school in Salem, Oregon for my BA. This was weird, because I grew up in Connecticut. No one in Connecticut had heard of Willamette and all pronounced Oregon as Ore-gawn. It actually took me a while to find a major. I initially wanted to major in theater, but quickly switched to “undecided.” I took classes all over the liberal arts spectrum—French, English, math, religion, costume design, art history. I took a few history courses because I had always loved history, but I settled on psychology as a major—I don’t think I knew that a person could be a historian. Plus I liked psychology and thought someday I could be a clinical psychologist.
Writing my psychology thesis was maybe the first time I realized I could do a different kind of research for a living. I wrote it on self-efficacy and low-income women’s experiences of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, otherwise known as “welfare reform.” It was as close to a history thesis as a psych thesis could be. My favorite part of doing that research and writing the thesis was doing the introductory “synthesis of the historical context” paragraph. I read a few historical and sociological articles to provide context for the studies and realized…wait. You can write this kind of stuff?
But I would say my real desire to become a historian came when I took my first women’s history class with Leslie Dunlap. This was during my senior year, the same semester I was conducting all the research on the psychological impacts of welfare reform and we read an excerpt from Felicia Kornbluh’s book on welfare rights activism. That class period was the first time I’d ever truly felt comfortable raising my hand and debating someone in class. I was pretty shy as a student, and that class (and that professor) really helped me find confidence in my skills in historical analysis. I ended up canceling my appointment to take the psychology GRE and stopped my search for psychology grad programs. I applied to one MA program in women’s history instead. At the end of my senior year, when my friends would ask what I wanted to do with my MA, I would say, “I want to be Leslie Dunlap.” Leslie is now one of my best friends.
Members of the 2009 women’s history MA cohort at Sarah Lawrence College, on graduation day. Tara James, associate director of the program, and Priscilla Murolo, labor historian and program director, are on the far left and second from the left. Credit: Sally Klann.
Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate experiences. Where did you get your MA and PhD?
I went to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY for my MA. That was the only graduate program I applied to, and I honestly found it by Googling “women’s history graduate programs.” A very good friend of mine was applying for genetic counseling MA programs and also applied to Sarah Lawrence so I recognized the name. Sarah Lawrence was the first graduate program in women’s history in the US, founded by Gerda Lerner and Joan Kelly in 1972. It also is a small liberal arts college, even smaller than Willamette. That program was almost magical for me. I still knew so little about history in general, but I knew that women were important. Everyone else in that program knew that too. That’s not a given everywhere!
I wrote my MA thesis on Black women’s participation in the tourism industry in post-apartheid South Africa. After graduating from Willamette in 2007, I went on a month-long summer study abroad “post-session” (led by the aforementioned Leslie Dunlap) with a group of students to South Africa. My MA thesis was basically my attempt to understand the tension between the discomfort and exhilaration I felt on that trip, as a white student tourist. I came to the study of colonialism and structural racism and uncomfortable language of guilt and reconciliation through the study of South Africa after apartheid, and through the lenses of tourism.
After my MA, I moved to Portland, OR. I applied for PhD programs in part because I was completely at a loss as to what I could do with an MA in women’s history in 2009 at the height of the Great Recession. I was unemployed for months, applying for jobs everywhere—random postings on Craigslist, J.Crew, any administrative job I could find. I finally got a part-time job in the ticket office at the Oregon Ballet Theatre and I did volunteer internships at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center (now the Japanese American Museum of Oregon) and the Portland Children’s Museum. I wanted to work in a museum full time, there just weren’t any paying jobs at all. I did a year of AmeriCorps at Habitat for Humanity in Portland, and while I loved the people I worked with, I still really missed history. I chose UC San Diego for two reasons—my parents and one of my sisters had recently relocated to San Diego, so I’d be in the same city as them; and UCSD offered me a fellowship for the first year that was $20,000, and then a TAship for the next few years that was maybe $16,000-$18,000 a year, much more than I was making as an AmeriCorps volunteer or had made as a part-time ticket agent. I felt like I was going to be rich. (HAHA!) More importantly, I felt like it was the first time in my entire life I was going to be paid for something I really loved to do.
I wanted to switch my research focus to the United States for my PhD. I still found tourism to be an arena where complicated ideas about colonization and race and gender play out through economic exchanges and performance. Driving down to San Diego from Portland with my then husband, we stopped in Yosemite National Park. The park’s museum had an exhibit on the “Indian Field Days,” this early twentieth century tourist attraction that brought Miwok, Paiute, and Yokuts people into the park and paid them to dress in Plains war bonnets and buckskin and pose for photos with tourists. I ended up conducting research on the Native women who created and sold their basketry to tourists through that event in my first year at UCSD.4
Baby’s first trip to the archives, conducting research for what would become Wardship and the Welfare State in 2014, at the National Archives branch in Riverside, CA. Credit: Eric Lam.
You have a book, Wardship and the Welfare State: Native Americans and the Formation of First-Class Citizenship in Mid-Twentieth-Century America, coming out in Spring 2024. Please tell us about it.
It is based on my dissertation. In short, Wardship and the Welfare State puts twentieth-century Indian policy (termination and relocation) in conversation with welfare policy (the expansion of the federal welfare state through the Social Security Act and the GI Bill).
The term “wardship” was (and is) a nebulous idea first introduced into Indian law in 1831 by Chief Justice John Marshall in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. It’s been used throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a rationale for assimilation policies, for denying Native people voting rights, and for the plenary power of Congress over tribes. In the mid-twentieth century, many non-Native people, including policymakers, politicians, social workers, welfare caseworkers, and agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), were confused about whether Native peoples’ status as “wards” of the federal government precluded their eligibility for welfare benefits administered by the states (things like Old Age Assistance, Aid to the Blind and Aid to Dependent Children). Some states (namely Arizona and New Mexico) argued that they shouldn’t have to pay for needy Native peoples’ welfare benefits because they were the federal government’s responsibility, even though after 1924, all Native people were American citizens.
My book brings Native people into a discussion of welfare by exploring both how wardship was equated with welfare dependency in conservative rhetoric and how wardship was actually experienced. Native people’s understanding of wardship was formed in daily interactions with BIA agents, in their applications to welfare offices, in their communication with their family members via government agents, and in their use of the educational provisions of the GI Bill. I also argue that Native people articulated a relational understanding of both wardship and welfare. They didn’t view them as synonymous, like conservative politicians or welfare caseworkers did. They saw wardship as a long-standing relationship between tribes and the US government and welfare as something they were entitled to because they were citizens.
You should buy the book and read it. In all seriousness, I hope it will help historians and instructors and students make a little more sense of a really ambiguous term in Indian law (wardship) and bring Native people into a conversation about welfare (they rarely, if ever, show up in histories of welfare and welfare rights) and critically assess the nuances of our common rhetoric about citizenship in the era of mass mobilization for equal rights in the U.S. Of course there are a lot of discussions of gender as well, welfare is inherently gendered. So is wardship. So is everything.
Are you currently working on a research project or new project?
I am working on a new project. It isn’t a traditional research project. It’s a set of personal essays about contingency and pedagogy, kind of a historically informed memoir and a pedagogical manifesto. In 2021 I received a fellowship from the ACLS to finish writing Wardship and the Welfare State. That fellowship, which was $65,000, was more than I’ve ever made (probably more than I’ll ever make) for my academic work. That year I also started to write personal essays. I love writing and finally had time to do it. I was processing my decision to leave the job market after six years of applying, my position as an adjunct, and the way I’ve been treated as an adjunct. I also love teaching, so these essays were an opportunity for me to put into a solid framework all the things I had been doing in my classes through the lens of adjuncting as a historical practice.
My teaching is adjunct teaching. To me that means it is non-linear, relational, contingent on acknowledging that academic meritocracy is a myth, and practiced in the spirit of dismantling academic hierarchies.
I wish that as a new adjunct I had been able to read someone’s honest reflections about what the job market is, how contingency has shaped their pedagogy, and what adjuncts do and who they are. So much of the writing out there about adjuncts is terribly bleak. Mainly, I want the book to explore how adjuncts are humans, not this faceless mass of tired transient workers satisfied with mere scraps, clinging to the periphery of academia. Right now it’s called Sad Adjunct, though I’m not sure if that title makes people want to read it or want to walk away quickly.
Photograph of excavated human trackways from White Sands National Park. Source: National Park Service.
Tell us about some of the public and digital history work you have done.
With the White Sands project, I was originally hired to transcribe oral histories conducted with the park’s tribal partners. Kristina Poznan extended the invitation for me to co-write the administrative history. It has been a really interesting experience to read about White Sands from all different perspectives (environmental histories, Native histories, the histories of the town/park relationship, the relationships with the military) and decide how to distill those narratives down to tell an administrative history of the park itself. So we have to balance a bureaucratic history (the nuances in this park are vast, since it is located within the White Sands Missile Range) of the park’s administration with a history of the land itself. Administrative histories are both for the public to understand how parks were formed and how they work, and for the park staff to be able to contextualize their own work. There are tons of threads to follow.
Very recently, park staff discovered fossilized human footprints in the park that establish a human presence there dating back at least 23,000 years. I’m personally interested in this sort of archaeological discovery as someone who writes and teaches Native history, and understand it as a reminder to listen to and respect the creation stories of Indigenous people.5
I consider my work at Ancestry to be public history work. Usually I’m working as part of a team, conducting reviews of content that has already been written or revising old and outdated content. Genealogy is one of the most popular ways people engage with U.S. history. The National Archives has partnered with Ancestry to make their digitized records available to family researchers. It’s also an essential tool for many historians and students. What I try to do with my Ancestry work is provide context and nuance to content, so that family historians may consider how their family’s stories intersect with broader societal changes and structures in the US.
I’ve also created my own digital history resource, which is free and available for anyone to use: Annotate McGirt. This is a website where users can access an easily annotatable version of the 2020 Supreme Court decision, McGirt v. Oklahoma, a landmark decision that reaffirmed the boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. If you’ve never tried out digital collaborative annotation before, you should check it out. Invite your students to read and annotate the decision. When I was adjuncting at multiple schools I often wished for some way to invite the students to talk to each other about material across institutions, and this site is designed with that experience in mind.
The adjunct solidarity button. The text reads: I’m an adjunct: Ask me how!
Tell us the digital project you are undertaking about adjuncts as historical actors.
This digital project started with a conference. I’ve found conferences to be terribly difficult as an adjunct, especially as one who is no longer on the job market. People don’t know how to talk to you. They either give you terrible advice (“just apply for one more year!”) or shower you with this pity that feels so thick it sticks to your clothes.
I went to the Western Historical Association meeting in October 2022 and attended an amazing panel featuring workers who participated in the Culinary Union’s strike at the Frontier in Las Vegas that started in 1991. The workers struck for over six years.6 One of the things that stuck out to me was such a simple organizing tactic—workers convinced each other to join the strike by wearing solidarity buttons. I had a lot of thoughts about that panel but one idea that came to mind was “adjuncts need a solidarity button.” I wanted to make a space for adjuncts at conferences to feel like they were worthy of being seen, like their experiences were as valid as someone else’s. This wasn’t necessarily an effort to make visible the labor that adjuncts perform, or our working conditions at specific institutions. It was more about engaging in one-on-one conversations that didn’t leave adjuncts feeling dejected and demoralized.
I did design an actual button. I also designed this interactive digital project, Adjuncts Are Historically Significant, which was kind of my way of psyching myself up to actually wear that button. The digital project takes a series of primary sources that feature adjunct’s experiences throughout the twentieth century. The oldest source is from 1924. There’s really no thorough history of adjuncts; many people, including academics, often assume that adjunctification is something that’s relatively recent. But I don’t think that’s true, I think academia has always employed adjuncts as temporary and precarious workers. But more than that, I think adjuncts are historically significant as people. Our experiences in academia are worthy of study because we are worthy of respect.
I brought the buttons to a conference in June, and it was terrifying to wear one. I felt the weight of all those previous interactions where I had walked away feeling devalued and infantilized and pitied. I think the buttons are useful—I did have a few joyous interactions with fellow adjuncts who saw my button and said “me too!”7 But the last interaction I had at the conference undermined some of the confidence I had built. I told a scholar I was an adjunct and she said that maybe when my book came out “people would see me differently.” I’m sorry, what? No. No. No. This is wrong.
Adjuncts are so valuable—as educators, intellectuals, and members of academic communities. We deserve a history.10 She has this incredibly useful metaphor of history as jazz music, where a lot of things are happening at one time, many instruments and musicians in conversation with one another. It can sound like chaos, but our job as historians is to hear the piece as a whole, to understand how all the instruments work together, even as they may clash at different points during the song.
More recent work I love includes women’s history work on Native people, like Brianna Theobald’s Reproduction on the Reservation, and work on welfare, like Jessie Wilkerson’s To Live Here You Have to Fight. I love books and articles that engage with how women make sense of their lives from within seemingly limited structures, like the reservation or the coal mine or the welfare state. Basically, research that adds to our understanding of the whole piece of music by inviting in a little more chaos.
Currently the women’s historian who inspires me the most is Ella Deloria (1889-1971). Deloria was a Yankton Dakota ethnographer and linguist who worked with Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. She wasn’t formally trained as a scholar, but she spent her life conducting ethnographic research on Dakota and Lakota people. She was employed only precariously by academia, taking speaking and lecturing jobs and writing to pay bills and support her kin. In the introduction of the most recent edition of her novel, Waterlily, Susan Gardner writes that academia “both enabled and exploited her.”11 (Read: she was an adjunct!) Waterlily is a work of fiction, but it is based on her years and years of research on Lakota culture—I would argue that it is a women’s history, as it is one of the only sources that fully explores Lakota women’s religious and cultural lives in the nineteenth century. She finished the book in 1948 but it wasn’t published until years after her death, in 1988. Thinking about Elsa Barkley Brown’s call for historians to be better jazz musicians—this book is jazz. I use it in my classes to invite students to consider Native concepts of time, kin, religion, gender, social roles. It’s beautifully written.
For you, what is the toughest part of tackling a research project?
Probably lack of funding, and the mental insecurity that comes with lacking funding. I think academia is an intense, competitive environment and it is very hard to make “progress” on projects when you feel like you’re constantly behind everyone else. In some ways I am behind—I don’t get sabbaticals, I don’t get research support, I’m literally not paid to do any of my own research at all. Maybe the toughest part is justifying to myself that I can be spending time on a research project. Before I got my ACLS Fellowship I really thought I might never finish my book. I had a book contract, I had a plan, but it just got so hard. The ACLS Fellowship provided so much more than the money though the money was absolutely life-changing. It provided validation that it was okay for me, an adjunct, to spend time reading sources and writing and revising and talking with people about my ideas.
In reality, this is what adjuncts do in the classroom all the time. I just got hung up on the fact that I wasn’t paid to do the “research” part until the ACLS Fellowship.
Mary’s kids, Sarah (L) and Nellie (R), on UCSD’s campus in front of the Sun God statue by Niki de Saint Phalle, a campus landmark, 2023.
What don’t people appreciate or understand/know about being an adjunct lecturer?
Wow. So much. I think, in theory, academics understand the disparity in working conditions among adjuncts and tenure-line faculty, and most tenure-line faculty and graduate students understand the fact that adjuncts are underpaid. But often I feel like these issues are considered from a (depersonalized) distance—we think about “adjunctification” of academia before we think about actual individual adjunct humans who we know. We think about adjuncting as a structural labor issue—and it primarily is—but it is also so personal and relational. Adjuncts have this nebulous underlying precarity woven into our individual relationships with other academics. When this relational precarity goes unacknowledged, adjuncts feel shame and despair.
Adjuncts are academics and experienced teachers, but in my opinion, we aren’t really treated that way. Sometimes I get the impression that tenure-line folks think of adjuncts as “junior” colleagues, somewhere between a grad student and a new assistant professor. But most adjuncts aren’t juniors. Sometimes I wonder if tenure-line faculty think of us as carriers of knowledge. But then again, I wonder a lot if tenure-line faculty think about individual adjuncts at all.
I wish people would stop talking about or presenting adjuncting as an individual “step” on the academic path, or even an example of “academic hazing” that everyone has to go through. That’s really limiting, especially for those of us who maintain connection to academic institutions through adjuncting. I also think it’s really a way of minimizing the scale of the problem at hand—if, for example, a tenure-line faculty member once was an adjunct, they might look back on their experiences as something they made it “through” but not something that could last forever. This is reinforced by the fact that adjuncts are hired in these temporary “part-time” stints. A friend of mine has been “permanently temporary” for over 25 years. We should be way past thinking of adjuncting as just a difficult temporary period some academics have to get through. Adjuncts have been here for a long time.
Joining other faculty to show (virtual) support for Miramar students in 2020 during the pandemic.
How has the pandemic affected you? Both when it started, through 2021 and 2022, and now as of this year?
When the pandemic started I was already teaching online. I had been certified and trained to do so through Miramar in 2017. I had only done the training because Miramar was offering a financial incentive—$500. At that time I had only managed to secure one class to teach for the semester. My income was $4,500 for the months of August-December.12 I did the training because it was essentially worth 11% of my income for the entire semester.
But it turned out I absolutely love online teaching. I find such joy and challenge and creativity in being able to reach people through digital tools. Even in my in-person classes I was using digital annotation and interactive polling to generate student discussion. When the pandemic started, I thought of the turn to remote learning completely differently than a lot of my colleagues. I ended up doing two different faculty development gigs where I assisted faculty at both UCSD and Miramar with moving their classes online.
The pandemic was one of the key triggers for me to fully embrace a more radical version of my pedagogy. I had always been interested in cultivating inclusivity in my classes, but the pandemic’s stresses, and the conversations around racial justice following George Floyd’s murder pushed me to investigate whether my courses were reflecting my values.13 I read a lot, participated in a lot of conversations through Twitter, and I joined a bunch of Zoom chats about teaching and learning.14 And I just decided, screw it. I’m going to ungrade, I’m going to embrace the chaos of digital learning, I’m going to make my classes completely collaborative, I’m going to cultivate spaces of joy for me and my students.15
The pandemic for me was stressful and unnerving, but so was the way I was working before the pandemic as an adjunct. So much of what I heard academics complain about during the pandemic (the uncertainty, the frustration with leadership, switching modalities with little warning) is the adjunct experience.16 This is not to say that I didn’t experience stress and anxiety, or to claim that all the things I tried in my online classes worked—they did not. But the pandemic did make me more willing to try new things because it really exposed all the preexisting cracks in academic structures. I could either cling to a crumbling foundation that had never shown adjuncts any love or I could try to make it better for my students and for me.
Multitasking with youngest daughter Sarah (then one year old), during the pandemic. Credit: Eric Lam.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
I think students and some scholars in other disciplines have an impression of “the archive” as an official record. Historians love archives, but we know they are incomplete. One thing I remind my students often is that just because something has been written down, it doesn’t make it any more “true” than something that was recorded in a different way (like oral tradition). The fact that something was saved doesn’t necessarily connote inherent value, just as things created in transient mediums, like ephemera or social media posts, do not inherently lack value.
History is incredibly expansive. I think people think of historians as people who write things about the past (which is true), but we also are really good at thinking about how the past lives in the present.
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle? Or what’s a class you have always wanted to teach, but just haven’t had the opportunity to?
I have a dream project I’d like to do someday—a large, annotatable, interactive digital database of all instances where Native people have testified to Congress. Congressional records are freely available, and the Congressional Record is digitized, but it is not at all user friendly. The text is very small and concentrated. I’d like to create an easily searchable transcribed version of the record that anyone can annotate or organize by theme. My own research utilizes a lot of Congressional testimony from Native people and I find these statements—and the responses and questions Native people get from members of Congress— revealing in terms of understanding how Native people made sense of their place in the American polity. Native people spoke to Congress all the time. That alone should be (searchable, annotatable) public knowledge.
If you weren’t a scholar, what other kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
I honestly don’t know, but I’m getting better at being okay with that. I think I’d be good at accounting. This year I seriously considered applying to work as a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service. I think I’ll always be some kind of writer and teacher, though the venue may change. Those things are in me for good.
A National Archives selfie, Washington D.C., 2022.
- To read more of Mary and Kristina’s work together, please see “Hi Person Reading This!” https://contingentmagazine.org/2022/03/08/hi-person-reading-this/
- Shout out to my former students Rossel-Joyce Garcia and Logan Gorkov, who were willing to co-write an essay with me about our digital history class, teaching and learning in the pandemic, and the concept of “instructional design.” “Sharing Instructional Design: Collaboration and Community with the Past, Present, and Future,” Designing for Care, edited by Jerod Quinn, Martha Burtis, and Surita Jhangiani (Denver: Hybrid Pedagogy Books, 2022), 113-134. You can read it for free here: https://pressbooks.pub/designingforcare/chapter/sharing-instructional-design/.
- Ungrading is an umbrella term used to describe alternative grading practices, and doesn’t have a shared definition. I define it as a system of feedback and relationship building between professors and students that intentionally disrupts academic hierarchies and meritocracies. I utilize a system of what Laura Gibbs describes as “all feedback no grades.” See her blog post (and chapter in Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning and What to Do Instead ed. Susan Blum, Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020) at https://oudigitools.blogspot.com/2019/03/getting-rid-of-grades-book-chapter.html, for more.
- Is it weird to keep citing yourself? My research on the Indian Field Days and Native women’s participation in tourist events in Yosemite and Nevada in my article, “Babies in Baskets: Motherhood, Tourism, and American Identity in Indian Baby Shows, 1916-1949,” Journal of Women’s History 29, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 38-61.
- Find out more about the human trackways discovery here: https://www.nps.gov/whsa/learn/nature/fossilized-footprints.htm
- The panel brought together former strikers with Mirabel Estrada Calderón who had conducted their oral histories for her 2021 MA thesis, “The Frontier of the Labor Movement: Latinas and the Longest Strike in Twentieth-Century Las Vegas.” https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations/4139
- Also I still have a ton! Let me know if you want one!
- For more of Mary’s writing on adjuncts, please see “Contingency is Not Complacency,” https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/09/15/rh-contingency/8
Annotated page from Ella Lonn’s 1924 report, “Academic Status of Women on University Faculties,” published in the Journal of the American Association of University Women, one of the sources featured in Mary’s digital project, Adjuncts are Historically Significant.
You are a scholar of women’s history. What are some women’s history works (books or articles)/resources that have informed your research? Who are some women’s historians that have inspired you?
I think of women’s history as my heart subject, because it is how I fell in love with history in the first place. I start my women’s history courses with Gerda Lerner, who provides a really useful entry point into the discipline because she has written frankly about the way that women’s historians were perceived by their colleagues. I also love Elsa Barkley Brown, especially her 1992 essay in Feminist Studies, “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics.”9Elsa Barkley Brown, “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 295-312.
- Susan Gardner, “Introduction to the Bison Books Version,” Waterlily by Ella Cara Deloria (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Bison Books, 2009), xiv.
- Unfortunately I fear that people will read $4,500 and think wow, that’s a lot for one class for an adjunct. That’s both true and absolutely absurd.
- See especially Jessica Zeller, “Pedagogy for End Times: Ungrading and the Importance of Arson,” in Crowdsourcing Ungrading. Originally published August 16, 2020. https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/ungrading/chapter/pedagogy-for-end-times-ungrading-and-the-importance-of-arson/.
- The Ungrading book club and Twitter chats organized by David Buck and Laura Gibbs were essential for my personal and professional growth. David has archived all the conversations and chats here: https://ungrading.weebly.com.
- The chapter I wrote for the Crowdsourcing Ungrading open access book, “On Grading, Efficiency, and Contingency,” represents some of my earlier thoughts on how ungrading is a fundamental piece of my adjunct pedagogy. https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/ungrading/chapter/on-grading-efficiency-and-contingency/
- Historian Jessica DeWitt described this phenomenon so well in her 2020 essay, “The Precarity That Binds Us,” for NiCHE: “The seeming inconveniences of COVID-19 affecting the research and writing of full-time academics and graduate students at higher education institutions are the same or similar to the inconveniences that adjunct faculty, precariously employed, and alt-ac scholars manage all of the time.” https://niche-canada.org/2020/07/23/the-precarity-that-binds-us/