Editor’s note: this piece deals with rape.
This ancient mayfly, trapped 100 million years ago in amber, is a new species named Vetuformosa buckleyi. Photo by George Poinar, Jr., Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Author’s note: This essay was written in the Fall of 2021 and selected for an edited collection on contingent teaching in the early semesters of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The piece went through the whole process of peer review, editing, and a contract was signed but, unfortunately, by 2025, the editors were still unable to place the collection with a publisher and publication of the volume on contingent Covid teaching fell through.
This experience speaks to the challenges of publishing as a contingent academic and publishing about contingency in academia. It also speaks to the importance of Contingent’s existence and its mission to publish the work of those outside the tenure-track professoriate.
Given the specificity of the time covered, I have left the essay as it was—situated within its composition in Fall 2021.
“[F]ull disclosure: as I write this during the first week of January 2021, in the midst of an insurrection a mile away at the US Capitol, my imagination is taxed, so I’m not 100% sure what we’re going to do. But we’ll figure it out.”
Actual words from my Spring 2021 syllabus! No lie.
Come April when my students tell me they’re tired, I’ll remind them that they have every reason to be. It is, after all, a year that started with an insurrection. And they’ll exhale an “Oh yeeeeeeeeah,” characterized by both relief and a little surprise. Because they maybe kind of sort of forgot, because—let’s be honest—a whole hell of a lot has happened since January 6th.
What a semester for a course entitled “Writing & Anger.” What a semester to be contingent faculty. What a semester in which to be raped by a man on a third date. What a semester in which to move house, to escape the place where the rape occurred. And what a semester in which to have 90+ students in varying states of mental and physical collapse. How ironic that I taught a course on “Writing & Anger” while feeling almost entirely numb.
“Dear People.” That’s how I start all emails to my students. Dear people. From there, I recap what has happened and what will happen next, so let’s do that now.
This essay, written in Fall of 2021, analyzes the emotional toll and labor of being a precarious academic in Spring 2021. The analysis is brief and in no way all-encompassing; it reflects only my own experience. “What I know is shaped by where I have been located,” writes Sara Ahmed.1 This is always true, and it has been especially true of where one is situated in time, place, and privilege during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
I am a white, cis-het woman who has lived alone in Washington, D.C. A single, childless woman who’s been separated from family and friends throughout this mass-death catastrophe while teaching five classes, sometimes six, per semester—full-time contingent faculty at one institution and part-time adjunct at another.
My perspective is that of an educator whose teaching has long been grounded in trauma-informed pedagogy. During the pandemic, however, in my teaching of writing, I’ve come to embrace even more fully a pedagogy of care. I’ve done this in an attempt to provide for students, but also, I am aware, for myself—as both a human and an instructor navigating circumstances characterized by an absence of institutional care and, often, active institutional abuse.
“I don’t think these institutions can support and love us,” the scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom has said, a truth codified in the very structure of contingent employment.2 I moonlight at NYU, but work at Howard University (HU), one of the most prestigious historically Black universities in the United States. I am employed at Howard as a full-time, non-tenure-track Lecturer in the English Department. As a pseudonymous colleague of mine explained in an open letter to our new colleague, Nikole Hannah-Jones, our working conditions, while more stable than those of graduate students and adjuncts, still necessitate that, “Each year, . . . we must re-apply anew for our jobs. Complete the employment application again, submit the vitae, act like we’ve never met. Every single year, we get a letter during the Spring Semester reminding us that our jobs are over as of May 15th.” And every year, we contingent academics “rely upon the ‘security’ of seeing our names attached to courses . . . as confirmation that we will not discover in mid-August that we are newly unemployed.”3 That is until our seventh year of employment, when time’s up and, due to the same 7-year cap that ended the teaching career of Toni Morrison, we are no longer eligible for full-time employment at HU, though they are perfectly happy to re-hire us as adjunct faculty.
I explore this dynamic of precarity in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic—an historical period that has infused our times with a new degree of precarity and risk and a period as yet unpindownable, historically. It is not just begun, but also not yet over. As I wrote that sentence on 26 November 2021, the Omicron variant has just today been identified as a “variant of concern.” I write this whole essay aware that I am unaware of my own position within the story I aim to capture, aware that we have previously felt we were nearing the end only to be thrown deeper into confusion and mass death.
I write from the United States, where it increasingly feels as though “normal” is irrefutable, where the pandemic is normalized, mass death is normalized, even as a 4th wave sweeps across Europe, undoubtedly on its way towards us.4 This is an essay composed within the pandemic (its precise location therein, I do not yet know). What I want to consider here, or at the very least record, is how we got through it—not the whole thing, just Spring 2021.
I also want to record how, year after year, we do this. Year after year, the pandemic rolls on, and academic year after academic year, it feels horrific in new ways. Like the peeling back of an onion or a bitten down fingernail, as we go, fresh horrors are revealed. As a teacher and a human, you work to attain some sense of balance, take control and impose some sense of order for your students. You figure out how to teach in the conditions you’re in, and then something happens, and everything resets, and the conditions you’re in are unlike anything you’ve ever experienced, and you must revise your syllabus, your class session, your day, your Blackboard site, your expectations, yourself, last night’s homework, next week’s reading, Essay #2, everything, and figure out a way forward for all of you all over again.
Revision is a core element of the writing process. The pandemic has reshaped my teaching of writing in many ways, especially in moving to the forefront an emphasis on writing gently, slowly, mindfully. It’s also led me to incorporate ongoing, informal therapeutic writing activities, intended to help students grow accustomed to writing regularly but also provide a space for processing the chaos of the everyday.
In an e-lecture delivered on 21 February 2020, the novelist Yan Lianke—IAS Sin Wai Kin professor of Chinese Culture and chair professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology—reminded the graduate students in his creative writing class:
Amid the great torrents of an era, one’s own memories are often treated as superfluous foams, tides, and noise that the era wipes out or carelessly throws aside, silencing them in voices and in words, as if they’ve never existed. Alas, with the passing of an era, everything fades into oblivion. Flesh and blood, body and soul are gone. All is well, and the little fulcrum of truth that could lift the world is lost.5
The “superfluous foams and tides and noise” that exist(ed) are what I aim to record here. All was not well in Spring 2021. This is one story about how it looked to be teaching then.
Trauma relocates and interrupts, blurring the lines between past and present. In trauma, there is no future. This is an essay deeply rooted in trauma. The writing here is discursive, reflecting the rhythms of precarity within its composition as well as the trauma. As a result, the verb tenses are messy, at best. All of this is messy. And that’s ok. That is how it was.
WTF?
“My students have been my whole life,” a similarly single, childless colleague told me late in 2020. It’s a problematic dynamic and one already proving difficult to explore now simply by virtue of my current employment conditions. As I write this, in the fall of 2021, our students at Howard have been occupying a building on campus for nearly a month, sleeping outside in an encampment of 60+ tents, in protest of their living conditions, the university’s authoritarian governance structures, and its punitive response to their efforts.6 I am here to write an essay about Spring 2021, and yet for all of Fall 2021, it has felt like our hair has been on fire.
The scenario described above is characteristic of precarity, which, through its rhythms of unrelenting forward motion—flinging us from crisis to crisis, anxiety to anxiety—severely inhibits reflection, processing, thinking, writing. Precarity stands in direct opposition to the life of the mind.
Living conditions are learning conditions are teaching conditions are working conditions. We are all of us, often, by fate, tied together. But still: our students should not be our lives, and neither should our work.
A profoundly problematic dynamic, the “my students are the entirety of my social life” situation blurs the necessary boundaries beyond recognition, though, as Amia Srinivasan writes, the boundaries between students and teachers have long been fuzzy, rooted as they are in desire. “The tacit promise of the classroom is that the teacher will work to confer on the student some of [their] knowledge and understanding,” Srinivasan observes. “In the best case, the teacher-student relationship arouses in the student a strong desire, a sense of thrilled if inchoate infatuation. That desire is the lifeblood of the classroom, and it is the teacher’s duty to nurture and direct it toward its proper object: learning.”7 In the present state of national/international disaster, the dynamic of intimacy and care-taking that has emerged across my pandemic classes has felt inevitable as well as reparative and healing. In my experience, it has also enhanced the “[E]pistomologic empowerment” that is one of teaching’s fundamental aims.8
In an environment where we’re welcoming students into our homes and lives in an unprecedented way and via formats that promote easier, and therefore increased, communication, I do not know how these circumstances would have been avoidable, barring an abdication of one’s own humanity and that of our students. That this circumstance feels unavoidable perhaps also suggests how untethered from institutional support both students and precarious academics have been during this period.
My school is not a building; it is my students—a circumstance that speaks to the pandemic’s dislocation and the “fundamental placelessness” of contemporary, precarious work.9 For the spring 2021 semester, my students were not on campus; they were scattered around the globe, on shaky wi-fi, in their family homes or apartments, or in unstable, unsafe, changeable living conditions. The constant was that we were there. We showed up. Somewhere, somehow. On camera, off camera, on mute, unmuted, via email, on Zoom, in virtual office hours, on Blackboard, in Google docs: we met.
What I am asking here is: What just happened? I work through that question of what happened with an awareness that the question itself is flawed. Because it is not over. The pandemic is not over; we are still in it as I write this. So, the question is equally: What is happening?
The pandemic is ongoing, and the responses of institutions and governments (local, national, and global) continue to demand new improvisations from educators with each passing semester. These are improvisations for which most of us, especially contingent faculty, have received little to no guidance or support. We have been left to figure it out, again and again, and again and again, on our own, with little, if any, institutional instruction and with limited, if any, institutional communication around public health measures. Repeatedly, during the pandemic, educators have been put in circumstances in which we have little to no control, without being asked for input, much less thanked for our efforts and the risks we have been forced to take on.
We are all of us learning something new every day, that same colleague texted me in spring 2020 as we scrambled to get our act together online in the early days. Learning is occurring, even if it feels like teaching isn’t. Focusing specifically upon the spring 2021 semester here, my intention with this piece is to center teachers as the essential workers we have been, providing substantial mental health support to our students during an ongoing crisis even as we navigate proliferating national, international, and personal crises.
I offer observations of how it feels to be on the ground, on Zoom and Blackboard. What I remember, and what I believe, is how it feels to be showing up during all of this. The effort involved in being present, bearing witness, and trying, in circumstances in which, as contingent faculty, it so often feels our efforts are never adequate, and we are, all of us, doomed.
You don’t know me, but I ask you to trust me. That’s what I tell my students, in our first week together, as I withhold our schedule and the syllabus from them until such time that the class list has stabilized, and I’ve got some sense of who we are and who we might be in the months we’ve got together. Every class is different; every semester is something new. I’ve ideas, but I’m never 100% certain what we’re going to do, where we’re going, what will happen. The thing I know is that that is ok; we will figure it out together moving forward.
Editor’s note: Read Part 2 here.
- Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017), 89.
- @tressiemcphd, “I don’t know who needs to hear this but it is a really good time to remember that the institution cannot love you. You don’t have to pay those statements or petitions any mind, black people. Just get your hugs where you can and let them have their institution,” Twitter.com, 1 June 2020, https://twitter.com/tressiemcphd/status/1226953483296763904?s=20.
- Imani Light, “An Open Letter to Nikole Hannah-Jones from a Howard Faculty Member,” 11 July 2021, https://howardprof.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-nikole-hannah-jones-from-a-howard-faculty-member-ad1fb3f9c05b.
- @saltysicky, “A student just used the phrase ‘as we normalize the pandemic’ instead of ‘as we return to normal’ and I love it.” Twitter.com, 3 December 2021, https://twitter.com/saltysicky/status/1466834065420550147?s=27.
- Yan Lianke, “What Happens After Coronavirus?” Literary Hub, 11 March 2020, https://lithub.com/yan-lianke-what-happens-after-coronavirus.
- The Hilltop, #BlackburnTakeover coverage, https://thehilltoponline.com/tag/blackburn-takeover.
- Amia Srinivasan, “What’s Wrong With Sex Between Professors and Students? It’s Not What You Think,” New York Times, 3 September 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/metoo-teachers-students-consent.html.
- Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 136.
- Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work (Zer0 Books, 2011), 21.