Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : a labor history of contingent faculty / Eric Fure-Slocum -- From the margins to the center : negotiating a new academy / Gary Rhoades -- Framing Part I : R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Elizabeth Hohl -- "Those who don't accept this don't last long" : two centuries of cost cutting and laboring in the US higher education industry / Elizabeth Tandy Shermer -- Why faculty casualization? : its origins and the present challenges of the contingent faculty movement / Joe Berry and Helena Worthen -- Women's work : a feminist rethinking of contingent labor in the academy / Gwendolyn Alker -- Contingency across higher education / Sue Doe and Steven Shulman -- Framing Part II : Multiple contingencies / Aimee Loiselle -- Social dirt, liminality, and the adjunct predicament / Claire Raymond -- The good, the bad, and the ugly : being contingent and female in STEM fields / Diane Angell -- Talking back against ableism, ageism, and contingency as a Latinx instructor and first-generation scholar / Miguel Juárez -- Graduate student labor, contingency, and power / Erin Hatton -- Common ground for the common good : what we mean when we say "faculty working conditions are student learning conditions" / Maria Maisto -- Framing Part III: "To move things forward" / Anne Wiegard -- So many roads, so much at stake : the composition of faculty bargaining units / William A. Herbert and Joseph van der Naald -- Graduate worker organizing and the challenges of precarity in higher education / Jeff Schuhrke -- From community of interest to imagined communities : organizing academic labor in the Washington, DC, Area / Anne McLeer -- The "army of temps" in the house of labor : how California's public sector labor unions struggle to resist the deprofessionalization of college teachers / Trevor Griffey -- Casualization in the United Kingdom : causes, scale, and resistance / Steven Parfitt -- Building labor solidarity across tenure lines / Naomi R Williams and Jiyoon Park -- How the isolation of contingency undermines the public good of education / Claire Goldstene.

"In the United States today, almost three-quarters of the people teaching in two- and four-year colleges and universities work as contingent faculty. They share the hardships endemic in the gig economy: lack of job security and health care, professional disrespect, and poverty wages that require them to juggle multiple jobs. This collection draws on a wide range of perspectives to examine the realities of the contingent faculty system through the lens of labor history. Essayists investigate structural changes that have caused the use of contingent faculty to skyrocket and illuminate how precarity shapes day-to-day experiences in the academic workplace. Other essays delve into the ways contingent faculty engage in collective action and other means to resist austerity measures, improve their working conditions, and instigate reforms in higher education. By challenging contingency, this volume issues a clear call to reclaim higher education's public purpose. Interdisciplinary in approach and multifaceted in perspective, Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education surveys the adjunct system and its costs"-- Provided by publisher.