We hosted a workshop on August 18 at the American Sociological Association's 2023 Annual Meeting. We envisioned this session as a space for graduate students and faculty from different universities to reflect together on the institutional conditions of their pedagogical labor. Thank you to the many attendees from across US and Canadian higher ed!
From the conference program:
The recent strike across University of California campuses included 48,000 academic workers and represented the largest academic strike in United States labor history. This event, along with the recent wave of academic labor actions beyond the UC, prompts us to consider teaching and pedagogy through the organization of labor in the neoliberal university. In this workshop, we will discuss the possibilities of considering teaching from a labor, rather than pedagogical, orientation. Drawing on several autoethnographies of teaching assistants as they learn to navigate the university’s labor structure as academics-in-training, we suggest an alternative dimension to talking about teaching that begins from a labor process perspective. Specific topics include lesson plans as labor games, arrhythmias in teaching and research, student support as care work, manager relations across teaching teams, and the role of silence in developing teaching labor. Attendees will expand their toolkit for analyzing their own teaching labor and the valuation of teaching within their institutions.
Past Events
The Árdna at UiT, site of the workshop.
Teaching Social Theory Workshop
UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway. January 9-10, 2023.
As part of the Peder Sather Center project, an ongoing collaboration between Norwegian institutions of higher education and UC Berkeley, we presented on the ethnographies in "Towards a Labor Theory of Pedagogy." The workshop as a whole attended to current debates over the sociological canon and the implications of this to pedagogy.