Against gig academia: connectivity, disembodiment, and struggle in online education

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the process of decomposition as well as the struggle for recomposition of academic labor, which we understand as a contradictory positionality within so-called “gig academy.” Ours is a rhetorical intervention to, first of all, explicitly connect contemporary working conditions in academia to the general process of neoliberalization; second, illustrate how online education platforms (or LMS) mediate important aspects of the academic labor process; and third, reflect on how these dynamics make faculty unionizing both urgent and particularly challenging.