Contingent faculty publishing in community: Case studies for successful collaborations

Abstract

The seeds for this project were planted nearly six years ago when we began considering the growing number of contingent faculty positions within English departments and across institutions of higher education and their effect on teaching and scholarly work. Active as scholars in our fields of study, we were struck by the lack of contingent faculty voices at many of the conferences we attended and in much of the scholarship we read, despite the fact that contingent faculty do most of the teaching within first-year composition (FYC) programs and, increasingly, in other disciplines as well. Although we felt at times in our writing and research on the subject to be “preaching to the choir,” recent news media coverage has helped to illustrate for those outside of academe that nontraditional, hybrid, contingent faculty positions are rapidly becoming the norm across institutions of higher education and significantly affect working conditions and faculty work.