Contingency, Gender, and the Changing Landscape of Higher Education

The webinar builds on the informational session the committee organized last year on shifts in higher education labor, but this time with a more focused frame: gendered precarity, institutional nonresponse to faculty excellence, and the gap between the actual composition of the faculty workforce and the structures that govern it. To give a sense of direction for the roundtable, here are some possible guiding questions:

• What does contingency currently look like in practical terms across institutions and fields?
• How are gender, caregiving, and livelihood insecurity shaping contingent faculty experience?
• What happens when contingent faculty achieve visible excellence, such as major fellowships or book contracts, but institutions fail to respond appropriately?
• What kinds of institutional responses are most notably absent?
• What can scholarly societies and committees realistically do?