Accommodation and Welfare of the Special Settlers of Kuban in the 1930s (on the Example of Karaganda Region)

The article is devoted to the history of the special settlers of the North Caucasus, including their placement and living arrangements in the of Central and Northern Kazakhstan, including on of the Karaganda region. The main attention in the article is paid to a special contingent, labor settlers from the Kuban in 1932—1933. Their history in modern science has not yet been studied. The article uses archival documents of the central, regional and local archives of Kazakhstan, including the Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the State Archive of the Karaganda Region, the State Archive of the Akmola Region, the State Archive of the Social and Political History of the Turkestan Region, the State Archive of the city of Temirtau, the State Archive of the Osakarovsky District of the Karaganda Region, the State archive of the Shortandy district of the Akmola region. Published documents in collections of documents from Russia and Kazakhstan were analyzed.

The Contingent Problem: A Counter-Narrative on Race and Class in the Field of Slavic Studies

This essay explores the unique challenge the proliferation of adjunct labor in higher education poses to efforts at eliminating racial bias and promoting diversity in our field. Relying on published research and personal experience, I argue that the pervasive exploitation of contingent labor makes academic careers, particularly in far-flung fields such as Slavic studies, unattractive to many college graduates from the Black community, a large portion of which considers education a meritocratic means of escaping intergenerational poverty. Because the economic, social, and cultural inequalities at play in determining who obtains a tenure-track job fly in the face of this myth of meritocracy so fundamental to historic Black hopes for socioeconomic mobility, I call for a reckoning with adjunctification as a critical first step to addressing racial bias and ensuring inclusivity in our field.

Adjunct Pleasure: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Writing on the Walls

In this chapter, Matthew Harrison explores how the radical contingencies of Elizabethan sonnets and academic employment can mutually inform pedagogical practice. Tracing links between contingent labor in higher education and early modern poets’ “phenomenology of contingency,” the chapter considers what happens when the metrics of selfhood and social perception produce competing notions of individual “value.” Harrison diagnoses how readily structural shortcomings are masked by fictions of personal exceptionalism or failure, and it proposes several practical strategies that invite students to “replace postures designed for obedience with active and bodily engagement with each other’s ideas.”

“It Is Time to Make Our Way Home”: How Contingent Labor Practices Impact Transformative Possibilities of Teaching About Violence Against Women

This article explores the intersection of teaching about gender-based violence and contingent employment. Drawing upon Patricia Hill Collins’s (1986) theory of the outsider-within to illuminate how power differentials, access, and resources as insiders or outsiders shape knowledge production and ways of knowing, seeing, and being, the author applies this lens to the experience of contingent faculty. Relying on perspectives in feminist pedagogy, autoethnographic methods, and case studies of students studying trauma, this article exposes layers of personal and institutional brokenness. In delving into the connection of emotion and social structure, this article is intended for people interested in higher education’s role and responsibility in preventing and responding to gender-based violence, the emotional life of the classroom, feminist pedagogy on trauma, mental health crisis in higher education, and overreliance on contingent laborers in higher education.

Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry

This book confronts an enduring investment in the poetic vocation. It seeks to challenge a dominant cultural logic that frames contingent labor as a sacrifice that frustrates the righteous progress towards realizing that seemingly purest of callings: Poet. Incorporating the often overlooked or excluded workaday ephemera of three canonical U.S. Romantic poets—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Hart Crane—it offers new archival insights that call for a re-examination of celebrated literary careers and questions their status as affirmatory icons of vocation. The poetry of Whitman the real estate dealer, Melville the customs inspector, and Crane the copywriter, does not constitute the formal inscription of a discrete poetic labor struggling against quotidian work towards the fulfilment of an exceptional individual career. Instead, the distracted forms of their poetry are always already intermingled with a variety of apparently lesser labors. Ousting poetic production from any sanctuary of privileged repose or transcendent focus, this book refigures the work of the poet as a living sensuous activity that transgresses labor’s conventional divisions and hierarchies. It consequently recasts the poet as a figure who unfastens and reimagines the “right of passage” vocational logic that does so much to reproduce the current political and economic paradigm.