Happy May Day! If you’re in a union that represents all faculty at your institution, contingent or otherwise, and you aren’t considering the needs contingent faculty, you fail to understand the purpose of a union.
If you’re at an institution with separate unions for contingent and TT faculty, and you fail to act in solidarity with the contingent faculty union, you are complicit in maintaining the exploitation of your colleagues.
If you’re at an institution with a grad union, and you fail to stand in solidarity with the grad students, you are complicit in maintaining the exploitation of your colleagues and your students.
Worse, if you take on their work duties while they’re striking, you’re a scab.
All this is to say that being an academic, especially a tenured academic, does not absolve you of your responsibility to act in solidarity with your colleagues, your students, and your fellow workers.
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Happy May Day! Did you know that sex workers are workers and including them in your conversations about labor is the bare minimum you can do?
Also, did you know that FOSTA/SESTA is not only a safety issue for sex workers, but also a labor issue?
Same with shadowbanning and other forms of digital discrimination targeted at sex workers.
Did you also know that framing sex work solely in terms of labor elides a whole host of social and cultural concerns that sex workers have been raising for decades?
The push to "fix" algorithms that produce biased results (e.x. hiring algorithms) ignores the very real fact that these algorithms are LITERALLY telling organizations about themselves and their data collection practices.
No, seriously: a hiring algorithm trained on the history of an institution is being trained on the history of choices made BY that institution. When the algorithm spits out a "biased" result, the algorithm isn't wrong: it's just telling the institution about its habits.
Now, clearly these habits reflect the institution's bias, but the instantaneous move to throw the algorithm out, to retool the algorithm, to point to the algorithm as biased, ignores that the algorithm just doesn't fucking work without a database, without training data.
The GOP's rebuttal to Biden's address was predictable, not just for the content which positions anti-racist work as the "true" source of division, but for its use of a minoritized person to do it. We should expect to see more things like this.
This move is not uncommon: power structures the world over have often use minoritized figures to "sell" their ideology to their allies and would be converts. On this view, one person becomes a metonym for an entire people and demonstrates that "they all aren't alike."
In higher-ed, we see this when administrators find one faculty member, one student, to show how things "aren't so bad," as if that one member can stand in for all members. It is an inversion of their using one member as an example of how all members of a group are "bad."
So, I'm glad Biden named white supremacy as "terrorism" and pointed to systemic racism in law enforcement, but I do want to keep in mind the purposes for doing so. In my mind, Biden has no other choice but to use this language to name the problem.
I'm pointing this out because the actions he's taking do not align with the rhetoric he is using. If white supremacy was as much a terrorist threat as Bin Laden, whose specter he invoked earlier, I would think that Biden would seek to mobilize resources sufficient to the task.
Moreover, his observation would recognize the breadth of white supremacist ideology not simply as a terrorist threat, or as a problem in law enforcement, which organizes our perceptions of how white supremacy works, but as an organizing principle that directs policy.
It is EXTREMELY risky for early-career people to specialize in LCT philosophies, not simply for the reasons that @BryanVanNorden pointed out in his retweet, but because of the way that departments and the field doesn't invest in LCT philosophies.
An example is how departments advertise for specialists in LCT philosophies. "Non-western," for example, is used as a catchall for "not-anglophone," and even when it is disambiguated into something like "Asian Philosophy," they're not specific as to which Asian Philosophy.
Thus, you have specialists in Chinese traditions competing with specialists in Indian traditions and Japanese traditions all for the same job. And this doesn't get into what happens when ads ask for "non-western" as code for "non-anglophone."