Working-Class Studies Association
The Working-Class Studies Association supports scholarship, teaching, and activism related to working-class life and cultures.
Lynn Arner, a WCSA member and Associate Professor in the Department of English at Brock University, was interviewed by James M. Van Wyck about her work studying how class backgrounds and gender shape the careers of English professors. The interview was published today by Inside Higher Ed.
In the article, Van Wyck writes that, “Arner’s work complements a growing body of research examining the clunky apparatuses by which higher education seeks to diversify the professoriate.” Read more here.
Lynn Arner, an Associate Professor of English at Brock University and a WCSA member, won a multi-year grant for her project “Working-Class Women in the Professoriate,” a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This project involves conducting an extensive survey of English professors in Canada and the U.S., a survey designed to uncover the ways in which working-class female academics negotiate a different terrain in the profession than their working-class male counterparts and than middle-class colleagues, male or female. One of the goals of the survey is to document tracking in hiring patterns in the professoriate, tracking according to gender, class, and institutional pedigree. Lynn plans to publish her survey results in a pair of articles and will also use the survey material in the book she is currently writing on gender and class in the professoriate.
Special Session for the MLA Convention in Philadelphia, Jan. 5-8, 2017
Tracking in the Professoriate (A Roundtable)
Although most scholars realize that possessing a PhD from a top-ranked university is advantageous, David Colander recently quantified the startling degree to which institutional pedigree determines where a PhD holder in English will garner a tenure-track position. This roundtable seeks to further the conversation about tracking in the professoriate. Topics may include the hidden or unacknowledged effects of such tracking; placement patterns in administration or in the faculty labor pools outside the tenure stream; theorizations of tracking as governance or projects of civility; practices of tracking in relation to political economy; and intersections between institutional pedigree and gender, race, class, or sexuality in professorial placements. Other possibilities are welcome.
If interested, please send an abstract (150-250 words) and c.v. to Lynn Arner at larner@brocku.ca by March 17, 2016. For more information about the conference and about the call for papers, see https://apps.mla.org/callsforpapers.