Hope Labour, Desperation, and Marginalization

Especially post-Covid, there is no sense of community in the system. Sessional staff come and go (and I’ve watched most colleagues go), and there’s a hot desk, but zero support or understanding for developing an actual career. Opportunities provided to permanent staff, including meetings and funding, exempt sessionals. It’s a dispiriting workplace that disregards limitations such as disability and parenting, and where all the publication/research/writing work is ‘hope labour’. Sessionals from the same subjects/area used to share a workspace in which we were visited by students. Class sizes have grown so much that even teaching is rarely rewarding, especially with anonymous ‘feedback’ from students looming over you. We know these mistreat women and other minorities.

The rare university emails about mental health or self-care for staff ring hypocritical and hollow. If you actually try to have a conversation about barriers, you are cut off – there is no time allocated to you as an individual, or to your well-being. The exception is people who are already privileged and have access to campuses and are taken under the wing of an academic staff member. Even this is not equitable, but random, depending on access to resources that enable relationships to form. I feel more marginal and irrelevant every day. Those colleagues who have left in despair are neither valued nor followed up. Their skills are lost, but there is no response to that from the University and no attempt to retain casual staff. In other words, the whole system is based on our desperation, our economic needs and our marginal status – without which, the system could no longer function as it does.