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Yes, we haven’t posted for a while but we’re still here. Still thinking, still working on our few words. Still (with)standing. Why are we still here? We’ve asked ourselves this question quite a few times over the last 18 months or so. And we’ve partly answered on Twitter and on our own blogs and we’ve … Continue reading
What to say in the aftermath of this piece. In his mid-40s, John had worked as a casual university tutor since finishing his PhD in philosophy 15 years ago. Passed over a few times for tenured jobs, he was a long-term member of the academic reserve army, the members of which perform around half of … Continue reading
This was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 18th October 2016. We don’t have any words to add at the moment but we will in coming days, as the sadness continues to seep through and the rage sets in. For now, please just read the article.
We were invited to sit on a panel on Academic Activism at the 5th International Academic Identities Conference 2016 Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes, and politics. Below is my response to the questions posed by moderator Agnes Bosanquet regarding why I withheld institutional affiliation in my conference biography and how I separate my paid job from my … Continue reading
Semester has ended, the grades are parked, and tomorrow we’re off to the 5th International Academic Identities Conference at the University of Sydney. The conference is titled Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics, and we’ve been invited to join a lunchtime panel discussion on academic activism. Sundi Richards, who is part of … Continue reading
We started CASA in 2014 as independent writers—one casually employed, one on a permanent academic contract—as an irked response to the Universities Australia annual conference, which was staring into the future of higher education and apparently failing to notice casualisation at all. We each saw this peculiar blindness as a sector problem, and we weren’t alone. There were already researchers tackling it … Continue reading
How (whether) you speak about casualisation in Australian higher education has become a kind of shorthand for indicating where you are in the system, and sometimes, where you want to be. Your use (or not) of the C word not only demonstrates your insight (or not) into casualisation, it is also becoming an extremely useful way for others to … Continue reading
Hello, and welcome to the latest roundup of news on casualisation in Australian universities, and worldwide. This week, we’re in our business suits, thinking about the cost and sustainability of casual staffing. At the beginning of March, the Universities Australia 2016 (#uaconf) marked a third year of CASA, and a return to what’s become our … Continue reading
For various reasons, we keep an eye on what comes out of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency which is the Australian Government statutory agency responsible for promoting and improving gender equality in Australian workplaces.* Of most interest is the WGEA’s publicly accessible and very search-friendly archive of the required annual reports by relevant Australian employers … Continue reading
We’ve been wanting to put together information for casual staff at Australian universities, who need resources and funding to develop or sustain their research careers, whether that be academic, alt-ac, or professional. We’re told*** that it’s highly engaging for students to be taught by people who are actively also researchers and highly engaged in their own careers. Now that the rate … Continue reading
CASA 