Graduate Students at Work - (Rethinking Careers, Rethinking Academia) by Tessa Brown (Paperback)

About the Book

"Essential Workers, Exploited Labor highlights the expertise and experiences of graduate students to demonstrate what graduate study entails, what it makes possible, and what it constrains. Moving between full-length research articles and short personal essays, the collection illustrates graduate students' experiences, organizing tactics, and strategies for staying in or moving out of the academy. The contributors illustrate the significant expertise that graduate students are asked to enact in their jobs as teachers, researchers, and administrators, even as they are kept in poverty wages for the decade or so it takes to move through a master's and doctoral program into the promised land of a tenure-track job. At the same time, these essays draw connections between the labor conditions of graduate student workers and other workers navigating poverty wages, labor migration, limited benefits, and harassment and discrimination around lines of race, gender, ability, and citizenship-the most important connection perhaps being the possibility for organization and unionization to fight for better working conditions for all"--

Book Synopsis

Graduate Students at Work highlights the expertise and experiences of graduate students to demonstrate what graduate study entails, what it makes possible, and what it constrains in the context of corporatizing higher education. This collection of full-length research articles and short personal essays illustrates graduate students' experiences, organizing tactics, and strategies for staying in or moving out of the academy.

Speaking from personal experience as well as reporting research findings, the contributors of Graduate Students at Work illustrate the significant expertise that graduate students are asked to enact in their time-intensive jobs as teachers, researchers, and administrators, even as they are kept in poverty wages for the decade or so it takes to move through a master's and doctoral program into the promised land of a tenure-track job. While these students are the leaders of the academic labor movement, they have yet to receive as much attention as adjunct instructors and other laborers in the university system. Though they experience harassment, discrimination, and exploitation, graduate students rarely have access to labor protections because they are often misclassified as students, not employees--a key rhetorical strategy universities use to fight graduate student organizing.

These essays and articles also draw insightful connections between the labor conditions of graduate student workers and other workers navigating poverty wages, labor migration, limited benefits, and harassment and discrimination around lines of race, gender, ability, and citizenship--the most important connection perhaps being the possibility for organization and unionization to fight for better working conditions for all.

Review Quotes

"Brown's collection captures the long road of labor exploitation that got us here as well as the unique challenges and opportunities graduate students face in the present moment. The authors explore the emotional, material, and intellectual consequences of capitalism in higher education, creating a vital resource for current and potential graduate students, for the labor organizers who support them, and for the teachers and administrators ready to be allies. This is both a scholarly and a narrative text, accessible and thought-provoking."--Amy Lynch-Biniek, professor of English, Kutztown University

"The contributions Tessa Brown's Graduate Students at Work: Exploited Scholars of Neoliberal Higher Ed makes to the field are significant. The book centers on the original research of current and recent graduate students rather than presenting them as other people's participants, giving it an authority and an ethical gravitas I can't applaud loudly enough. The primary research covers a huge range of territory where the all-too-often demands for 'data' stall advocacy efforts. I am profoundly grateful that this book exists."--Seth Kahn, professor of English, West Chester University

"Recent world events have irreparably influenced how labor dynamics operate within different industries. Tessa Brown has pulled together a brilliant slate of contributors to collectively author a definitive exploratory text that (re)contextualizes graduate students as 'entry-level academic laborers' within contemporary higher education. Each original contribution to the book studies this overarching framing of work and labor, whether through empirical study, reflective essay, or commentary. Moreover, the authors present exhaustive rebuttals and thoughtful analyses that dismantle many academic leaders' and policymakers' understanding of graduate students as 'only' students. This volume is important reading for any person considering, guiding, or participating in higher education and hoping to transform the field in ways that better recognize, compensate, and value the individuals that are doing the essential work that perpetuates the best version of what higher education can be in a society."--Demetri L. Morgan, associate professor of higher education, Loyola University Chicago