Let me start off by saying that I am blessed. Usually, I hate when people say that they are blessed, or, even worse, #blessed, but in this case I think it is important to acknowledge that my positionality has afforded me maximum privileges in life. Moreover, I am extremely, here it comes, #blessed because I have a partner who works as tirelessly as I do to make sure we survive while I am in graduate school. Recently I was having a discussion with a friend in the discipline, a WPA, and she mentioned that she thought it was important for graduate students to do radical things—like make a living wage. Of course, as a third-year Ph.D. student, I am feeling all too well the economic constraints of an endeavor like graduate school. Then, tonight, as I was winding down on Twitter—that sounds ridiculous, I know—just before I was going to start the second season of Frasier (https://bit.ly/2GUHxRN) on Netflix, I saw this Tweet: I blacked out the handle and photo to keep this Twitter user’s identity anonymous. By the way, if you have made it this far into the blog, kudos to you. Let’s keep going.
Each year, graduate students and contingent faculty are burdened with a daunting, almost insurmountable, financial burden when it comes to attending conferences, as well as other professional development opportunities. Coupling the unethical amount of money institutions pay graduate students with the rigorous amounts of emotional, physical, and mental labor required to succeed in higher education creates striking implications for the future mental wellness of the academy. Sure, you have heard this before: universities don’t pay graduate students and contingent faculty enough. Okay, well, you need to hear it again because things need to change, and the only way things are going to change is if we band togeth-- (Pause) I will admit, things got out of hand a bit there. Frasier was playing in the background and he was going on one of his long soliloquies and his passion yadda yadda osmosis… you get the point. Here’s the deal, though, we know that universities don’t compensate workers ethically. But, what about when conference organizers plan and execute the registration of their conference unethically? For the most part, graduate students and contingent faculty know how much they are getting compensated, unfair or not, because they sign a contract. Conference organizers, on the other hand, have the agency to choose and change the registration fees for conferences annually, and virtually all up the price for non-members. Of course, the primary difference in the institutional contract we sign and the registration fees we pay is stability, however fragile, meaning we know how much we are going to get paid; we don’t always know how much conference fees will be. Remember earlier in this blog post when I was getting all fired up and then stopped myself? It’s because I am fired up. I went to the Conference on Community Writing website, which is run by the Coalition for Community Writing, and checked out the About page. What I found leads me to propose this question: how are we supposed to “help to catalyze community-based writing through research, teaching, publications, workshops and conferences, and public writing projects about, with, for, and by local, global, and online communities” if we can’t even afford to join your efforts?
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Charles WoodsPhD student focusing on Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Archives
October 2019
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