“It Is Time to Make Our Way Home” * : How Contingent Labor Practices Impact Transformative Possibilities of Teaching About Violence Against Women

Abstract

This article explores the intersection of teaching about gender-based violence and contingent employment. Drawing upon Patricia Hill Collins’s (1986) theory of the outsider-within to illuminate how power differentials, access, and resources as insiders or outsiders shape knowledge production and ways of knowing, seeing, and being, the author applies this lens to the experience of contingent faculty. Relying on perspectives in feminist pedagogy, autoethnographic methods, and case studies of students studying trauma, this article exposes layers of personal and institutional brokenness. In delving into the connection of emotion and social structure, this article is intended for people interested in higher education’s role and responsibility in preventing and responding to gender-based violence, the emotional life of the classroom, feminist pedagogy on trauma, mental health crisis in higher education, and overreliance on contingent laborers in higher education.

Keywords

teaching about violence contingent faculty contingency gender-based violence

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