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  • Editors’ Note:The Teaching Poor
  • Amy Herzog and Joe Rollins

To admit to one’s own poverty and debt, as an academic, is to step into a minefield of shame and self-doubt, even within feminist circles. To be sure, many feminist scholars have labored intensely to document structural economic injustice around the globe, and a large number of academics productively extend their research into practices of advocacy and activism. Most of us have been trained to recognize that the personal is the political. That does not necessarily make it easier to disclose that one is in debt or struggling to pay one’s bills, particularly to colleagues or advisors. Poverty is something that happens to someone else, or that one can proudly claim to have overcome in the historical past (neoliberal-bootstrap stories abound, but they can also function as a moral reproach to those currently in debt, a status that still smacks of a personal failure). Poverty is something we research, not something we experience or are complicit in, certainly not within our own departments.

And yet many of us are in debt and struggling with poverty. Contingent faculty comprise the majority of the academic workforce, and fewer and fewer PhDs entering the field can expect to find fulltime employment. Most students in the United States graduate in debt, and they owe significantly more than in previous years.1 The economic crisis in academia disproportionately impacts women, who are paid less than their male colleagues (based both on rank and overrepresentation at lower-paying institutions), are less likely to receive tenure, are more likely to head single-parent households, and are more likely to work as contingent faculty, particularly in the humanities (Schell 1998; Mason and Goulden 2004; Finley 2009). Even those who secure coveted tenure-track positions are [End Page 9] not immune from the economic crisis, particularly when teaching at public institutions where research and travel funds are limited and workloads are heavy. The line between contingent and fulltime faculty blurs, too, when one considers that many tenure track faculty began their careers as adjuncts, accruing increased debt along the way.

With so much at stake, it is critical for feminist scholarship to address the economic crisis within academia head-on. As evidenced by the heated exchanges that have recently erupted via social media, the process will be a painful one (Potter 2013; Schuman 2013). Yet those among us who have the privilege of job security bear a responsibility—to the students we are training and the contingent faculty who support our positions—to advocate for more equitable working conditions and a sustainable field. To do so, however, requires confronting a seemingly insurmountable and deeply entrenched system, one in which we are all insidiously imbricated. We are in dire need of a frank conversation about the nature of debt, about its history and temporal nuances, about the ways in which it binds and severs ties between various actants, about its psychological machinations, and our own participation within its cycles.

Rosalind Petchesky and Meena Alexander’s intervention into these waters could not be more timely. Debt offers an inspired and often startling take on the multifaceted nature of indebtedness. These range from Monica Johnson’s graphic novel depicting the struggles of a loan-burdened graduate, to Nell Painter’s meditation on Beloved, to a roster of chapters grappling with questions of reparations, refusals, credit, “feminist indebtedness,” gratitude, and the fraught economies of care-based labor. The global focus of these interdisciplinary efforts, which include significant feminist and queer critiques of prevailing discourses on debt, dovetail into both activist and artistic proposals for upending paradigms of obligation. It is a collection that significantly advances our understanding of the gendered nature of debt.

Given the deep-seated ways in which the shame of debt can be internalized (and ignored), we are particularly pleased to feature Janet Yoon’s haunting portrait of “The Formerly Middle Class” for this issue’s Alerts and Provocations. Yoon, an architect and design researcher, takes a spatial approach to the slow economic decline experienced by many U.S. households. As people shift into decreasingly stable and often nomadic domiciles, their experience of urban space is...

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