National Adjunct Walkout Day (Topic Exploration)

1. While National Adjunct Walkout day was, as the title says, national, I’m drawing my boundaries around the University of Arizona campus. This is in part because of my direct exposure to it (i.e. my being connected to some of the actors involved with the demonstration) and my primary material (the Daily Wildcat clipping) being what I drew my topic inspiration from.

2. The identity I’m writing about (adjunct lecturer) is exactly tied to the protest, because that specific status within the world of academia brings the problems that they’re protesting against, such as low pay, lacking working conditions, and almost zero job security.

3. The walkout was exactly what it sounds like. On February 25^th, 2015, University of Arizona adjunct instructors literally left the class buildings and congregated at the alumni plaza to articulate their concerns and be seen (and hopefully heard) by the administrative offices of the university. This walkout would have disrupted a significant number of classes, since non-tenure track faculty make up about 40% of the teaching staff at the university.

4. One of my biggest concerns is actually that my boundaries are too small. Given that we need a lot of scholarly, peer-reviewed sources, I’m not sure that I can have enough specifically about the U of A protest. Based on my rudimentary, surface-level research on the topic, there are also several different definitions of “adjunct teacher” and while they all face the same basic problems and discrimination, there are some nuanced challenges for specifically being a college adjunct lecturer compared to a primary school adjunct or part time instructor. I’m not sure how much of my paper can be about the comparison between the different types of adjunct in comparison to my analysis of the issues being protested.