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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Question: The conference theme of reinvention invites consideration of different ways to navigate the stages of an academic career, particularly as we work to address academic precarity and the potential destabilization of our work by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thinking through your distinctive institutional affiliations and experiences, how are you reinventing your identity and work practices in light of professional transitions, the pandemic, and/or other personal/professional changes? What lessons have you learned, and what advice would you offer to others? Topics may include: pre-tenure anxieties, post-tenure slump (or “where do I go from here?”), experiences in non-tenure track positions, changing institutions, etc.
Responses
Courtney Brannon Donoghue
I am in an unusual and privileged position to have given up a newly tenured position at my former institution for a junior faculty position at the University of North Texas (a public HSI serving mostly DFW area commuters). My partner and I decided to move back to Texas to be near our families, particularly after my parents experienced a series of health issues. Starting over in the tenure process at a research-focused institution during the pandemic has been a challenging transition in creating all new courses, navigating a new department, pivoting to keep scholarship in the pipeline, and working with MA and MFA students for the time. My media industry studies research has been difficult to continue without the ability to build upon relationships with industry professionals through fieldwork, in-person interviews, and festivals and trade shows. Many of the industry-facing classes and programs I was hired to develop remain on hold with COVID-19 restrictions and inability to travel. In many ways, and like so many of us, I’m feeling isolated and stuck in a holding pattern between what I realistically can pursue towards research, teaching, and service on the ticking tenure clock and future projects and programs that remain on hold. I wonder how a new(er) faculty member can contribute to their department, build a community at their institution, support undergraduate and graduate student learning, grow a research trajectory, and protect their own mental health and well-being amidst the uncertainty and instability we’ve experienced over the past 19+ months.
Erika Johnson-Lewis
While on the job market in 2010-11, I realized the interdisciplinary nature of my PhD program did not make me a good fit for positions at 4-year institutions. I began teaching at a community college, enjoyed it, and refocused my search, which led me to my current position. At the time, I had planned to maintain a research program in some capacity, but I quickly learned that the course load and service commitments left little time for that work. I earned continuing contract in 2015 and now define my professional identity primarily in terms of my role as an educator rather than as an academic. I’ve concentrated on developing my teaching practice and found fulfillment in my role as a CETL associate organizing pedagogy workshops. I find my work in the classroom rewarding and have a tremendous sense of pride in seeing my students from different backgrounds, skill levels, ages, and experiences achieve their goals and do things they didn’t think they were capable of. But, as many of us are, I am burned out. I often find myself in the role of social worker and therapist, often with little aid and assistance from my institution, and COVID-19 has only increased the mental and emotional load. I am concerned that my exhaustion will leave me disaffected and jaded. How can I reinvigorate my career and set new goals within the confines of my institutional setting and without increasing my workload and adding to my already full plate?
Jennifer Lynn Jones
During doctoral applications, I asked a prominent (now retired) scholar about taking and teaching production classes during my Ph.D. They said I’d be rejected because of a distinct divide between production and studies in their program. For me though, working between these has been central to my identity as a feminist media scholar, tying activism to academics in the vein of Paulo Freire’s dialogical action to provide both reflection and action on the meanings of media. However, that senior scholar was prescient in two ways. More expectedly, I was rejected from their program. Less expectedly, I’ve had to face the field-wide professional divide between production and studies, and as an early career scholar, struggle to negotiate my position between the two. Teaching production has made me hireable but not necessarily tenurable. Especially in studies-based departments teaching production is more work with less support. There is little blending between the areas addressed in job descriptions or tenure plans. Teaching production makes finding writing time even more difficult. This means I must soon choose a path--more production or more studies--before returning to the job market. Otherwise, this points to the reinventions many early career scholars make in an attenuated job market: getting in wherever you fit in whether it’s the job you want, then deciding if you can contort yourself enough to move into the job you do want. How can we transform ourselves, our graduate programs, and our field to ease these shifts, for the betterment of all parties?
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
An appealing aspect when I was first hired in my current position was the opportunity to meaningfully impact curriculum design. My program was new and I was part of a tenure-track cohort meant to strengthen the media studies part of the school. Over the past four years, I’ve created several core program courses and sat on the School’s undergraduate studies committee. My third-year review committee admitted that I was tasked with significant service above what’s expected of junior faculty, yet I was comforted by the fact that this service was acknowledged and seemed to count for something.
Now, one year out from submitting my tenure dossier, I’m much less optimistic: the Dean who hired me and promoted curriculum building has resigned; one of my cohort colleagues has left after a series of mistreatments from university leadership; the pandemic has revealed how little our administration cares about faculty well-being when it endangers tuition dollars. Approaching the tenure milestone has prompted a reflection on whether, and how, that extra work has had value to me. While I appreciated learning skills and areas I didn’t train in my grad program, like multimodal pedagogy and (surprisingly!) assessment, I also wonder where my energies may be better spent if/when I’m on the other side of tenure. How does one create meaningful impact despite the animosity or apathy of university administration? Could cross-institutional work help mitigate the impasses without our home institutions, or does it only add more hurdles?
Erin A. Meyers
I am post-tenure and currently up for full professor at my public university and find this moment to be one in which I am pulled between multiple goals at a time of overlapping crises. The struggles brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic dovetailed at my university with a highly contentious contract negotiation between faculty and the administration that brought into focus questions of work/life balance, the value of my scholarly and pedagogical labors within my institution and the field, and what the role of senior faculty ought to be. I have the privilege of status and want to find productive and collaborative ways to use that to advocate for the junior and precariously employed scholars who are even more burdened by these and other crises. But I also find myself questioning the viability or value of my contributions within an increasingly hostile and unstable climate surrounding higher education. Like many others, I find myself feeling burnt out in ways that leave me wondering what the latter stages of my career ought to look like. Now that the race to tenure has ended, how do I approach teaching in new ways? How do I develop as a leader in my service obligations without losing my mind and my all my time? How do I find renewed passion for developing a research agenda that is meaningful to me as well as to the field?
Brandy Monk-Payton
Being a Black woman who is advanced on the tenure-track in a time of multiple crises – that of the COVID-19 pandemic and that of anti-Black violence – has profoundly shaped the reinvention of my scholarly self. My approach to academia has always centered questions of identity, difference, and community. In terms of the latter, the urgency of the moment has drawn me to generate and circulate knowledge outside of academic institutions and for the broader public. I have been afforded opportunities to share my research on Black media culture in news articles, podcasts, radio, and television. This has been exhilarating on both personal and professional levels. We are at a critical juncture in which many want to hear the perspectives of scholars of color. Yet it is also a moment in which there are very concerted attacks on the kind of work that I do under the name of critical race theory. While I am cognizant of my privilege working at a private (albeit religious) institution in a liberal city, nonetheless all Black public intellectuals (and especially women) experience some degree of precarity in higher education. To the degree to which we are researching and teaching in uncertain conditions, I am interested in ways to work collaboratively and cultivate alliances in a genuinely engaged way both on and off our campuses.
Karen Petruska
I sometimes refer to my school, where I am quite happy, as the “slow lane.” This is due not only to our rather humane research expectations, but also to our less humane service obligations. Through a host of subtle and unspoken actions, the school encourages participation in co-curricular and other campus events through a visibility metric. This metric is all about perception--do higher ups perceive you as someone who shows up, beyond the classroom? Some scholars may inspire envy over publication records--we do it over who made it to that student-organized roundtable, attended that pedagogical workshop, or facilitated a co-curricular intergroup dialogue program. I have grown immensely as a teacher, to be sure, but my identity as a scholar has become a bit blurry.
Notwithstanding, one of the opportunities of tenure--beyond possibly feeling less beholden to the visibility metric--is that I can engage in research that is challenging to do at other institutions. I can research slowly. Locally. Inspired by our social justice mission and our community-engaged commitments. I may think through what media studies can look like here, while also contemplating how to reinvigorate my own preoccupations with power, industry, policy, and history. I always expected to pursue an administrative path, yet the lure of a return to my identity as a media historian suggests that my reinvention may in fact take me back to my graduate school roots--who am I as a scholar and what do I have to say?
Perspectives on Navigating Academic Careers
Question: The conference theme of reinvention invites consideration of different ways to navigate the stages of an academic career, particularly as we work to address academic precarity and the potential destabilization of our work by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thinking through your distinctive institutional affiliations and experiences, how are you reinventing your identity and work practices in light of professional transitions, the pandemic, and/or other personal/professional changes? What lessons have you learned, and what advice would you offer to others? Topics may include: pre-tenure anxieties, post-tenure slump (or “where do I go from here?”), experiences in non-tenure track positions, changing institutions, etc.
Responses
Courtney Brannon Donoghue
I am in an unusual and privileged position to have given up a newly tenured position at my former institution for a junior faculty position at the University of North Texas (a public HSI serving mostly DFW area commuters). My partner and I decided to move back to Texas to be near our families, particularly after my parents experienced a series of health issues. Starting over in the tenure process at a research-focused institution during the pandemic has been a challenging transition in creating all new courses, navigating a new department, pivoting to keep scholarship in the pipeline, and working with MA and MFA students for the time. My media industry studies research has been difficult to continue without the ability to build upon relationships with industry professionals through fieldwork, in-person interviews, and festivals and trade shows. Many of the industry-facing classes and programs I was hired to develop remain on hold with COVID-19 restrictions and inability to travel. In many ways, and like so many of us, I’m feeling isolated and stuck in a holding pattern between what I realistically can pursue towards research, teaching, and service on the ticking tenure clock and future projects and programs that remain on hold. I wonder how a new(er) faculty member can contribute to their department, build a community at their institution, support undergraduate and graduate student learning, grow a research trajectory, and protect their own mental health and well-being amidst the uncertainty and instability we’ve experienced over the past 19+ months.
Erika Johnson-Lewis
While on the job market in 2010-11, I realized the interdisciplinary nature of my PhD program did not make me a good fit for positions at 4-year institutions. I began teaching at a community college, enjoyed it, and refocused my search, which led me to my current position. At the time, I had planned to maintain a research program in some capacity, but I quickly learned that the course load and service commitments left little time for that work. I earned continuing contract in 2015 and now define my professional identity primarily in terms of my role as an educator rather than as an academic. I’ve concentrated on developing my teaching practice and found fulfillment in my role as a CETL associate organizing pedagogy workshops. I find my work in the classroom rewarding and have a tremendous sense of pride in seeing my students from different backgrounds, skill levels, ages, and experiences achieve their goals and do things they didn’t think they were capable of. But, as many of us are, I am burned out. I often find myself in the role of social worker and therapist, often with little aid and assistance from my institution, and COVID-19 has only increased the mental and emotional load. I am concerned that my exhaustion will leave me disaffected and jaded. How can I reinvigorate my career and set new goals within the confines of my institutional setting and without increasing my workload and adding to my already full plate?
Jennifer Lynn Jones
During doctoral applications, I asked a prominent (now retired) scholar about taking and teaching production classes during my Ph.D. They said I’d be rejected because of a distinct divide between production and studies in their program. For me though, working between these has been central to my identity as a feminist media scholar, tying activism to academics in the vein of Paulo Freire’s dialogical action to provide both reflection and action on the meanings of media. However, that senior scholar was prescient in two ways. More expectedly, I was rejected from their program. Less expectedly, I’ve had to face the field-wide professional divide between production and studies, and as an early career scholar, struggle to negotiate my position between the two. Teaching production has made me hireable but not necessarily tenurable. Especially in studies-based departments teaching production is more work with less support. There is little blending between the areas addressed in job descriptions or tenure plans. Teaching production makes finding writing time even more difficult. This means I must soon choose a path--more production or more studies--before returning to the job market. Otherwise, this points to the reinventions many early career scholars make in an attenuated job market: getting in wherever you fit in whether it’s the job you want, then deciding if you can contort yourself enough to move into the job you do want. How can we transform ourselves, our graduate programs, and our field to ease these shifts, for the betterment of all parties?
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
An appealing aspect when I was first hired in my current position was the opportunity to meaningfully impact curriculum design. My program was new and I was part of a tenure-track cohort meant to strengthen the media studies part of the school. Over the past four years, I’ve created several core program courses and sat on the School’s undergraduate studies committee. My third-year review committee admitted that I was tasked with significant service above what’s expected of junior faculty, yet I was comforted by the fact that this service was acknowledged and seemed to count for something.
Now, one year out from submitting my tenure dossier, I’m much less optimistic: the Dean who hired me and promoted curriculum building has resigned; one of my cohort colleagues has left after a series of mistreatments from university leadership; the pandemic has revealed how little our administration cares about faculty well-being when it endangers tuition dollars. Approaching the tenure milestone has prompted a reflection on whether, and how, that extra work has had value to me. While I appreciated learning skills and areas I didn’t train in my grad program, like multimodal pedagogy and (surprisingly!) assessment, I also wonder where my energies may be better spent if/when I’m on the other side of tenure. How does one create meaningful impact despite the animosity or apathy of university administration? Could cross-institutional work help mitigate the impasses without our home institutions, or does it only add more hurdles?
Erin A. Meyers
I am post-tenure and currently up for full professor at my public university and find this moment to be one in which I am pulled between multiple goals at a time of overlapping crises. The struggles brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic dovetailed at my university with a highly contentious contract negotiation between faculty and the administration that brought into focus questions of work/life balance, the value of my scholarly and pedagogical labors within my institution and the field, and what the role of senior faculty ought to be. I have the privilege of status and want to find productive and collaborative ways to use that to advocate for the junior and precariously employed scholars who are even more burdened by these and other crises. But I also find myself questioning the viability or value of my contributions within an increasingly hostile and unstable climate surrounding higher education. Like many others, I find myself feeling burnt out in ways that leave me wondering what the latter stages of my career ought to look like. Now that the race to tenure has ended, how do I approach teaching in new ways? How do I develop as a leader in my service obligations without losing my mind and my all my time? How do I find renewed passion for developing a research agenda that is meaningful to me as well as to the field?
Brandy Monk-Payton
Being a Black woman who is advanced on the tenure-track in a time of multiple crises – that of the COVID-19 pandemic and that of anti-Black violence – has profoundly shaped the reinvention of my scholarly self. My approach to academia has always centered questions of identity, difference, and community. In terms of the latter, the urgency of the moment has drawn me to generate and circulate knowledge outside of academic institutions and for the broader public. I have been afforded opportunities to share my research on Black media culture in news articles, podcasts, radio, and television. This has been exhilarating on both personal and professional levels. We are at a critical juncture in which many want to hear the perspectives of scholars of color. Yet it is also a moment in which there are very concerted attacks on the kind of work that I do under the name of critical race theory. While I am cognizant of my privilege working at a private (albeit religious) institution in a liberal city, nonetheless all Black public intellectuals (and especially women) experience some degree of precarity in higher education. To the degree to which we are researching and teaching in uncertain conditions, I am interested in ways to work collaboratively and cultivate alliances in a genuinely engaged way both on and off our campuses.
Karen Petruska
I sometimes refer to my school, where I am quite happy, as the “slow lane.” This is due not only to our rather humane research expectations, but also to our less humane service obligations. Through a host of subtle and unspoken actions, the school encourages participation in co-curricular and other campus events through a visibility metric. This metric is all about perception--do higher ups perceive you as someone who shows up, beyond the classroom? Some scholars may inspire envy over publication records--we do it over who made it to that student-organized roundtable, attended that pedagogical workshop, or facilitated a co-curricular intergroup dialogue program. I have grown immensely as a teacher, to be sure, but my identity as a scholar has become a bit blurry.
Notwithstanding, one of the opportunities of tenure--beyond possibly feeling less beholden to the visibility metric--is that I can engage in research that is challenging to do at other institutions. I can research slowly. Locally. Inspired by our social justice mission and our community-engaged commitments. I may think through what media studies can look like here, while also contemplating how to reinvigorate my own preoccupations with power, industry, policy, and history. I always expected to pursue an administrative path, yet the lure of a return to my identity as a media historian suggests that my reinvention may in fact take me back to my graduate school roots--who am I as a scholar and what do I have to say?
Bio
Courtney Brannon Donoghue
Courtney Brannon Donoghue is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Arts at the University of North Texas. Her research areas include Conglomerate Hollywood and international operations, Brazilian film and television, media distribution, female-driven filmmaking, and blockbusters and franchising. Brannon Donoghue is the author of Localising Hollywood (BFI, 2017) and co-editor of Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines (NYU Press, 2021). She has published in Cinema Journal, Media, Culture & Society, and various edited collections and her next book project about gender equity and female-driven films is under contract with the University of Texas Press. She serves on the board of directors for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies.
Erika Johnson-Lewis Erika Johnson-Lewis is an Associate Professor in the Division of Fine Arts and Humanities at St. Petersburg College. She serves as CETL associate for the Arts, Humanities and Communications divisions and has run workshops on an array of pedagogical topics. She teaches introductory general education courses, which cover a variety of disciplines across the humanities including visual, literary, and performing arts as well as history, philosophy, and religion.
Jennifer Lynn Jones Jennifer Lynn Jones is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Tulsa. She completed her Ph.D. on celebrity, corpulence, and convergence in Film and Media Studies at Indiana University. Her research focuses on identity, embodiment, and media. She also trained in documentary production at the New School and teaches video production.
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez Juan Llamas-Rodriguez researches and teaches how media helps us make sense of social phenomena on a global scale. His areas of specialization include streaming media, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American film and television. He has published in the journals Feminist Media Histories, Television & New Media, Lateral, Film Quarterly, Jump Cut, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. He is a member of the Global Internet TV Consortium and the host of the Global Media Cultures podcast.
Erin A. Meyers Erin A. Meyers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. She has published multiple articles on the intersections of celebrity, new media, and audience cultures in journals such as Celebrity Studies, New Media & Society, and The Journal of Popular Culture, as well as two books on contemporary celebrity cultures, Dishing Dirt in the Digital Age: Celebrity Gossip Blogs and Participatory Media Culture (Peter Lang, 2013) and Extraordinarily Ordinary: The Rise of Reality Television Celebrity (Rutgers University Press, 2020). She is currently co-editor of the journal Celebrity Studies.
Brandy Monk-Payton
Brandy Monk-Payton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and affiliated faculty in the Dept. of African & African American Studies at Fordham University. Her research focuses on the theory and history of African American media representation and cultural production across television, film, and digital media. Her work has been published in edited collections such as Unwatchable as well as the journals Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, and Communication, Culture and Critique. She is a co-organizer of the “Talking Television in a Pandemic” podcast and has also been featured on NPR's All Things Considered and PBS NewsHour.
Karen Petruska
Karen Petruska is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University. Her research interests include streaming media, digital distribution, and television history. A graduate of Georgia State University, she has published in Communication, Culture and Critique; Creative Industries; Spectator; Popular Communication; and The Velvet Light Trap. She has also co-edited a special issue of Convergence, contributed to four anthologies, and published online through In Media Res, Flow, Antenna, and MIP Research.