Paper short abstract

This paper uses an auto-ethnographic perspective to explore questions about what temporalities of knowledge production means from the perspective of precarious academic labourers.

Paper long abstract

In 2005, Meneley and Young published their edited volume, Auto-Ethnographies: The Anthropology of Academic Practices, in which various anthropologists employed a critical ethnographic approach to reflecting on the academy, and “the ways in which current intellectual practices are produced within various institutional, national, and international constellations of meaning and power” (1). This paper adopts these writers’ critical and reflexive perspective, turning the lens toward what intellectual practice means for the generations of scholars working as precarious academic labourers, or move into careers primarily outside of the academy. From the perspective of the many who work within the academy on short-term teaching contracts, what do concerns about slow or fast professing mean? What do (or perhaps should) these reflections mean for how those of us still working within or on the margins the academy approach teaching and training the next generation of anthropologists? Drawing on years of informal discussion and participant-observation, this paper begins to explore how and in what ways these questions about temporalities of knowledge production matters today for marginalized academics and those working beyond the academy.