what dh labor talk did for me

Graduate students workers are a lower class form of contingent labor in higher education, although a privileged one. Grad workers supply essential labor to universities for a fraction of a faculty/lecturer salary. As a direct consequence of their contingent status, graduate professional development is rarely a priority in the daily operations of a doctoral academic curriculum. Institutional needs always come first.

Many grad workers come into PhD programs unaware of this dynamic and how it decisively shapes our professional outlook during and after the program. Others, like me, have been exposed to its reality through sour personal experiences and conversations with mentors, colleagues. Even so, I know we remain at least partially in the dark about the ramifications that being cheap, contingent workers have on our role and responsibilities as workers. We graduate without fully realizing the extent to which being employees in a knowledge company affects our ability to afford basic necessities, like rent and food. Partly, this happens because cloaking the commodification of higher education has become part and parcel of academic culture.

For me, it was in the digital humanities community (DH) where I started feeling more like a colleague than a student. In this space, I met people who helped me see, understand, and navigate my position as a higher ed worker. Why is it that some realities of labor are more visible in DH spaces? Why is it so hard to talk about labor in academic ones?

Academic scholarship, for historical and cultural reasons, holds the allure of being a virtuous pursuit, the always-noble goal of producing and managing human knowledge. Scholars are the watchful guardians of humanity’s archive—or that’s supposed to be the idea. Many apply to grad programs hoping to join a knowledge-driven guild. In reality, joining this grand purpose also means inheriting a set of intellectual hierarchies, values, and practices that have as much to do with oppression as they do with knowledge-production and pedagogy. It is easy to forget that, after all, the university is a centuries-old product of early Christian European ideas of knowledge-making and learning. This means that the dedication of the “Academic Ivory Tower” to the pursuit of knowledge also includes strict models, formats, and biases about what scholarship means and looks like, who can produce it, what makes it valid, and how it turns into knowledge.

This long tradition of academia as a space for intellectual exchange is what still draws many of us to its campuses, what compels us to dedicate long hours to reading, writing, thinking. We collectively subscribe tacitly to the belief that the university is a safe site for intellectual exchange and learning. Such an idea hides institutional interests and dealings in politics and funding to, instead, present the university as an intellectual safe-haven. The hidden underbelly reveals a for-profit institution looking to capitalize its assets (human and otherwise) to their maximum potential, often as cheap as possible.

In this system, the love and devotion for sharing knowledge that is inherent to the role of lecturers, faculty, and graduate PhD workers becomes entangled with the amount of labor they individually generate for the university.¹ But these conditions aren’t immediately visible in everyday life. It takes time, exposure, good guidance, and effort to see the small ways in which they end up significantly shaping career outlooks, especially for grad workers. You’re caught between being a student (someone who takes courses), a teaching instructor, a research assistant, and a researcher-in-training. You’re meant to defer to your advisor and/or department when you take on new commitments, projects, applications, and they sort out the administrative side sometimes without much explanation. Institutional rules and regulations are not to be your immediate concern, much less your focus. You’re theoretically expected to fully focus on your research. But these rules hold the bureaucratic and capitalist nuances that govern the existence of your position as a grad “student” worker.

DH offered me, instead, a space to meet, listen, and learn from a community of scholars that do not all hold traditional tenure-track placements. Many are librarians, research specialists, programmers, admin directors, or officers. Regardless of job title, these are the kind of worker hired generally under the label of “staff.” Their salaried conditions play a daily role in their workplace interactions and their position’s descriptions are more granularly described than “graduate student” or “dissertation committee member,” for example. This varied constituency, in turn, supports the development of DH’s overt disciplinary concern with the job crisis in higher education at a time when traditional graduate school curricula aren’t evolving quickly enough to protect graduate workers from the crisis. Professionalization in DH goes hand in hand with discussions about pedagogy to address job uncertainty, job market survival skills, alt-ac opportunities/training, and hidden curriculum issues.

A landscape where labor is frequently discussed creates the space to consider the necessary individual, personal, material needs that we each require to become fulfilled employees amidst current broader issues of social and economic decay. A space that acknowledges multiple forms of expertise, abilities, and needs, also highlights that one single person—no matter their desire and experience—is incapable of single-handedly supporting a grad worker’s growth as a professional. DH pushes grad workers to seek and foster a community of colleagues to navigate the brutal job market where the traditional graduate curriculum dictates graduate student workers should always do what their advisor says.