Conference Program

Universities are frequently defended as spaces of academic freedom, critical inquiry, and democratic debate. Yet these ideals rest on increasingly precarious labour arrangements that fundamentally undermine the conditions under which knowledge can be produced. This paper examines the contradiction between academic freedom and employment insecurity through an autoethnographic account of working as an adjunct lecturer in South African universities for over seven years, often on rolling six-month contracts. During this period, I was required to perform excellence in teaching, care, and institutional commitment while navigating chronic precarity that profoundly shaped my capacity to complete my PhD, publish scholarly work, and sustain a scholarly life.

Using autoethnography as a method of worker-scholar knowledge production, the paper argues that adjunct precarity in South Africa should not be understood as an exceptional or transitional condition, nor as a delayed replication of Global North trends. Rather, it constitutes a central organising logic of the postcolonial university, deeply entangled with histories of racialised inequality, marketisation, and managerial governance. In this context, precarity functions as a disciplinary regime that structures academic subjectivity, reorganises time, and regulates dissent—often without the need for explicit censorship.

The South African university occupies a contradictory position within global higher education. On the one hand, institutions are embedded in transnational circuits of ranking, audit, and performance measurement. On the other, they are shaped by the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, where access, transformation, and redress are publicly foregrounded while labour insecurity is normalised. As an adjunct lecturer, I occupied a position of both visibility and disposability: heavily relied upon for undergraduate teaching—particularly of first-generation and working-class students—yet excluded from meaningful institutional support, research time, and secure career pathways.

Teaching excellence, under these conditions, becomes an extractive demand rather than a recognised form of labour. High teaching loads, emotional labour, and pastoral care are framed as moral obligations rather than work that requires material support. The paper situates this experience within broader global patterns of casualisation in higher education. Importantly, the paper moves beyond diagnosis to reflect on organising as a response to precarity. For adjunct workers, organising is often constrained by fear of contract non-renewal, reputational damage, and professional exclusion. These fears are not incidental but structurally produced. Yet informal conversations, collective reflection, and union spaces provided a language through which personal exhaustion could be re-read as institutional design. Organising functioned as political education, emotional repair, and collective sense-making, transforming individual endurance into shared analysis.

In conclusion, the paper insists that academic freedom cannot be meaningfully defended without addressing the material conditions of academic labour. Precarity does not merely threaten individual careers; it reshapes what can be thought, written, and said. By foregrounding adjunct experience from South Africa and the Global South, the paper contributes to ongoing efforts to build solidaristic, democratic forms of worker organising in higher education—organising that operates in, against, and beyond the university as it currently exists.