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.

On the first day of the 2023 University of Illinois-Chicago - United Faculty strike, Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates rallied the crowd by insisting that “how we union” matters. Outlining a commitment to common good unionism, Gates refrain of “how we union” encourages us to broaden the foundations of labor organizing by using an intersectional feminist lens to understand and address the root causes of oppression and to work in solidarity with impacted communities struggling to contest oppressive systems. In Chicago, this has meant bargaining beyond wages and benefits, integrating community partners into decision-making processes, and centering demands that uplift racial, gender, and disability justice. In this way, common good unionism insists that struggles to improve workers’ conditions are intimately tied to struggles to improve community conditions, particularly for public school workers whose institutional mandate is to advance the public good. This is not to say that bargaining contracts in higher education can end oppressive systems; instead, it illustrates how bargaining for the common good can create openings ripe with political possibility for further agitation and transformation. In this paper, I examine what common good unionism can look like and fight for in the context of intensifying austerity, resurging authoritarianism, and growing assaults on higher education.

A popular strategy of the “new right” in Germany is the call for neutrality. University teachers as well as schoolteachers are denounced for not being neutral when they address the racist, sexist and discriminatory utterings and behaviours of the right. As many teachers are civil servants in Germany, the so-called “neutrality principle” applies to them. This principle mainly becomes important in times of elections when teachers are supposed to withhold their political opinions to let students find their own positions in the political landscape. However, the “new right” instrumentalizes the “neutrality principle” to pressure teachers and to neutralize any political education. But still, it seems even though the educators’ union tries to inform teachers about this misinterpretation of the neutrality principle (cf. GEW, 2024), many teachers are becoming more insecure and careful about showing a clear positioning against right comments and policies.

This is not a coincidence. The call for more teacher’s neutrality has been present in German educational debates since the competence orientation was introduced in the early 2000s (cf. OECD’s DeSeCo project). In response to the “PISA Shock” in 2000 – that the German school system did not perform well in the PISA studies conducted by the OECD (Germany was just in the middle of the ranking) – teacher education and its effectiveness was questioned heavily. Another consequence was the promotion of individualized learning. As a result of this individualisation, the idea that the teacher should be a diagnostician became quite popular: “teachers’ key tasks include making diagnoses, as they are challenged to meet students’ diverse learning needs and adapting their teaching to students with heterogeneous academic abilities as well as multiple interests and motivations” (Klug, Gerich & Schmitz, 2016, p. 185). The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany (abbreviated as KMK) promoted research on diagnostics and competences since the PISA shock as well (cf. KMK, 2001) and changed the structure of teacher education at universities. The social dimension of the teacher’s profession was minimized throughout those reforms (cf. Rojahn, 2025). What the concept of competence, the idea of diagnostics and the call for teacher’s neutrality share is the disregard of the subject matter as well as the lack of any community idea. Instead, they overemphasize the isolated student, their skills and perceptions. This individualized perspective stands in contrast to important aims of (political) education: enabling students to form judgements, creating solidarity, trying to emphasize similarities and shared interests instead of focusing on differences.

A concept that aims at enlarging and contextualizing arguments with reference to a community idea is Hannah Arendt’s concept of judgement (cf. Arendt, 1992). This paper will illustrate why judgement instead of ‘neutral diagnostics’ is a far more valuable concept for teacher education as well as political education.

This paper argues that union organising ought to be a key component of ‘academic activism’. Rather than consider ourselves as ‘academics’, we ought to think of ourselves as education workers. This requires academics to reconsider our role and what ‘academic’ labour means and the way it is bound relationally to the labour of all workers within the university. Overcoming distinctions between workers in the university is an essential strategy to strengthen the position of all workers relative to senior management within the university. This requires us to think carefully about class relations and the class structure of the university and to commit to the educational work of building relationships and alliances that will overcome traditional hierarchies and elitism. Organising collectively for dignity and autonomy for all workers in the university is essential to making another university, and another world, possible.

German academia is characterised by the widespread use of fixed-term and part-time employment, as well as by a growing number of staff categories beyond the traditional personnel structure. With non-fixed contracts almost only available for full professors, 80 per cent of non-professorial full-time academics overall and as many as 92 per cent of those under the age of 45 are employed on a fixed-term contract (Konsortium BuWiN 2021, p. 111). These fixed-term employment relationships, which are generally regulated by the Act on Temporary Academic Contracts (Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz, WissZeitVG), are frequently characterised by very short contract durations. More than half of the employment contracts concluded under the WissZeitVG have a duration of less than one year (Jongmanns 2011).

Although the WissZeitVG has increasingly been criticised by academics themselves, and media campaigns such as #ichbinhanna have gained public attention, academic staff in mid-level positions at universities remain largely dissatisfied with their employment conditions, particularly with regard to career predictability, opportunities for advancement and job security (Jaksztat et al. 2010, p. 16). Nevertheless, the effects of activism and protest remain limited. The number of academics who contest poor working conditions and even more poor employment conditions remains low due to low representational power.

The paper discusses this situation from two perspectives. First, drawing on my own research on precarity in academia (Graf, Keil and Ullrich 2020; Keil 2018, 2020), I show how academic culture in Germany is shaped by personal dependency, asceticism and contingency, fostering loyalty and endurance rather than collective voice. Structural and historical features of German academia, such as the high turnover of academic positions and the structure of union representation, further undermine political organising.

Second, based on my own experiences of mobilising academic staff within the sociological community, I outline how articulating political concerns conflicts with the ideal of academic asceticism and the subordinate position of non-professorial academic workers. In the absence of a collective identity as workers, solidarity tends to be rooted in shared suffering rather than in collective mobilisation. Moreover, political engagement may directly affect career prospects, as support from professorial staff is fragmented and precariousness is frequently processed as a biographical precondition for academic success.

The aim of the paper is to identify the challenges and structural barriers to the mobilisation of academic workers in Germany, to situate these challenges in an international comparative perspective, and to outline possible points of intervention for further action.