Afterword: Precarity, Pedagogy, and the Public

Abstract

AfterwordPrecarity, Pedagogy, and the Public Krista Comer (bio) Anyone close to the academic job market or to humanities graduate students or early career PhDs will feel the urgency that coeditors Surabhi Balachander and Jillian Moore have put at the center of their introduction to this singular special issue. Conceived importantly as a platform for emerging scholars juried by their editor peers, WAL readers find seven essays that range widely in critical topics, in hybrid creative/critical methodologies, and in a sense of audiences for research well beyond university readers. We also find the coeditors’ arguments about new critical turns in the field of western American literary and cultural studies toward, as they say, the personal and the pedagogical. Underlying the case for these turns are serious questions about where, how, and from whom “critical turns” might come when the infrastructures that have supported graduate education, faculty research, and organizational longevity are being dismantled. In the face of humanities crises, defunded university research, far fewer new tenure lines, the collapse of the job market, and imperiled association memberships— including in the Western Literature Association—how will research grow and thrive? As Balachander and Moore note, nearly ten years have gone by since I edited a 2013 special issue for Western American Literature titled “Young Scholars.” The name, incidentally, came to be in the editorial process. My original call for papers was circulated as “Emerging Field Directions from Younger Scholars.” At the time, a set of critical interventions and openings seemed afoot in new research, and the hope was a special issue could provide opportunities for junior scholars and graduate students as well [End Page 193] as a significant occasion for the field. I hoped also to give back as someone who had had quite a time on the market myself; indeed, the year I was WLA President in 2002 I had just moved to assistant professor from a lecturer appointment. If I felt job prospects were urgent in 2002, in 2013 that urgency was different and deeper. The field keywords of that moment included “postwest,” “postregionalism,” and “critical regionalism.” Un-conflating these concepts, which were muddied in one another, allowed me in the introduction to track their divergent claims and politics and to address directly the implications of the concept of the rhizome, especially as they bore on feminist frameworks, settler colonialism, and Indigenous sovereignty—keywords that were then emergent. I remember the number of essays I received, far more than could be accepted for publication. When I look back at the abstracts—as I did in thinking about this special issue—and when I think of very recent conferences and WAL essays, I see in them all various critical turns that have since, in my view, become widespread alongside settler frameworks and Indigenous sovereignty, namely: land ethics, place accountability, climate justice, eco-grief, and climate dread. With this “Emerging Scholars” special issue, the precarity of humanities research itself is rightly registering as a focus for the field of western American literary and cultural studies. In the hands of contributors, the demands of precarious scholarly environments are forcing the issue of research that reaches toward new publics and audiences and speaks in voices that likely skirt the classic conceptual training of graduate seminars. This sea change in who any of us writes for, why we write, where we publish, and the ability to conceive of a public-oriented criticism read by nonspecialists, is extremely important. Unlike western writers or historians, literature and culture scholars of the US West have not been as institutionally well-placed or secure in universities or popular authority. The need to innovate research practice and method and expand our audiences is fundamental in order to survive as knowledge producers who make a difference in consciousness about what “the US West” means or does. In very different ways, both Alison Turner’s work in “Perfectly [End Page 194] Designed for Connections: Zine Making in Denver Shelters” and Mika Kennedy’s creative nonfiction piece, “Peregrination 2036,” point toward research methods that support a western American literary and cultural studies of the future. Turner’s engaged research practice is one of collaborative relation with writers and artists who she...