Gigification of English Language Instructor Work in Higher Education: Precarious Employment and Magic Time

Abstract

AbstractThis article describes how discourses of professionalism, insecurity, and exploitation among English as a second language/English for Academic Purposes (hereinafter ESL/EAP) instructors and curriculum‐level administrators at two Canadian universities relate to their understanding of fair work. These understandings are examined in a nested manner, in keeping with social positioning theory. Via discourse and thematic analysis of job advertisements and semi‐structured interviews, we illuminate aspects of the gigification of ESL/EAP in Canada, wherein ESL/EAP instructor work is increasingly rendered un(der)paid, constantly evaluated, surveilled, and precarious. Viewed through the lens of “magic time,” an infinite category of work time, we document the frustrations of ESL/EAP instructors who recognize their own exploitation. The relevance of this study is described in relation to the growing numbers of international students at English‐speaking universities throughout the world requiring a robust program infrastructure supporting their success, while the ESL/EAP instructors who provide these programs are increasingly made disposable through contingent employment relationships. The increasing reliance on contract professors teaching for‐credit courses in higher education has come to be known as adjunctification. In the noncredit, the more marginal context of ESL/EAP instructors subject to the forces of international student supply and demand, underpaid even by contract faculty standards, and engaged in often cutthroat competition for the few remaining contracts, we reference contextual differences by calling it gigification.