The Homeless Adjunct Tour is Announced

In the last few months, the ‘Junct team – Chris LaBree and I – have traveled to NYC, D.C. (twice!) and to Chicago in order to show clips of the documentary and to give talks about the project, about adjunct/contingent faculty issues, and to raise awareness, build community, shoot additional documentary footage and interview more people. It’s been exciting, not only to experience the positive ways in which our work has been received, but to see how many voices are now being raised, how many conversations are raging about the issues of adjunct faculty labor exploitation, the break-down of the university, the corporate culture that has overtaken academia.

So here is the news I would now like to share: Chris and I are in the planning stages of a Homeless Adjunct Tour. There is much more news to follow, because we are in the earliest phases of planning.  We are hoping to be able to head out on the road a few times. The first trip, beginning the last week of May, will see us heading west from Philadelphia, to meet up with people across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and then, depending on how the route takes shape, perhaps Illinois, Indiana, and then back home, perhaps, through West Virginia. The exact route isn’t final for this first trip yet, because we are hoping to hear from people who would like to invite us to their cities, their campuses, their organizations. We are also planning two additional trips, one north from Philadelphia into New England, and one south into the southern states. We hope that more trips can follow, and it will depend on a few things – our work schedules, our success in fundraising, and the invitations we receive. Here is our hope: we will travel and speak at various locations, showing bits of our film, and shooting interviews for the next round of documentary work. We will meet with adjuncts and contingents as we travel, and speak with them, with parents and prospective college students in order to give them an honest picture of what is happening to students in colleges across the country. Finally, as an extension of a talk I gave at the Summit sponsored by the New Faculty Majority in D.C. in January, we are hoping to meet with adjuncts and students who have created activist art, creative ways of expressing the truths of the struggles of the academic untouchables. We will be creating open mic/reading events and gathering artwork as we go, with the plan being to publish and present the work online, and perhaps in published hard copy format. We would love to hear from you, and to begin to schedule our tour based on invitations and gatherings along our route west. Please email us to express interest, and we’ll go from there! We also welcome suggestions on how we might be able to create exciting events wherever we go. The momentum is building, and the awareness of what is happening in our universities is more important now than ever. As we travel, our goal is to create a network across the country that will work together in order to reclaim high-quality education, professional treatment of professors in our college classrooms. So The Homeless Adjunct Tour is gearing up to begin. Help us to make it happen! Of course, we would welcome donations, no matter how small, since we will be launching a fundraising effort to get us started. Just go to our website, http://www.junctrebellion.com, for donation information.   Thanks for all the interest and positive support we’ve received so far; it would be wonderful to have a chance to meet more of you in person.  Any questions?  Want to invite us to your city or town?  Please email us at junctrebellion@gmail.com!

UPDATE:  I apologize, because I don’t know why this is happening.  But the links I provided don’t seem to be working properly.  Instead, I provided the junctrebellion website url, and New Faculty Majority is http://www.newfacultymajority.info   Sorry for the inconvenience!