Using Ethnography to Dissolve the Stickiness of Contingency: An Intersectional Feminist Exploration of Being Stuck in Contingency

Abstract:This feminist ethnographic piece offers a snapshot of how contingency impacts diversity work in General Education (GE) courses in the Communication Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. After grounding my work in critical university scholarship from Sara Ahmed (2012), Roderick Ferguson (2012), and others, I explore how the pressure to do diversity work impacts contingent faculty of various identities in my department. To this end, I take an intersectional approach to understanding these experiences in hopes of showing how various parts of one's identity might make certain topics more difficult to teach than others, especially through precarity.Concurrently, I illustrate how my contingent position intersects with my neurodivergency to make the ethnographic process especially challenging. In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman (2010) explores how this usurping of time affects those who cannot, or do not want to, conform to neoliberal time. Freeman describes this concept of privileging a certain orientation toward time as chrononormativity, or a way institutions use time to encourage maximum productivity of individuals within it. My neurodivergency combined with my contingency work against chrononormative expectations. When I add to this the time necessary to perform the intersectional work of feminist ethnography, my hopes of producing research that might unstick myself from contingency feels both rushed and stalled at the same time. I offer this essay as a glimpse of the tensions contingent faculty hold within them.