Creating a positive casual academic identity through change and loss

Neoliberalism has significantly impacted higher education institutes across the globe by increasing the number of casual and non-continuing academic positions. Insecure employments conditions have not only affected the well-being of contingent staff, but it has also weakened the democratic, intellectual and moral standing of academic institutions. This chapter provides one practitioner’s account of the challenges of casual work, but rather than dwelling on the negativities, it outlines the potential richness of an identity based on insecurity and uncertainty. This exploration draws on the literature of retired academics and identity theory to illustrate the potential generative spaces within an undefined and incoherent identity

Turn-Ons for Money: Interactional Strategies of the Table Dancer

Using participant observation, retrospective and interactive introspection, and interviews, we describe interactional strategies used by erotic dancers to sell “table dances.” In contrast to past studies, we concentrate on the dynamic, processual nature of the exchange from the point of view of dancers and the dancer as researcher. Instead of emphasizing the deviant aspects of this interaction, we view it as representing a microcosm of strategies used to gain and maintain control in “respectable” exchanges, such as those employed by women in negotiating gender relationships and by sellers in buyer-dominated service occupations

“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity, Stigma, and the Racial Formation Project

Using interview data from individuals who were frequently asked some version of the question What are you? in regards to their race, we apply a deviance perspective to frame these encounters as micro level racial formation projects. Racial formation projects are problematized when one\u27s race is not readily classifiable. These data suggest that when race is perceptibly ambiguous, stigma is assigned and normativity is enforced through discursive constraint and other means. Racially ambiguous individuals use many forms of resistance to navigate these encounters and make identity claims that either affirm or endanger the normative racial formation order. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC