Open AccessHired Hands: Casualised Technology and Labour in the Teaching of Cultural Studies
Author(s) -
Kieryn McKay,
Kylie Brass
Publication year - 1970
Publication title -
cultural studies review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.116
H-Index - 2
eISSN - 1837-8692
pISSN - 1446-8123
DOI - 10.5130/csr.v17i2.2004
Subject(s) - casual , sociology , appropriation , context (archaeology) , cultural appropriation , publishing , cultural studies , project commissioning , higher education , perspective (graphical) , scale (ratio) , media studies , social science , pedagogy , political science , visual arts , history , art , anthropology , law , epistemology , philosophy , archaeology , physics , quantum mechanics
This article examines the uptake and application of podcasting in a particular higher education context, drawing on the the authors' experience in late 2008 when both were employed as casual tutors on large-scale first-year communications and cultural studies courses at the University of Western Sydney. The article maps out the limits of technological innovation within the teaching of cultural studies, as well as its limits in promoting the radical potential of a cultural studies approach. It also charts some of the effects and affects of an over-reliance on casualised labour, which we argue can have a profoundly destabilising and atomising impact on academic practice and student engagement. We argue there is a parallel between the appropriation of popular media technologies into the university and the current system of casual academic employment in Australia, in that both the podcast and the casual academic represent ‘new’ interfaces of outsourced academic labour. Stipulated from our positions as casual teachers in cultural studies, this article is written from an embedded perspective which conceptualises both the podcast and the casual academic in line with the most prevalent mode of their employment in the academy: as ‘hired hands’, appendages to traditional models of pedagogy