Most of the instructional workforce within the humanities in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and The Netherlands comprises non-tenure track appointments. This commentary is a starting point in thinking about what the meaning and consequences are of far-reaching casualization for humanities education. Based on my…

This article uses a context of increasing institutional demand to be geographically mobile to examine how early-career researchers move across borders. I explore the case of Swiss academia, a particularly competitive and attractive environment with the highest levels of inbound and outbound mobility in Europe. In line with the aims of the European…

This paper explores the hyper-performative expectations of early career teachers (ECTs) in the context of neoliberal education assemblages. The need to support and retain beginning teachers is a salient issue in the context of troubling rates of teacher attrition. The study explores how ECTs perceive teacher identities in response to national…

This article aims to describe teacher induction (TI) with reference to two physical and health education (PHE) teachers based on three variables: 1) self-efficacy, 2) motivation and 3) satisfaction. Our case study relies on individual telephone interviews conducted during each teacher's first five years of teaching and allows for describing the…

It is the norm for the casual teaching precariat to experience insecure labour conditions requiring an additional skill set to teachers with stable employment. As more beginning teachers than ever before commence work in casual employment--often a tenuous and unsupported transition into the profession--it is beholden on teacher educators to…

We analyze a series of interviews with Estonian humanities researchers to explore topics related to the beginning of academic careers and the relationships with supervisors and mentors. We show how researchers strive to have meaningful relationships and produce what they consider quality research in the conditions of a system that is very strongly…

The high turnover rates of beginning teachers are an issue of continuing concern in education. However, little is known about the motivational process that encourages beginning teachers to stay in the teaching profession. This study investigated how working conditions (job insecurity, teacher autonomy, collective responsibility, reflective…

This article documents the experiences of three early career academics trying to establish a network of early career academics (ECAs) in a middle-ranked university in Australia. The changing context of academia means that ECAs face considerable challenges in understanding and negotiating effective career paths. Some of the issues encountered…

In four decades of teaching college English, the author has watched many good teaching jobs morph into second-class ones. Worse, she has seen the memory and then the expectation of teaching jobs with decent status, security, and salary depart along with principles and collegiality. To help reverse this downward spiral, she contends that what is…

This brief article posits that the drive to privatize public services in the US (United States) coupled with growing economic inequality are now so extreme that they threaten a cornerstone of American liberal democracy--quality public education. The argument rests on the assumption that there is such a concept as "the public good". This idea of…