Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (ALRA) journal special issue: Recognizing the Invisible and Expected: Art & Engagement as Critical Response. Editors: Suzanne Faris, MFA and Tobi Jacobi, PhD, Colorado State University. In the spirit of recognizing the ongoing precarities of higher education–both internal (neoliberalism, systemic institutional inequities) and external (crisis of public confidence in U.S. universities/colleges, threats to academic freedom), we invite proposals for a special issue of the ALRA journal on art and engagement as critical response to the invisibility, illegibility, and silencing faced by much of the academic labor force. The issue will feature a gallery of scholarly essays and creative visual/performing art that explores the vital contribution of art and arts-based engagement to the intellectual work of higher education. We encourage submissions that theorize, reflect upon, innovate and critique the practices and discourses of academic labor through a creative/engaged lens. This special issue will advance conversations about the ways that art and creative practice and engagement, broadly defined, can simultaneously work to document, challenge, analyze, observe, resist, redefine, and transform the ways that institutions perpetuate invisible and expected faculty and staff labor. We invite submissions that document experiences, offer reflections, reveal historical patterns of inequity and/or absence, and project alternative futures.
