When Teachers and Students Share the Same Structural Conditions
Amy Tucker, DSocSci Candidate, Royal Roads University
ORCID: 0009-0006-9872-2248
In May 2025, I received the Faculty Council Teaching Award at Thompson Rivers University. The same month, after twenty-five years of service, I was laid off.
I had been a contract faculty member for seventeen of those years, teaching organisational behaviour, business ethics, leadership, and diversity, primarily to international student populations. I had built courses, mentored students, served on committees, and chaired the Non-Regular Faculty Committee for the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of British Columbia. I had applied for tenure-track positions six times, each time passed over for someone newer. Each semester had brought the question of whether I would be offered work. Each contract had been temporary, renewable only at institutional discretion. And now, in the same week, the institution told me I was excellent and that I was finished.
I tell this story because it is the origin of a concept I develop in my doctoral dissertation. The concept is asymmetrical precarity: the recognition that contract faculty and international students in Canadian higher education occupy structurally analogous positions within the university, sharing patterns of conditional belonging, temporal vulnerability, and dependence on institutional discretion, while facing dramatically different stakes and possessing dramatically different protections. Asymmetrical precarity names a relationship of resonance without equivalence: precarities that rhyme without being identical.
This page develops that concept through published scholarship and my own experience as a contract faculty member. It reveals nothing about the empirical findings of my doctoral study, which will be shared following the defence. What it offers is the theoretical architecture of a concept I believe has analytical utility beyond my dissertation: a framework for understanding how neoliberal universities extract value from both their workers and their students through structurally parallel yet morally distinct mechanisms.
The Shared Condition: Just-in-Time People
Guy Standing’s (2011) concept of the precariat describes a new class of workers characterised by permanent temporariness: unstable employment, truncated access to social protections, and a relationship to institutions defined by conditionality rather than belonging. Standing argues that the precariat experiences a distinctive form of insecurity that corrodes identity, agency, and the capacity for collective action. The precariat differs from the traditional working class in that it lacks the industrial-era protections, union representation, and occupational identity that once provided a floor beneath economic vulnerability.
Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) applied a parallel analysis to higher education through the concept of academic capitalism: the integration of universities into the knowledge economy through the treatment of students as revenue streams, faculty as flexible labour, and knowledge as intellectual property. Under academic capitalism, the university operates less as a public institution dedicated to the common good and more as a market actor seeking competitive advantage through the strategic management of human and intellectual capital.
Kezar, DePaola, and Scott (2019) extended this analysis through what they call the gig academy: the systematic replacement of tenured faculty with contingent, contract, and adjunct workers who teach the majority of undergraduate courses while receiving a fraction of the compensation, security, and institutional voice available to their tenure-line colleagues. In Canada, the Canadian Association of University Teachers reports that contract academic staff now constitute approximately half of all faculty at many institutions. At Thompson Rivers University, where I taught for twenty-five years, the proportion was higher.
These three frameworks — Standing’s precariat, Slaughter and Rhoades’ academic capitalism, and Kezar et al.’s gig academy — converge on a structural observation: the contemporary university has become an institution that depends on precarious labour delivered by people it refuses to permanently employ. What these frameworks have yet to fully articulate — and what my concept of asymmetrical precarity addresses — is that this extractive logic operates on two populations simultaneously: the faculty who teach and the students who pay. Both are “just-in-time” components of the university’s supply chain. Both are welcomed when needed and dispensable when convenient. Both exist in conditional relationships with an institution that celebrates their contributions while refusing to guarantee their place within it.
Six Dimensions of Asymmetrical Precarity
Asymmetrical precarity operates across six dimensions. In each dimension, the structural pattern is shared but the stakes diverge. I present these dimensions as a framework derived from my own experience, the published literature on contract faculty and international student populations, and the structural analysis that anchors my doctoral research.
Table 1
Six Dimensions of Asymmetrical Precarity: Shared Patterns, Divergent Stakes
| Dimension | Contract Faculty Experience | International Student Experience |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Conditional belonging | Employment renewed semester by semester. No guarantee of future work. Twenty-five years of service carry no contractual weight toward permanence. Belonging is performed through contribution yet withheld through structure. | Study permits tied to continuous enrolment and academic performance. Right to remain in Canada contingent on institutional standing. Belonging is performed through tuition payment and cultural compliance yet withheld through visa conditions. |
| 2. Temporal vulnerability | Contract renewal notifications arrive weeks, sometimes days, before the semester begins. Planning beyond a single term is structurally impossible. Time is extracted through unpaid preparation, curriculum development, and administrative labour that contracts exclude. | Immigration processing creates temporal uncertainty that structures daily life. Work permit restrictions limit employment to twenty hours per week during semesters. Bureaucratic compliance consumes hours that domestic students spend studying, socialising, or resting. This temporal extraction is what I call the time tax. |
| 3. Epistemic authority | Contract faculty hold classroom authority yet lack institutional voice. They teach the curriculum yet rarely participate in designing it. Their pedagogical expertise is valued in the classroom and discounted in governance. They possess what Bourdieu (1991) would recognise as a form of symbolic capital that is simultaneously affirmed and denied. | International students possess knowledge systems, languages, cultural competencies, and experiential wisdom that the institution devalues or fails to recognise. What I call “grandmother’s wisdom” carries no currency in curricula designed around Western theoretical frameworks. Their epistemic authority is erased through what Fricker (2007) identifies as hermeneutical injustice: the absence of interpretive resources that would recognise their knowledge as knowledge. |
| 4. Capacity for collective action | Contract faculty can organise through unions, attend meetings, write grievances, and coordinate collective bargaining. My role as FPSE Non-Regular Faculty Committee Chair gave me a platform to advocate for structural change. Citizenship protects against the most severe forms of retaliation. | International students’ capacity for collective action is constrained by immigration status, the individualising pressures of academic competition, cultural norms around deference to authority, language barriers in institutional contexts, and the rational fear that visible advocacy may jeopardise their visa. The structural conditions for solidarity are present; the conditions for safe expression of solidarity are severely limited. |
| 5. Consequence of loss | If I lose my contract, I face financial hardship: lost income, lost benefits, lost professional identity. This is serious and real. Yet I retain citizenship, the right to work elsewhere in Canada, access to social safety nets, and the cultural capital that comes with being a white, English-speaking Canadian navigating a system designed for people like me. | If students lose their status, they face deportation: removal from the country, separation from communities built over years of study, the potential collapse of educational investment representing a family’s entire savings. The consequences are categorical rather than incremental. Financial hardship and deportation are qualitatively different forms of loss. |
| 6. Institutional visibility | Contract faculty are often invisible in institutional self-representation: absent from strategic plans, excluded from governance structures, unnamed in marketing materials. Their labour is essential yet their presence is contingent. I received a Teaching Award the same month I was laid off: the institution recognised my excellence while demonstrating that excellence carried no claim on continued employment. | International students are hypervisible in institutional self-representation: featured in recruitment brochures, counted in diversity metrics, displayed in photo opportunities. Their presence generates both revenue and reputational capital. Yet this visibility is extractive rather than inclusive: they are seen as assets rather than members. Institutional marketing celebrates their diversity while the institution’s material provisions may fail to support their daily needs. |
Note. This framework is original to this study, drawing on Standing (2011), Slaughter and Rhoades (2004), Kezar et al. (2019), Bourdieu (1991), and Fricker (2007). The six dimensions are derived from the author’s twenty-five-year experience as a contract faculty member teaching international student populations, her role as FPSE Non-Regular Faculty Committee Chair, and the published literature on both populations. The framework illustrates that the structural patterns are shared while the stakes are dramatically unequal.
Why the Asymmetry Matters More Than the Resonance
It would be tempting to use the resonance between these experiences to build a narrative of shared struggle: contract faculty and international students united against the neoliberal university. That narrative would be politically appealing and analytically dishonest. The asymmetry in asymmetrical precarity is the conceptual load-bearing wall. Remove it, and the framework collapses into a false equivalence that obscures more than it reveals.
When I was laid off, I grieved. I lost income, professional identity, and access to a community I had built over a quarter century. I became what I now describe as institutional ghost data: someone whose contributions had shaped the institution yet whose departure would leave no structural trace. This experience was painful, disorienting, and consequential. It was also categorically different from what would happen to a student who lost their immigration status.
I could grieve from the safety of Canadian citizenship. I could file a union grievance. I could apply for employment insurance. I could write about my experience in a doctoral dissertation. I could transform my pain into scholarship, my precarity into a concept, my layoff into a chapter. Every one of these capacities was available to me because of protections I hold that my students lack. The structural resonance between our experiences is real. The structural inequality is also real. Asymmetrical precarity insists on holding both truths simultaneously.
Robinson’s (1983/2000) concept of racial capitalism provides theoretical grounding for this insistence. Robinson argued that capitalism has always depended on racial differentiation to justify unequal extraction: the system functions by treating different populations as differently exploitable. Applied to the contemporary university, racial capitalism helps explain why international students — who are overwhelmingly racialised and positioned as non-citizens — pay differential tuition that subsidises domestic operations while receiving services that fail to match the premium they pay. The tuition differential is the economic mechanism. The racial differentiation is the logic that makes the mechanism politically sustainable. My concept of asymmetrical precarity maps how this extractive logic operates on faculty and students simultaneously, producing structurally parallel yet morally distinct forms of institutional exploitation.
The Canadian Policy Context: Study Permits and the January 2024 Cap
Asymmetrical precarity is a structural analysis, yet it operates within a specific policy environment. In January 2024, the Canadian federal government announced a cap on new study permits — the most significant restriction on international student admission in decades. The policy was presented as a response to housing shortages and fraudulent educational institutions. Its effect was to reframe international students — who had been courted as essential contributors to institutional revenue and cultural diversity — as problems to be managed.
This policy reversal illustrates the conditionality at the heart of asymmetrical precarity. For years, Canadian universities had recruited international students aggressively, marketing Canada as a welcoming destination for global talent while charging tuition rates two to four times higher than domestic rates. At Thompson Rivers University, where I taught, international student enrolment had grown substantially during my tenure, generating revenue that sustained programmes, funded infrastructure, and underwrote the salaries of permanent faculty. Then the federal government changed the rules, and the same students who had been assets became liabilities — their numbers suddenly excessive, their presence suddenly problematic.
The parallel to contract faculty experience is structural rather than biographical. Universities recruit contract teachers when enrolment grows and release them when enrolment contracts. They recruit international students when revenue is needed and restrict them when the political environment shifts. Both populations are treated as adjustable inputs rather than permanent members. The difference is that when the adjustment happens, contract faculty lose their jobs and international students lose their right to be in the country. The mechanism is the same. The consequence is categorically different.
Solidarity Without Appropriation: What Asymmetrical Precarity Makes Possible
The concept of asymmetrical precarity enables a form of political and analytical solidarity that recognises connection while refusing to collapse difference. This is what I mean by resonance without equivalence: the capacity to stand with someone without standing in for them, to use shared patterns of institutional treatment as a basis for mutual understanding while insisting that the differences between those patterns carry ethical and political significance.
My experience as a contract faculty member gives me a form of knowledge about how institutions operate that a securely employed, tenured researcher would struggle to produce. I know what it means to calculate whether I can afford to attend a conference when my employment beyond the current semester is uncertain. I know the exhaustion of performing competence in spaces where people assume you belong less than they do. I know the peculiar vertigo of being celebrated by an institution that refuses to guarantee your place within it. This embodied, experiential knowledge creates a bridge to the experiences of the international students I taught, who navigated the same institution from a position of even greater vulnerability.
Yet the bridge is asymmetrical. I can cross it more safely than they can. I can advocate publicly. I can write dissertations. I can name the mechanisms of extraction without risking deportation. The solidarity that asymmetrical precarity enables is therefore an obligated solidarity: one that recognises the privilege embedded in my capacity to speak and accepts the responsibility to use that privilege in service of those whose speech carries greater risk. This is why Photovoice matters to my methodology: it places the camera — and the authority to represent — in the hands of those whose visual testimony I carry the institutional platform to amplify.
The Teaching Award and the Termination: A Case Study in Malperformative Inclusion
I return to the opening image because it crystallises the concept. In the same month, the same institution recognised my teaching as excellent and terminated my employment. These two acts were carried out by different institutional mechanisms — the award by a faculty committee, the termination by an administrative process — yet they reveal a single institutional logic: the capacity to recognise value while refusing to sustain it.
Sara Ahmed (2012) theorised this logic as non-performativity: the capacity of institutions to name a problem — even to create structures ostensibly designed to address it — while maintaining the conditions that produce it. Ahmed’s analysis focused on diversity work in universities, showing how diversity statements, equity committees, and inclusion initiatives often function as substitutes for structural change rather than vehicles for it. I extend Ahmed’s concept through what I call malperformative inclusion: the active demonstration of awareness of equity problems while maintaining the structural conditions that produce them.
The Teaching Award was malperformative. It performed recognition. It demonstrated that the institution possessed the evaluative capacity to identify excellent teaching. It proved that the institution knew what it was losing. And it changed nothing about the structural conditions that made the loss possible. The award was a celebration by an institution that had already decided — through the separate yet connected logic of budget allocation and workforce flexibility — that the person it was celebrating was expendable.
International students experience a structurally parallel malperformance. They are recruited with glossy brochures promising a welcoming, diverse campus community. They are counted in diversity metrics that the institution reports to government and accreditation bodies. They are photographed at orientation events and featured on institutional websites. And then they discover that the Global Lounge closes at five, that the cafeteria serves no food from their home region, that the curriculum contains no framework for the knowledge systems they carry, and that the counselling centre has a six-week wait for services available only in English. The institution performs welcome. It withholds belonging.
Asymmetrical precarity connects these two malperformances analytically. It reveals them as expressions of the same institutional logic operating on different populations with different consequences. The Teaching Award and the locked Global Lounge are produced by the same system: one that recognises and extracts value from contingent populations while refusing to reorganise itself around their permanence.
What Asymmetrical Precarity Offers the Field
I propose asymmetrical precarity as an analytical framework with applications beyond my own dissertation. The concept addresses a gap in the existing literature where contract faculty precarity and international student precarity are typically studied in separate scholarly conversations that rarely speak to each other.
Table 2
Current Scholarly Conversations and What Asymmetrical Precarity Bridges
| Contract Faculty Literature | International Student Literature | What Asymmetrical Precarity Adds |
|---|---|---|
| Standing (2011) on the precariat; Kezar et al. (2019) on the gig academy; CAUT reports on non-permanent faculty | Stein and Andreotti (2016) on internationalisation; Haapakoski and Pashby (2017) on marketing diversity; CBIE reports on international student experience | A framework that connects these two bodies of scholarship by identifying shared structural mechanisms (conditional belonging, temporal vulnerability, institutional discretion) operating on both populations simultaneously within the same institution |
| Ahmed (2012) on diversity work and non-performativity; Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) on academic capitalism | Fricker (2007) on epistemic injustice; Bourdieu (1991) on linguistic capital and symbolic violence | A framework that reveals how malperformative inclusion operates on both workers and students, extracting value from both while performing recognition of both, through structurally parallel yet morally distinct mechanisms |
| Union organising literature; FPSE advocacy documents; collective bargaining analyses | Immigration policy analysis; study permit regulations; the January 2024 cap and its institutional consequences | A framework that connects labour policy and immigration policy as parallel instruments of institutional flexibility, revealing how the “just-in-time” logic of the gig economy applies to both the university’s workforce and its student body |
Note. This table maps the bridging function of asymmetrical precarity as a concept. The left and centre columns represent well-developed yet typically separate scholarly conversations. The right column identifies what becomes visible when those conversations are brought into dialogue through the framework of asymmetrical precarity. The framework does not claim equivalence between the populations; it claims that the structural logic producing their respective precarity is shared and therefore amenable to joint analysis.
The concept may also have utility for institutions seeking to understand why their equity initiatives fail to produce the belonging they promise. If the same extractive logic operates on contract faculty and international students, then addressing the experience of one population without attending to the other will produce partial solutions at best. A university that secures its faculty through permanent employment while continuing to treat international students as adjustable revenue inputs will improve working conditions without improving learning conditions. A university that invests in international student services while continuing to rely on contract faculty to deliver those services will invest in programmes staffed by people the institution may release at any time. Asymmetrical precarity suggests that institutional transformation requires attending to both populations simultaneously, because the structural logic that produces their insecurity is the same logic, operating through the same institution, serving the same fiscal imperative.
I developed the concept of asymmetrical precarity because I needed a framework that could hold two truths at the same time. The first truth is that my experience as a contract faculty member gives me genuine understanding of what it means to exist conditionally within an institution that depends on my labour while refusing to secure my place. The second truth is that my experience is categorically less consequential than what my students face when the same institution treats them with the same conditional logic.
Holding both truths is what asymmetrical precarity demands. It refuses the temptation to equate experiences that differ in stakes, protections, and consequences. It equally refuses the temptation to declare those experiences unrelated when they are produced by the same structural mechanisms. The resonance is real. The asymmetry is real. The analytical work lies in holding both — and in asking what solidarity looks like when the people standing beside you face risks you do not share.
The Teaching Award is on a shelf in a house where a woman who spent twenty-five years building an institution now writes about what that institution taught her. The concept it helped produce — asymmetrical precarity — is an attempt to make that teaching useful: to transform one person’s experience of institutional contradiction into a framework that others — faculty, students, administrators, policymakers — can use to see what satisfaction surveys will never measure and what recruitment brochures were designed to conceal.
This page describes a conceptual framework developed through the researcher’s own experience and the published literature. The empirical findings from my doctoral study, including how participants experienced and documented the conditions this framework describes, will be shared on this site following the defence.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Canadian Association of University Teachers. (2023). CAUT almanac of post-secondary education in Canada. CAUT.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.
Haapakoski, J., & Pashby, K. (2017). Mapping the field of research on ‘international students’: Questioning assumptions and knowledge production in a delimited field. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 47(6), 927–940.
Kezar, A., DePaola, T., & Scott, D. T. (2019). The gig academy: Mapping labor in the neoliberal university. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Robinson, C. J. (1983/2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.
Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2016). Cash, competition, or charity: International students and the global imaginary. Higher Education, 72(2), 225–239.