Shared Precarity: Teaching and Learning Inside the Same System

When the people who teach and the people who learn occupy structurally similar positions inside the same institution

This page develops the concept of asymmetrical precarity: the structural condition shared by contract faculty and international students, held together without being collapsed into equivalence. Participant evidence grounding this concept will be shared following the doctoral defence. The researcher’s strand is shared here in full.

Two Populations, One Structural Logic

For nineteen years I taught international business students as a contract faculty member at Thompson Rivers University. My students were recruited as premium revenue sources. I was employed as an easily replaceable instructional unit. We sat on opposite sides of the same extractive relationship. I was the institution’s labour. They were the institution’s market. And we were both, in the structural sense this dissertation examines, expendable.

The concept of asymmetrical precarity emerged from sitting with that recognition long enough to understand its shape. Contract faculty and international students share a set of structural conditions: conditional belonging, absence from the institutional decisions that shape their lives, and expendability when the institution’s financial priorities shift. These conditions rhyme. I want to be precise about the ways they also diverge, because the divergence is as analytically important as the connection.

What the Conditions Share

Guy Standing (2011) developed the concept of the precariat to name a class defined by permanent temporariness: people whose relationship to their institution, their employer, or their state is characterized by insecurity that is structural rather than transitional. The precariat lives in the conditional tense: the contract may or may arrive. Renewal is never guaranteed.

Contract faculty at Canadian universities live this condition in their employment relationship. My contracts at TRU were renewed semester by semester at the institution’s discretion, without performance review, without due process, without explanation when renewal ceased. For nineteen years I planned my life in six-month increments. I prepared courses knowing they might be my last. I invested in institutional relationships that the institution reserved the right to dissolve at any time without cause.

International students live a version of this condition in their immigration relationship. Their right to remain in Canada is tied to continuous enrolment, satisfactory academic standing, and compliance with study permit conditions. An interruption in enrolment, whether caused by financial hardship, family emergency, health crisis, or institutional policy change, can trigger consequences that go far beyond academic disruption. The 2024 federal study permit cap made visible what had always been structurally true: international students are present in Canada at the institution’s invitation, and the institution’s invitation is contingent on their continued revenue generation.

Both populations navigate institutions that extract their labour and their finances while managing them as peripheral to the institution’s core concerns. Both populations are celebrated when they serve the institution’s interests and managed away when they cease to. Both populations are absent from the governance structures that make the decisions shaping their lives.

What Remains Asymmetrical

I hold Canadian citizenship. My students navigate visa conditions to remain in the country where they are studying. I hold union protections, however limited for contract faculty, that give me access to grievance procedures and collective bargaining. My students’ capacity for collective action is constrained by immigration regulations that make labour organizing risky in ways that carry far greater consequence than mine does. I am white. My students move through an institution that reads their bodies, their accents, their names, and their knowledge systems through frameworks that read mine as default.

When I lost my job in May 2025, I lost income and institutional affiliation. I retained citizenship, union resources, professional networks, and the capacity to seek employment elsewhere in the country without immigration consequence. When an international student’s enrolment is interrupted, the stakes are categorically different. Job loss and loss of the right to remain in a country are precarious conditions of entirely different magnitudes. They share a structural logic. Their risk operates on different scales entirely.

Asymmetrical precarity insists that both parts of this are analytically necessary. Collapsing the asymmetry into a claim of shared experience would misrepresent the structural conditions and appropriate the more severe precarity to illuminate a less severe one. Refusing the connection entirely would miss the shared mechanism that produces both conditions and would leave each population analytically isolated from the structural solidarity that their shared positioning might generate.

What This Means for the Institution

An institution that manages contract faculty and international students through the same extractive logic, conditional belonging contingent on continued economic contribution, has a structural interest in keeping those two populations from recognizing their shared positioning. Contract faculty who understand their precarity as an individual professional circumstance rather than a structural condition will address it through individual strategies: working harder, being more compliant, making themselves indispensable. International students who understand their precarity as a temporary transitional condition, a price worth paying for the credential, will manage it through the same strategies.

Asymmetrical precarity names the structural connection in order to make structural solidarity possible. The asymmetry is named precisely so it cannot be used to collapse the difference. I can advocate for international students from a position of relative security. My advocacy is worth something structurally different from what international students can advocate for themselves from inside the conditions this concept names. That difference is part of the analysis. It is also part of the ethical obligation this research carries.

References

Kezar, A., DePaola, T., & Scott, D. T. (2019). The gig academy: Mapping labour in the neoliberal university. Johns Hopkins University 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.