ALRA Special Issue: Recognizing the Invisible and Expected: Art & Engagement as Critical Response
Editors: Suzanne Faris, MFA and Tobi Jacobi, PhD, Colorado State University
Contact: suzanne.faris@colostate.edu, tjacobi@colostate.edu
"I am just one more. I am status quo. I am expected."
~Faculty response, Knowing Her survey
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 ALRA 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.
Why Art & Engagement as Critical Response?
In higher education, we are often both anticipated and assumed. Our performance as teachers, scholars, administrators, and artists is expected, and while moments of recognition may occasionally appear, we remain largely invisible. In their 2018 Art Journal Open essay, "Generation Wipeout," Galvin and Spiker write that
"Robust discourse depends on contributions from all parts of the academic pipeline--from graduate students, who vitally support institutions during their progression to a PhD, to full professors and those that have transitioned to advanced administrative positions. However, the gap between these beginning and end points has dangerously widened, and the bridge has all but collapsed."
There is a history of art and engagement as response to labor inequities as decades of visual, written, and performative art attest; yet activating art as critical response to issues of labor, contingency, and inequality in academia is harder to trace. Scholar-practitioners working at the crossroads of art, humanities, and engagement have opportunities to mobilize for change by drawing attention to the working conditions that both celebrate (often invisible) labor and to decry systemic institutional inequities that threaten the productivity, creative innovation, and even health of academic workers.
Since 2010, a handful of visual art exhibitions and performances have drawn attention to issues of equity and institutional responsibility (e.g.,"Precarity: Contingency in Artmaking and Academia," curated by Lorelei Stewart, 2016, University of Illinois, Chicago; "Honor the Precariat" by Natalie Barnes, 2019, Colorado State University; ""Contingency: A Crisis of Teaching and Learning" by CSU/FRCC with the Romero Theatre Troupe, 2013). Too, scholars have argued for the necessity of arts as one tool in the work of increasing recognition of lived experiences and advancing meaningful change (e.g., Kannan, Doe, and Schicke 2015, Guard et al., 2012, Hamlin, 2017). Our experiences as long-term academics with experience in adjunct, tenure-stream, and leadership roles let to a collaboration across sculpture and writing and a year-long process of making and producing a critical response to labor practices and recognitions of women-identifying faculty/staff on our own campus in Northern Colorado ("Knowing Her: Women's Work and Leadership at CSU, 1925-2025," Colorado State University, 2025). A key component of this work became direct invitations for publics to interact with the art and in some cases, to co-create a community response.
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. The work included will span disciplinary research practice to include creative works, written expression, performance, and interdisciplinary pieces.
Some questions that may drive inquiry include the following:
We invite proposals of around 300 words including 1-2 images for visual or performing work and/or direct links to the creative work online (not a general website). Scholarly or visual/performing arts essay or creative arts submissions welcome in the following formats: text, image, video, and audio.
*Accepted Visual/Audio/Video works will be required to include a 500-word written narrative introduction/reflection. Audio/Video final work representation will be determined in consultation with the artist once the work is accepted.
Special Issue Timeline
|
Dec 1, 2025 |
CFP Circulation |
|
Jan 16, 2026 |
Proposal Deadline. Proposals should be limited to 300 words including 1-2 images for visual or performing works. |
|
Jan 30, 2026 |
Invitations and regrets sent to authors in response to proposals |
|
April 15, 2026 |
Completed articles due to the editors. Peer Reviewing begins. |
|
June 10, 2026 |
Decisions sent to authors. |
|
August 15, 2026 |
Revised final draft articles due to the editors |
|
October 1, 2026 |
Full manuscript to copyeditors |
|
Late Fall 2026 |
Publication of Special Issue |
Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (ALRA) is a peer-reviewed open access academic journal launched in 2016 by the Center for the Study of Academic Labor (CSAL) at Colorado State University. The journal encourages ongoing research on matters relating to tenure and contingency in the academy, both nationally and internationally. Along with our center and web site, we offer a research home for those undertaking scholarship in areas broadly defined as tenure studies, contingency studies, and critical university studies. To meet this objective, we invite a wide range of contributions, from the statistical to the historic/archival, from the theoretical to the applied, from the researched to the creative, and from empirical to essayist forms. Our editors and reviewers include social scientists, artists, and theorists specializing in labor issues.
The Center for the Study of Academic Labor and ALRA welcome varied genres, such as scholarly articles, reports, policies, position statements, essays, organizing and advocacy toolkits, photographs, photographic essays, personal narratives, social science research, original art, artifacts of curated performance art, op-eds, reviews in print and multimedia formats, etc., so long as they associate favorably with the Center and Journal's theme. We also welcome histories of academic labor efforts; for instance, if your institution or program has engaged in efforts to establish or improve practices and policies and would like to have a backup location for archiving the papers, please send them our way and we will work with you on creating a secure, digital file. If you do not see a genre mentioned that you are interested in pursuing, please contact the special issue editors, Suzanne Faris (Suzanne.Faris@ColoState.EDU) and Tobi Jacobi (tjacobi@colostate.edu). ALRA has no minimum required word count; given ALRA's mission to encourage conversation among a broad range of stakeholders, we welcome shorter pieces, including briefs, on topics aligned with the journal's mission and aims. Maximum word counts are 10,000 words.
Barnes, Natalie (2019) "Honor the Precariat," Academic Labor: Research and Artistry: Vol. 3 , Article 3. Available at: https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/alra/vol3/iss1/3
Galvin, Kristin, and Christina Spiker. (2018). "Generation WipeOut." Art Journal Open. https://artjournal.collegeart.org/?page_id=10366
Guard, J., Martin, D., McGauley, L., Steedman, M., & Garcia-Orgales, J. (2012). Art as Activism: Empowering Workers and Reviving Unions through Popular Theater. Labor Studies Journal, 37(2), 163-182. https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449X11431895
Hamlin, J. (2017), 'At the intersection of education, art and activism: The case for Creative Chemistries', Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, 6:2, pp. 179–89, doi: 10.1386/vi.6.2.179_1
Kannan, V., Schicke, J., & Doe, S. (2015). Performing Horizontal Activism: Expanding Academic Labor Advocacy Throughout and Beyond a Three-Step Process. Literacy in Composition Studies, 3(1), 131–142. https://doi.org/10.21623/1.3.1.10
Stewart, Lorelei. (2016). "Precarity: Contingency in Artmaking and Academia," Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago. https://gallery400.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Postcard_Precarity.pdf