On Labor, Embodiment, and Debt in the Academy

Abstract

This reflection is an essay—in the etymologically rooted sense of a “try”—that grapples with the deteriorating effects of the neoliberal university, in its current state of extreme precarity, on the bodies of (young) faculty of color. Mobilizing autobiography, poetry, and (non)fiction to think through questions of embodiment, I will focus on academic labor and its often injurious dimensions.