“How’s Work?” Tackling the Issues of Academic Labour One Scholar at a Time

“How’s work?” I ask the theatre scholar who hesitates in front of my table. She surveys the cue cards arranged before me, each one filled with question prompts created by the American Society for Theatre Research’s Working Conditions Task Force with the goal of gathering information on the current reality of academic labour. We’ve set up a booth in a hotel hallway in Dallas at the annual ASTR conference, hoping to encourage organization members to address questions of working conditions, graduate training, and the academic marketplace. I’ve volunteered over six hours of my conference time to engage in dialogue about these issues with theatre artists, graduate students, and performance scholars from across North America and around the globe.