Abstract
In this article, the authors analyze the impacts of their university eliminating Spring Break and replacing it with intermittent Reading Days during the Covid-19 pandemic. With particular attention to contingency, relations of power, and positionalities, they offer narratives of their lived experiences with Reading Days as a graduate student (Author 1) and as a pre-tenure faculty member (Author 2). They also offer analysis of the public conversations surrounding the institutional decision. The article addresses how the particularities of the narratives are symptomatic of a culture of overwork that predates and continues beyond the moment in time and place of the context described. Authors offer takeaways and calls to action that invite readers to continue examining and intervening in larger, persistent structures of inequity—particularly as they come to bear on academic breaks.
Recommended Citation
Lycke Martin, Kelli R. and Shivers-McNair, Ann
(2022)
"From “Spring Break” to “Reading Days”: Contingency, Relations of Power, and Positionalities in Experiences of Overwork During Academic Breaks,"
Academic Labor: Research and Artistry: Vol. 6, Article 8.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/alra/vol6/iss1/8
Publication-Ready Author Bio
Kelli Lycke is a Graduate Associate Teacher at the University of Arizona and the Graduate Assistant Director of Placement and Assessment for the Foundations Writing Program in the English Department. She is also a third-year PhD student in Rhetoric, Writing, and the Teaching of English. She earned a Master’s degree in Rhetoric and Writing from the University of New Mexico. Kelli is passionate about advocating for positive working conditions for educational workers, but her research interests include material rhetorics of public memory, especially monuments and memorials. Kelli also enjoys experimenting with film and web texts as compositions, as well as teaching students how to use technology in new and interesting ways.
Ann Shivers-McNair is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona, on the lands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui Peoples. She is the author of Beyond the Makerspace: Making and Relational Rhetorics (University of Michigan Press, 2021), and her work has appeared in journals such as Across the Disciplines; College English; Computers and Composition; enculturation; Kairos; Learning, Culture, and Social Interaction; Programmatic Perspectives; and Technical Communication; and in edited collections and conference proceedings. She is an associate editor of Technical Communication Quarterly and a co-organizer of UX@UA, a user experience community in Tucson, Arizona.