Never Submit!

Despite earning hundreds of millions (and in some cases, billions) of dollars in revenues each year, multinational publishing conglomerates still do not pay researchers and scholars to publish their works, while charging postsecondary institutions billions of dollars in journal and digital subscription fees. Concurrently, 68% of faculty at US colleges and universities hold precarious, gig economy-like adjunct and contingent appointments. This session explores structural similarities between for-profit scholarly publishing, and neoliberal, corporatized, and financialized higher education. Both rely on labor exploitation to minimize expenses and maximize revenues — profits for shareholders in the case of commercial publishers, and high administrative salaries and endowment revenues in the case of not-for-profit colleges and universities. Yet the imperative to publish or perish persists for faculty across tenured, non-tenured, contingent and adjunct ranks. What does it mean to have to publish (and potentially perish) under such conditions? What are the real costs of providing content to publishers for free? Is the system broken, or is it functioning as it's meant to? Has the time finally come to dismantle the system (or systems), and if so — how? This session seeks contributions that reflect on the current state of academic publishing in the larger context of neoliberalism, and it seeks proposals, case studies, propositions, and presentations that consider or offer practical solutions, new models, alternative visions, actions and refusals, subversive reimaginings, structural upheavals, new beginnings, and more equitable, compassionate, livable, and sustainable systems.